Justice for Joyce Yost | Twice Overturned | Bonus Episode 3 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Cold

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Episode: Justice for Joyce Yost | Twice Overturned | Bonus Episode 3

Author: KSL Podcasts | Wondery
Duration: 00:19:51

Episode Shownotes

The man who killed Joyce Yost wins a major victory in court, seeing his death sentence overturned for a second time. It all boils down to one line of questioning at Doug Lovell's 2015 trial. COLD host Dave Cawley attended oral arguments before the Utah Supreme Court and discusses the

stunning decision with Talking COLD's Amy Donaldson.Listen to Cold on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/cold/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In this bonus episode of 'Cold,' host Dave Cawley examines the Utah Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn Doug Lovell's death sentence for the second time. The episode reflects on the implications of the court's ruling regarding Lovell's trial in 2015, focusing on ineffective assistance of counsel and concerns about juror bias connected to church testimony. The discussion highlights how these legal complexities impact Joyce Yost's family and question the fairness of the justice system, particularly in death penalty cases where the stakes are exceptionally high.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Justice for Joyce Yost | Twice Overturned | Bonus Episode 3) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
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00:00:07 Speaker_06
This podcast discusses sensitive topics, including descriptions of physical and sexual violence. We've taken great care to avoid being explicit, but please use discretion when listening.

00:00:19 Speaker_07
Do not let the sun set on the concept that every criminal defendant is entitled to effective counsel.

00:00:29 Speaker_06
From KSL Podcasts, I'm Dave Cauley. This is a bonus episode of Cold, season two, twice overturned.

00:00:38 Speaker_06
Joyce Yost disappeared in August of 1985, days before she was due to testify at trial about how a man she had never met followed her home one night, kidnapped her, and raped her. That man, Douglas Lovell, came back and murdered Joyce to silence her.

00:00:54 Speaker_06
He took her somewhere in the mountains of Utah and left her there. Joyce's remains have never been found. But that didn't keep Lovell out of prison. Police built an airtight case against him. And in 1993, Lovell pleaded guilty to capital murder.

00:01:09 Speaker_06
The judge sentenced Lovell to death. Then Lovell had a change of heart and tried to take back his guilty plea. It took almost two decades, but the Utah Supreme Court ended up siding with Lovell over a technical error, undoing his death sentence.

00:01:30 Speaker_06
That set the stage for a trial in 2015, 30 years on from Joyce's murder. We covered this in the main run of the season, but to refresh your memory, Doug Lovell didn't contest his guilt.

00:01:41 Speaker_06
His trial strategy focused entirely on the penalty phase, where to avoid death, he needed to convince just one juror he didn't deserve to die. It didn't work. The jury chose death. Then the appeals process started all over again.

00:01:59 Speaker_06
It took nine more years before Lovell's latest appeal reached the chambers of the Utah Supreme Court.

00:02:05 Speaker_05
Good morning. Welcome to the Utah Supreme Court. We are here in the matter of State v. Lovell.

00:02:10 Speaker_06
I attended the oral arguments in February of 2024. I was the only member of the news media there.

00:02:16 Speaker_05
So with that, if I could please ask counsel to place your appearances on the record.

00:02:20 Speaker_06
Lovell's attorney, Colleen Koberg, came with a long list of reasons why she contended the 2015 trial was fatally flawed.

00:02:28 Speaker_07
My brief addresses many, many topics, and I would invite you to ask any questions you have.

00:02:35 Speaker_06
On the other side of the courtroom sat Mark Field from the Utah Attorney General's office. He argued Lovell's second death sentence should stand.

00:02:43 Speaker_04
The aggravating evidence encompassing these crimes was overwhelming at trial.

00:02:49 Speaker_06
In the end, the high court said it would consider the issues and the law, then return with an opinion at a later date.

00:02:55 Speaker_05
Thank you, Ms. Coburg. Thank you, Mr. Field. We appreciate the arguments today. We'll take this matter under advisement, and this court will be adjourned.

00:03:05 Speaker_06
The opinion arrived at the end of July, and it's a stunner. Utah's top court once again overturned Doug Lovell's death sentence.

00:03:14 Speaker_08
It is big because it's so rare to get a death penalty conviction overturned, but to have one overturned twice.

