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September 17, 2025 12 mins

Retired Judge Larry Goodman (the Superior Court Alameda County in CA) joins Jack Armstrong to talk about the strength of the state's case against the assassin of Charlie Kirk.

 

 

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Utah County Attorney says, Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin used
his grandfather's rifle to kill Kirk and afterwards praised that gun,
just one of the deeply disturbing details authorities revealed this afternoon.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
A short while ago, the twenty two.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Year old suspect appeared remotely from the Utah County jail
for his first court appearance since the assassination of Kirk.
Robinson wore a suicide prevention smock and did not show
any emotion as the charges were read. He did clearly
speak his name. The Utah County attorney says, the alleged
assassin confessed to his family and his lover. Seven charges
against Robinson were announced, including aggravated murder.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Anyway, I know they're going for the They're likely to
go for the death penalty in this case, and in
Utah they shoot you.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
So I got no problem with that.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Shoot this scumbag after a trial, then silently it's gonna
be too complicated. Well, actually we could ask a judge
about that. Larry Goodman joins us. This is Katie's dad,
who was a judge for the Superior Court of Alameda County.
For those of you across the country who don't know,
that's where Oakland is, Alameda County for a.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Very long time. How long were you a judge?

Speaker 4 (01:06):
Judge, Larry, I was a judge a little over thirty
three years.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Thirty three years. Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
So you got a bachelor's degree at Stanford? What did
you get your bachelor's degree.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
In political science?

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Okay? And did were you planning to become a judge?

Speaker 4 (01:22):
No? I with a political science degree, there's not a
lot you can do except teach political science or go
to law school. Okay, who went to last.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
And then you went to law school? Do you have
to go to law school to become a judge? Yes,
you do. You have to be a lawyer to be
a judge. That makes sense. Yeah, okay, So I just
want to get that out of the way. So any thoughts.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
First of all, just as you've been following this as
a you know, as a citizen of the country who
just happens to have a hell of a lot of
background knowledge on the way courts procedures go and whether
or not people are found guilty or not, is he
looking pretty dead right?

Speaker 4 (02:00):
I would say so. I mean it sounds like from
the news reports and what little bit I've read that
he's pretty much confessed and they can use all those
text messages as statements against his own interests with his
roommate that he said that he did it. So yeah,
I think it's it's going to be more like a
slow plea what we used to call when the evidence

(02:21):
is so overwhelming of guilt that the person insists upon
having a trial. We used to call it a slow flea.
You're going to be found guilty, we all know it,
but we have to go through the process.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
What will the defense attorneys even try?

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Do you suppose.

Speaker 4 (02:38):
You know, in a case like this, it's gonna if
they the jury, they probably won't do a lot because
it will be the same jury that tries the case
that will decide the penalty, and so they probably don't
want to irritate the jury too much. So I think
though they won't be trying any hail Mary type passes,
they might write raise issues about his mental health. It's

(03:01):
confidency type of thing. But when you're talking about the
same jury deciding that your client states the client decides
your client's guilt or innocence, you don't want to mad
at you, but the time you start, the penalty drops.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Okay, So there's a chance that the lawyers are thinking,
the best thing we could do for this guy is
keep him from getting the.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Death penalty exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
And if he's found guilty, he's ever getting out.

Speaker 4 (03:25):
Right, I can't imagine. I mean, crazy things happen. I
mean even in during the trial itself. You may have
a Every time you put a case in front of
a jury, there's always the danger of having a lawless
juror or a juror that has their own agenda that
throws everything off track. But I would say that he's

(03:46):
going to be found guilty and that if he is,
he'll either get the death penalty, your life without.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Parole okay before we'll get back to him. And I
got some questions about that. But have you been a
judge in cases with a scumbag that you like, You
fully believe they're guilty but they ended up walking.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
One of my big death penalty cases where the charge
was he killed both his sisters and tried to kill
his parents, and it was my OJ Simpson trial. It
lasted four months and the jury found him not guilty
of two counts of murder. And two counts of attempted murder,

(04:25):
and then about two hours later they met him across
the street from Margarine.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Wow And when the foreman read out, we find you
know so and so not guilty?

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Were you just like what well?

Speaker 4 (04:39):
I was? And I used to get the verdicts before
they were read, and I wanted to make it filled
out properly. And the jury came back after a four
month trial, they came back with a verdict in less
than two and a half hours. And the defense was
so sure that there was going to be a guilty
verdict that they soon as we found out there was
a verdict, they asked if I we put their client

(05:01):
on suicide watch before we started the penalty trial, and
that wasn't necessary because the surrey found I'm not guilty.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
So where does that leave you? After years of doing this?
A couple of different things. One, where do you rank
our justice system? And compared to others in other countries
or throughout history? Are we doing it better than anybody
ever has? That's always been my belief, but maybe I'm
maybe I'm wrong about that? And where are you on

(05:30):
the whole Better to have one hundred men go free
than an innocent man found guilty.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
Well, I think we do have probably the best system.
The problem with our system now is become subject to
a lot of politics. Jurors come sometimes come in with
their own agendas. I've seen judges that get appointed to
the bench that have their own agendas and do things
that probably they shouldn't do if they were uploading their

(05:58):
roads and not being partial. In part in trying to
be impartial, and I think it's better to have a
guilty person go free than have an innocent person be
executed or spend thirty years in prison. The consequences are
It's shocking when you know somebody is guilty, like I

(06:20):
did in this case and they walked out, But you
have to do I had to actually make a call
in that case. It probably led to him being found
not guilty because it was a crucial piece of evidence
that the police messed up, and I spent three days
trying to find out a way to let it in
so the jury could hear it, and there just was
no legal way to do that. So I had to

(06:41):
make the ruling in favor of the defense, and I
think that played a big part. I still live with
that one.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Well, a big picture though, the way we're supposed to
look at it is that forces cops to just be better, right.

