The Aug. 18 filing by prosecutors rebuts defense lawyers’ contentions and sets the stage for a Sept. 1 hearing that could decide whether the case goes to trial.
Prosecutors on Aug. 18 urged a Utah judge to uphold all charges, including one carrying a potential death sentence, in the case against Charlie Kirk’s accused killer.
In their 19-page filing in Utah County’s Fourth District Court, prosecutors rebutted an Aug. 11 memo from lawyers representing the defendant, Tyler James Robinson, 23.
Robinson’s defense team had argued that evidence presented during a preliminary hearing last month failed to support the death penalty. They said that the evidence also did not establish “probable cause”—a reasonable belief that their client committed the alleged offenses. Under Utah law, that standard must be met for the case to proceed to trial.
Prosecutors counter-argued that defense lawyers ignored important facts damning to their client while misconstruing legal standards to favor him.
Further, prosecutors said evidence clearly shows that others besides Kirk were at great risk of being killed—an “aggravating” circumstance that supports a death-penalty-level charge, they argued.
A gunman, alleged to be Robinson, fatally shot Kirk in the neck on Sept. 10, 2025, as he spoke to a crowd of about 3,000 people in a courtyard at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Some attendees were “in the line of fire,” while other people were near Kirk, putting them in the “zone of danger,” prosecutors said.
Those basic facts show that other people’s lives were imperiled, they argued.
Defense lawyers had said, “The State has failed to show that the actual conduct created a ‘high probability’ that someone other than Mr. Kirk would be killed.”
However, prosecutors pointed out that defense lawyers made no challenge to evidence showing that Robinson “was the person who crawled to the sniper’s perch … fired the fatal shot … hid the rifle in a wooded area, got rid of some of the clothing he was wearing, and told his roommate to delete their texts about the shooting.”
Robinson is accused of aggravated murder, a capital offense, in the highly publicized assassination case.
By Janice Hisle