00:03:21 Speaker_06
If you have listened to our companion podcast, Talking Cold, or the podcast series The Letter, then you're probably familiar with Amy Donaldson. She's a journalist like myself, and she covered crime and corrections in Utah for a long time.

00:03:35 Speaker_06
Amy and I got together to dig into the reasoning behind this ruling and what it means for Joyce Yost's family going forward.

00:03:44 Speaker_08
Where were you when you found out that his death penalty conviction had been overturned for a second time?

00:03:50 Speaker_06
I was in southern Utah on the outskirts of Bryce Canyon National Park basically on vacation, summer vacation.

00:03:56 Speaker_06
And I had been out of cell phone contact because in that part of the state, you know, it's canyons and desert and you're far from civilization. And I roll into town and all of a sudden my phone's blown up.

00:04:07 Speaker_06
And everybody at KSL, the station where we both work, saying, hey, what are you going to do to cover this big breaking news today about Lovell?

00:04:16 Speaker_08
What was the issue? Why did they send this back?

00:04:18 Speaker_06
So bottom line, what the Utah Supreme Court says went wrong with Lovell's 2015 trial was ineffective assistance of counsel. His lawyers did not object to certain testimony about religious matters coming in before the jury.

00:04:34 Speaker_06
And the argument is that could have prejudiced the jury against Lovell.

00:04:41 Speaker_07
In this country, the United States of America, I think this court should reverse on that issue alone.

00:04:48 Speaker_08
There's no doubt about the fact that he did this crime.

00:04:51 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:04:51 Speaker_08
So the facts of the crime are undisputed.

00:04:53 Speaker_06
Guilt is uncontested in this 2015 trial.

00:04:56 Speaker_06
They go to the penalty phase, which is the important part where he's going to tell the jury that he is changed by all of the experiences he's had with religious leaders and things over time, that he feels remorse for the crime.

00:05:10 Speaker_06
And that's the presentation of the defense's case in 2015.

00:05:14 Speaker_06
What happened, though, was some of the people the defense wanted to have come in and talk about their experiences dealing with Doug Lovell in the Utah State Prison during all those years, they're religious leaders.

00:05:29 Speaker_06
They're members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are bishops. So in the hierarchy of that church, they are the people who would be

00:05:40 Speaker_08
They would head a congregation.

00:05:41 Speaker_06
The first level up. Yeah. Yeah.

00:05:42 Speaker_08
They're over a congregation.

00:05:43 Speaker_06
Kind of like a pastor.

00:05:44 Speaker_08
Yes. And so the defense talked about these people and talked about Lovell's experiences gaining some spiritual insight and some remorse and his changes without ever mentioning the role these people played in church hierarchy.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
Right.

00:05:58 Speaker_08
Right. So you just thought these were religious volunteers at the prison who are having these religious experiences with Mr. Lovell.

00:06:04 Speaker_08
And then when the prosecutors have their chance to cross-examine these witnesses, they bring up their roles in the church.

00:06:11 Speaker_06
And it was a big deal at the time in the middle of the trial. They actually stopped the prosecution cross-examination of one of these witnesses in particular because the questioning veered into policy, like church policy about excommunication.

00:06:25 Speaker_06
If you've been kicked out of the church, what does it take to be readmitted? Has Lovell gone through that process?

00:06:31 Speaker_07
The topics that were brought up, no reasonable attorney could have thought, this is a good idea. Let's talk about how he has been excommunicated.

00:06:42 Speaker_08
Church policy is that if you are convicted of murder, and you want to convert to the Mormon church, it's happened in my podcast, the letter season two, you cannot technically become a member of the church. You cannot be baptized into the church.

00:06:56 Speaker_08
You have to actually like gain parole. And then you have to go all the way to the first presidency, which is the highest of the high of the church and get a letter from them that says they give you permission to become an actual member on the rolls.

00:07:09 Speaker_08
So when this discussion is happening in court, like you say, they stopped. And I had a lengthy discussion about whether or not it was allowable or it was prejudicial. I sort of saw that as obviously problematic.

