SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah’s Supreme Court overturned a death sentence Thursday for a man convicted of murdering a woman to stop her from testifying against him in a rape case.
FILE - Douglas Lovell is escorted into the courtroom for an evidentiary hearing, Aug. 5, 2019, in Ogden, Utah . Utah ’s Supreme Court on Thursday July 25, 2024, overturned Lovell’s death sentence but upheld his conviction and sent the case back to a lower court for a new sentencing. Lovell has twice been convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the 1985 killing of Joyce Yost.
Justices said Douglas Lovell had ineffective attorneys at his sentencing hearing, but upheld his conviction and sent the case back to a lower court for resentencing. It was not immediately clear whether Lovell could again receive the death penalty. Lovell, 66, has twice been convicted of capital murder and was sentenced to death for the 1985 killing of Joyce Yost to prevent her from testifying against him on charges that he had raped her. He tried to hire two different people to kill Joyce and, when that failed, did it himself by abducting and strangling her, state officials said. He was sentenced to die by lethal injection but appealed the verdict.
In a 42-page opinion, justices faulted the attorneys at Lovell’s 2015 sentencing for failing to object or sufficiently respond to testimonies about his excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Utah-based faith known widely as the Mormon church. The justices said that prejudiced his sentencing hearing and prevented the jury from fairly weighing the circumstances of his crimes before it sentenced him to death.
Lovell had been one of seven inmates on death row in Utah. The overturning of his sentence comes as another death row inmate,. Honie this week asked Utah’s parole board to commute his sentence to life in prison during a two-day hearing. Relatives of the victims testified in favor of his death. A decision is pending.Schoenbaum is a government and politics reporter based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She also covers general news in the Rockies and LGBTQ+ rights policies in U.S. statehouses.
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