BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Attorneys jousted Monday at the Idaho Supreme Court over whether Lori Vallow Daybell’s convictions for killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival should be thrown out because she wasn’t allowed to have the lawyer she wanted at her 2023 trial.
She is asking Idaho’s highest court to reverse her convictions in the deaths of Joshua “JJ” Vallow, Tylee Ryan and Tammy Daybell, whose husband married Vallow Daybell weeks later. JJ was 7, and Tylee was 16.
The children went missing in 2019 before their bodies were found buried in rural Idaho on the property of Vallow Daybell’s new husband, Chad Daybell. Vallow Daybell was sentenced to three life sentences in Idaho, while Chad Daybell was sentenced to death in the three killings.
She was later convicted in Arizona for conspiring to murder her former husband and her niece’s ex-husband, the latter of whom survived.
Vallow Daybell holds doomsday religious beliefs and has claimed that people in her life were possessed by evil spirits. Chad Daybell wrote several religious novels about prophecies and the end of the world.
The hourlong hearing Monday in the Idaho case focused mostly on Vallow Daybell’s claim that her rights were violated when an attorney who represented her earlier in the case was disqualified. A lower-court judge had ruled there was a conflict of interest because the lawyer had represented both her and Chad Daybell.
Craig Durham, an attorney who now represents Vallow Daybell, said the decision to remove her previous lawyer was made while Vallow Daybell had been declared to be mentally unfit and while the case had been put on hold by a court. Durham contends that Vallow Daybell’s previous lawyer didn’t have a conflict of interest. “The district court equated prior joint representation with an actual conflict of interest without an evidentiary basis linking those two,” Durham told the justices.
Prosecutor Jeff Nye said Vallow Daybell’s attorney back then had filed confidential information in the case. The court had to act to remove him. “The district court faced a very unique situation, and it did everything it could to address that situation,” Nye said.
Supreme Court Justice Gregory Moeller said it looks as though the lower-court judge made that decision in a bid to protect Vallow Daybell from having an attorney who might damage her case.
If that decision hadn’t been made, Moeller said he believed the state Supreme Court would be hearing complaints about how the attorney who represented her wasn’t competent.
In court papers, Vallow Daybell's lawyer argued that the lower court also should not have allowed jurors to hear about the shootings involving Charles Vallow and Brandon Boudreaux in metro Phoenix.
Months after filing for divorce from Vallow Daybell, Charles Vallow was fatally shot in July 2019 in Chandler by Vallow Daybell’s brother, Alex Cox, whose claim of self-defense was later called into question by investigators.
Nearly three months after Charles Vallow’s killing, someone parked in a Jeep fired a gunshot at Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow Daybell’s niece, as he was driving up to his home in Gilbert, another Phoenix suburb. The shot narrowly missed Boudreaux.
Prosecutors say Vallow Daybell conspired with Cox to kill Charles Vallow so she could collect money from his life insurance policy and marry Chad Daybell, then her boyfriend. Cox, who was identified by prosecutors as the person who shot at Boudreaux, later died from a blood clot in his lungs.
Vallow Daybell received two life sentences for her Arizona convictions, and she has appealed those as well.
A few minutes of Monday's hearing focused on the Arizona cases.
Asked by a justice about the decision to bring up the Arizona evidence at the Idaho trial, Nye said prosecutors used it to show jurors, “This is what these people do.”