00:07:24 Speaker_06
Yeah. The concern on the part of the attorneys and the judge and all the way up to the Utah Supreme Court, as we've now seen, is

00:07:30 Speaker_06
Could what is being put in front of this jury cause even one of those jurors to think to themselves, I don't have to make the decision about whether or not Doug Lovell is a reformed person because that's a question for a higher power.

00:07:45 Speaker_06
And so I'm going to abdicate that decision to the higher power. We don't know that happened. Nobody knows if that happened except for those jurors. If that happened, though, that would be evidence of the jury being prejudiced.

00:07:59 Speaker_06
And that came up during the oral arguments.

00:08:01 Speaker_05
If the jury is being asked to decide whether or not Mr. Lovell has really changed, the prosecutor has offered at least some of the jurors a proxy for knowing.

00:08:11 Speaker_04
We don't, we just don't have the evidence to show that any juror was thinking along the lines that you just mentioned at all.

00:08:23 Speaker_06
So we heard the justices of the Utah Supreme Court really digging in. Can you reasonably say, given the religious makeup of Utah society, that nobody on that jury was influenced by that testimony?

00:08:38 Speaker_04
I don't think jurors, when they hear religious testimony like that, that they somehow give up the oath that they made, whatever beliefs they may have about what they hear in the courtroom about Doug Lovell.

00:08:52 Speaker_05
What if it's a little more subtle than that?

00:08:54 Speaker_06
Clearly, what we've seen in the decision overturning Lovell's second death sentence was Utah Supreme Court says even the risk of that being the case means you've got to do it over.

00:09:03 Speaker_08
And really what they're saying is that his defense attorneys should have recognized that possible contamination and objected to it.

00:09:11 Speaker_08
But the fact that they didn't object, that they just let them talk about things that, to a person outside of Utah who has no affiliation with the L District, not going to matter.

00:09:19 Speaker_08
But there's a lot of ways in which our society here in Utah is impacted by somebody who has standing, has authority in the church, just by saying they're a member of the church.

00:09:30 Speaker_06
And when this jury was being seated, there were questions that you could tell both sides were trying to suss out, you know, is this person a member? Now, they weren't coming right out and asking, you know, do you have a temple recommend?

00:09:42 Speaker_06
Do you have good standing in the church?

00:09:44 Speaker_08
Can you do that? Can you ask those kinds of questions?

00:09:46 Speaker_06
They would ask questions like, what types of periodicals do you read? And so if the juror volunteers, well, I read the Ensign, which is a LDS publication magazine. Ah, that's maybe a cue to yourself that this person

00:10:02 Speaker_08
is pretty faithful. The question is, are they an LDS person who is going to care that the bishop at the prison, who's a volunteer, says, this guy's trustworthy, he's changed, he deserves another chance?

00:10:15 Speaker_06
Or that's going to think, well, because he was excommunicated and not readmitted, his level is not to be trusted, is not truly remorseful.

00:10:25 Speaker_08
There is no such thing as redemption. Yeah.

00:10:28 Speaker_06
In a death penalty case, it has to be unanimous. If you have one person on that jury who is unsure about death, you don't get death.

00:10:39 Speaker_08
And I do think, if you are a person of faith, it is easier to say, this is not my responsibility. It's not my decision. I'm making this decision based on my obligation to the greater community. And our greater community says this is the option.

00:10:56 Speaker_08
Death is the option. This is between God and him, and it's not really for me to figure out.

00:11:02 Speaker_04
Even assuming that counsel was deficient in not objecting at that point, I don't think there's a reasonable likelihood that there would have been a different outcome but for that.

00:11:13 Speaker_06
There's something that you often see in appeals cases, which is harmless error. There was an error made, but it didn't change the outcome.

00:11:21 Speaker_08
Or likely wouldn't have.

00:11:22 Speaker_06
I've seen that a lot.

00:11:23 Speaker_08
Likely wouldn't have, yeah.

00:11:25 Speaker_06
But in a case like this, if there's even an inkling that it might have, the justices on the high court are going to be very cautious about just waving that away. They want to make absolutely sure.

00:11:39 Speaker_06
Because look, the bottom line is you're talking about whether someone lives or dies.