Speaker 4 (06:56):
Yeah, I mean, it wasn't just the cops fault. It
was just a circumstance of a key witness that was
going to testify. Matter of fact, it was one of
the victims who eventually died. But she targeted her brother
and said he did it, and I saw his face
in the shotgun blast. And this was after she'd been
in the hospital for two months, and the day before

(07:17):
she was supposed to testify, she threw an air embolism
and died, and the statements that she made were not
admissible because they weren't excited utterances or a statements made
in anticipation of death. So it was hearsay and it
wasn't admitted.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
So back to Utah scumbag. There's going to be a
tremendous amount of attention paid to this trial, obviously, every
aspect of it. This story is now what going on
a week old and still leads everywhere all the time,
so it's had, you know, it's really gotten a lot
of people's attention. I don't know if Utah has these

(07:54):
specific rules around cameras in the courtroom, or if it's
a case by case circumstance. But what are you what's
your opinion of cameras in the courtroom. It seems while
I'm as interested in anybody is watching these sorts of things.
And obviously transparency is a good thing for a justice system,
I just feel like it distorts things so much.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
I'm mostly against it.

Speaker 4 (08:15):
Well, I tried a lot of high publicity cases, excuse me,
and I never let cameras in the courtroom.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
That would have been your decision.

Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, when the cameras are in, Ye, generally it's up
to the judge decisions. And when cameras are in the
courtroom just try as hard as they may. Lawyers play
to the cameras. They they get a little more outrageous,
they get a little more flamboyant, a little more aggressive.
Sometimes makes the jury feel uncomfortable because they don't want

(08:46):
to have a camera person slip up and show their face.
It changes the whole dynamics of the court room. So
I never let them in.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
That's really interesting. You had friends. I assume judges that
did would allow cameras in though.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
What was their argument? Transparency?

Speaker 4 (09:04):
Yeah, transparency, I mean, and sometimes the judges will play
to the camera.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Ah, right, you can become famous.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
Think of Altido.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
So if there's a camera there and you're feeling all
judicial and everything, then you act a little differently if
the camera pans on the bench. So there's just not
a good I get the transparency thing, but there's really
not a good upside to having that kind of transparency
if people want to see you trialy and come down
and sit in the audience.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Anything before we let you go, anything surprised you over
the last several days since they got him, arrested him,
you know, he showed up in the courtroom first time.
Anything we should be on the watch out for.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
No. It's interesting. Utah has a very strict death penalty.
I was doing a little research on it, and the
aggravation factor is that he exposed others to the risk
of death or injury when he killed Charlie Kirk, And
that's what they're going to the whole aggravating circumstance on

(10:02):
to try to get the death penalty. In California, there
was a lot wider area of aggravation circumstances that you
can use, but this is they have to prove beyond
a reasonable doubt that he put other people's lives at
risk and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating
circumstances outwigh mitigating, and that the death penalty is justified

(10:23):
and appropriate. And that's a pretty good standard. So it'll
be interesting to see if it plays out.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Yeah, I got another question before we let you go,
all these years of watching people come before you, the
ones that are guilty, how often are the idiots? And
how often are they and how often are they too
smart for their own good? I think that's what this
kid's deal is. He's too smart for his own good.
He thinks he, you know, can fix the world and

(10:51):
get away with it and all that.

Speaker 4 (10:52):
Oh, I had my share of well, i'd say most of.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Them idiots, most of our idiots, most.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
Of my idiots. But I had a had a couple
of high publicity cases where the guy who was just
thought he was smarter than everybody else in the courtroom, right,
and it turned out.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
But yeah, yeah, that's that's got to be something when
you when you're looking at an idiot who committed a crime.
You know, let's not talk about really hurting somebody, because
there's no excusing that. Well, you know, you try to
pull off a robin, a bank or whatever. You must
look at some of these people and think, God, dang it,
you had no shot in life.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
You're a moron.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Well yeah, I mean most of them are like that,
particularly in Oakland. I mean that's that's just kind of
a way of life. I would I would have a
third category. And some of them are just pure evil.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Ah, that's a good one artist guy.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
In the room. You can have the idiot and you've
got the ones that are just pure evil.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Yeah, And that might be what this this shooter in
Utah is also, he might just be evil.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
We talked about it before. The shark eyes, you know,
and if you look at his booking photo, he's got
those shark eyes again.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yeah, that is something you've talked to us about before. Hey,
Judge lair Ry, Larry Goodman, thanks for coming on the
air today.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
Appreciate it, sure, Jack, thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, if you if you didn't hear us talking about
that before, there are some people you look at, the
judge said, and cops will tell you this too. You
did you look at them or they look at you
and you can just see there's there's no soul in there.
For whatever reason, you know what, whatever's gone wrong Armstrong
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