BOISE, Idaho (Court TV) — The attorney for convicted killer Lori Vallow Daybell told the Idaho Supreme Court that the judge violated her constitutional rights when he removed her lawyer from the case, but the justices seemed more concerned with how the attorney was removed than with the removal itself.
Lori Vallow Daybell appears in court Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022, in Fremont County, Idaho. (Court TV)
Vallow Daybell, 53, was convicted of murder in the deaths of her children, Joshua “J.J.” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 16, as well as her fifth husband’s first wife, Tammy Daybell. Vallow Daybell was charged alongside her fifth husband, Chad Daybell, who was convicted of the same crimes and sentenced to death. Vallow Daybell was sentenced to multiple life terms without the possibility of parole.
Much of Vallow Daybell’s appeal focused on District Judge Steven Boyce’s decision to disqualify her initial attorney, Mark Means. Vallow Daybell’s appellate attorney, Craig Durham, argued before the Idaho Supreme Court on Monday that Boyce violated her constitutional right to choose her attorney.
Durham argued that Boyce removed Means because he had represented both Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell, co-defendants and coconspirators. “The district court equated prior joint representation with an actual conflict of interest without an evidentiary basis linking these two,” Durham said.
But Jeffrey Nye, representing the state, said Boyce acted in the defendant’s best interest when he removed Means from the case. After her arrest, Vallow Daybell was ruled incompetent, but Means kept filing documents in her case. Among the documents Boyce found problematic was a filing Means made under penalty of perjury that included statements Vallow Daybell had allegedly made to him. “Mr. Means was actively violating his client’s constitutional rights to the effective assistance of counsel,” Nye said. “We do not want our district courts in the states to stand back and say, ‘Nothing I can do, the case is stayed.'”
The justices appeared to agree that it was appropriate to remove Means as Vallow Daybell’s attorney, but were troubled by how it happened. The cases of Chad Daybell and Vallow Daybell were severed, Justice Gregory Moeller pointed out, after Vallow Daybell had been declared incompetent. Boyce then moved to remove Means, but did so by litigating it under Chad Daybell’s case file, rather than Vallow Daybell’s, which the incompetency ruling had stayed. “That seems incredibly unorthodox to me,” Moeller said.
“The procedures that were used to disqualify Mr. Means weren’t just unorthodox; they were unconstitutional,” Durham said. “This occurred while Ms. Daybell was incompetent. Her case was stayed, which was the district court’s order, and her counsel was not allowed to participate.”
“Nothing that happened here is normal,” Nye conceded. “But that doesn’t mean that there was any error in any of it.”
The justices said they would take the matter under advisement and would issue a written decision at a later date.
Vallow Daybell, who is currently behind bars at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center in Idaho, was also convicted of conspiring to kill her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and conspiring to kill her ex-nephew-in-law, Brandon Boudreaux, in Arizona. She was also sentenced to life in prison for each of those convictions, with a mandatory minimum 25-year sentence for each to be served consecutively.
