There were moments yesterday when it felt like Judge Tony Graf, the judge handling the Tyler Robinson case, was specifically dragging out his ruling in an effort to explain to a lot of people how evidence works.
Judge Graf walked through the basic facts of the case and then through each of the seven counts against Tyler Robinson. He was making what's called a bind-over decision, which just means that a judge has found there is enough credible evidence for a trial to take place. But he really spelled out the difference between mere speculation and reasonable belief. Here's what he said:
The primary purpose of the preliminary hearing is the fariting out of groundless and improvident prosecutions. Before a defendant may be bound over for trial in district court, the magistrate must find probable cause to believe the crime charge has been committed and that the defendant has committed it. The prosecution's burden is light and merely requires the state to produce believable evidence of all elements of the crime charged...
...magistrates are free to decline bind over where the facts presented by the prosecution provide no more than a basis for speculation as opposed to providing a basis for a reasonable belief. To be sure, the line separating speculation from reasonable inference can at times be faint. An inference is a conclusion reached by considering other facts and deducing a logical consequence from them. On the other hand, speculation is the active practice of theorizing about matters over which there is no certain knowledge at hand.
In short, the difference between an inference and speculation depends on whether the underlining facts support the conclusion.
Again, I don't think it was accidental that he said all of this. It was a challenge to the speculators out there, people like Candace Owens, who have spent months throwing out garbage with no facts to back any of it up.
For instance, when Owens speculated that maybe an exploding microphone had killed Kirk or that Tyler Robinson was never on campus. She speculated the Mossad was behind the assassination and that Egyptian planes had something to do with putting the real killer in place. She speculated that a site in Delaware was a key part of the plot and that Tyler Robinson's text messages to his roommate/boyfriend were fake. She speculated his confession to his friends online had been written by someone else and that there was a secret meeting at a military base to plan the attack.
All of it was nonsense. All of it was pure speculation with no connection to the actual case. And yesterday Judge Graf really spelled out that the facts of the case don't include any of these speculations. Far from being a "patsy," Judge Graf said of Robinson, "The state's evidence of identity is substantial, combining forensic DNA matching with statements attributed to defendant admitting responsibility for the shooting."
Given all of this, now would have been a good time for Candace Owens to start walking back some of her theories. Instead, she just doubled down with one of the dumbest, most dishonest tweets I've seen in a long time.
Go find every single worthless influencer who lied and gaslit you for months about this case, claiming that Tyler Robinson turned himself in and subsequently admitted his guilt.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 2, 2026
We simply do not hate these people enough. What they actually want is for the American court process… https://t.co/DTvAQHjST4
Let's walk through it.
Go find every single worthless influencer who lied and gaslit you for months about this case, claiming that Tyler Robinson turned himself in and subsequently admitted his guilt.
She is the chief "worthless influencer" who has "lied and gaslit" people for months. Tyler Robinson did turn himself in. There's no doubt about that. And he did admit his guilt more than once in a letter and in multiple texts to different people. But the game Candace is playing here is in the word "subsequently." Did he turn himself in and subsequently admit his guilt? No. He admitted guilt probably 14 times but all of them happened before he turned himself in.
We simply do not hate these people enough. What they actually want is for the American court process to run “guilty until proven innocent”. It is utterly monstrous to insist that someone should be put be death before they are given a fair trial. And while a few of these influencers do it out of sincere stupidity, the majority of them do it for money. Better stated, they are prostitutes.
Again, If influencers talking about this case for money are prostitutes then Candace Owens is the head madam. She has made more off this grift than anyone else pushing nonsense about the case.
Also, it goes without saying that no one has ever said Tyler Robinson should be executed without a trial. Of course we need a trial. But the trial is based on actual facts, not the dumpster fire of stupid claims Candace Owens traffics in. I'm quite confident the trial will result in his conviction or, at a minimum, a guilty plea.
We are at the beginning of this trial and every one of their lies will be exposed by the end of it.
This is a plea for time but we already can say that none of Candace Owens' speculation is part of this trial. All of her months of "truth seeking" were wiped away yesterday in the judge's summary of the facts. None of those facts will be undone in the coming trial because Tyler Robinson is guilty. That's why all of the evidence points to him and only to him. So Candace can keep playing this game a while longer, but in the end Robinson will be convicted and she'll have nowhere else to go.
As for Robinson pleading not guilty, this is pretty standard in any major trial. The defendant pleads not guilty and then hopes to negotiate some kind of deal which would (for instance) take the death penalty off the table. I hope that doesn't happen in this case but it's been clear for months that's all the defense is trying to do.
Tyler Robinson will stand trial and face the death penalty in rulings that were more delayed than doubted. The evidence against Tyler Robinson is so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine a defense...
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 2, 2026
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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