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00:13:55 Speaker_06
Amy, you and I can sit here, and we can dissect these arguments. We understand them, and we can see the logic in them. Even if we disagree, right? We might be able to say, ah, I get what the justices are saying here.

00:14:07 Speaker_06
I get why the attorneys feel this way, the judges, da-da-da-da-da. The hard thing is when you go back now to Joyce Yost's family, and you tell them, all right, that death penalty that you fought for, not only did you get death once, you got it twice.

00:14:26 Speaker_06
We're going back and we're doing that all over again.

00:14:28 Speaker_08
Have you talked to her family?

00:14:29 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I've had some conversations with her daughter, Kim Salazar, since this came down. She was the first person I reached out to. So I get these messages from my workplace saying, are you going to cover it?

00:14:41 Speaker_06
I quickly read the decision. And then I reached out to Kim to kind of take her temperature, feel where she was at, ask if she wanted to talk about it. You know, do you want to speak to a reporter? Do you want to speak to me about it?

00:14:54 Speaker_06
The first thing I remember her saying was, I'm sick. I feel sick.

00:14:59 Speaker_06
And then, you know, we talked a little bit about the specifics of why, but there was a meta context to this whole conversation, Amy, which was Lovell's death sentence was overturned at the same time Utah was preparing to execute somebody else.

00:15:18 Speaker_08
Yeah, and it's just so rare here. We're not like Texas or Florida. There's not people on death row being executed on the regular. This hasn't happened since 2010. So it's a major event and it captures a lot of attention.

00:15:32 Speaker_06
And you can imagine if you are Joyce Yost's family, who are still strongly supportive of seeing Lovell executed, this crime was 39 years ago and you're watching somebody else be executed for a crime

00:15:49 Speaker_06
that also happened a long time ago, but not nearly that long ago. And your case has just been basically sent back. You're going, well, why? Why are we being forced to wait so long to see the justice that we feel is warranted?

00:16:07 Speaker_06
Now, I'm not taking a stance on whether it's right or wrong, but you can imagine how they feel.

00:16:11 Speaker_08
Well, and I think that's where the criminal justice system is not just. You come into it thinking, I'm looking for justice. I'm looking for fairness. I'm looking for something that's going to make this right. We talk about it that way.

00:16:25 Speaker_08
We're speaking for the victims. We're speaking for the dead. But it's not really about that at the end of the day. I mean, the cold, hard truth is it's about applying laws and which laws were broken and what can you prove.

00:16:38 Speaker_06
Exactly right. And so what happens procedurally is this case now goes back to the district court. That's the county level court. A new jury will conceivably be impaneled.

00:16:51 Speaker_06
They will be asked to again decide this question of should Doug Lovell be sentenced to death?

00:16:57 Speaker_08
What if they decide they don't want to seek the death penalty? What happens there?

00:17:00 Speaker_06
So we don't know at this point. The conversations, I'm sure, are happening behind closed doors about where do we go? Do we go for death again? You've got death twice. Are you going to get it a third time?

00:17:11 Speaker_06
And if you do, does everybody on board have the stomach to go through yet another round of appeals? Because the appeals start all over again if you get death a third time. People are getting older in the process.

00:17:25 Speaker_06
Witnesses, including some who testified in 2015, one for sure has passed away.

00:17:31 Speaker_08
Are you going to read a whole bunch of witness statements?

00:17:33 Speaker_06
It's going to be a bunch of transcripts. Yeah. And then the defense gets to put on live witnesses. Is that fair? Right.

00:17:39 Speaker_08
Because they're talking about what's happening now. Sure.

00:17:41 Speaker_06
Yeah. So that skews more toward the current. So trying to find that balance on those scales of justice. You know, we've seen that with this decision, the Utah Supreme Court feels like there was an error made, they're gonna send it back, okay.

00:17:56 Speaker_06
Does Weber County have the stomach to go for death again? Does Joyce's family?

00:18:00 Speaker_08
I mean, that's really the reason that a lot of defense attorneys argue if you're going to have the death penalty, you have to really put money behind the defense of these cases because you don't want to have these errors.

00:18:11 Speaker_08
This is the reason you want to avoid errors. Not because, you know, somebody doesn't want to look bad. It's really torturous for everybody involved. The witnesses. I mean, none of this is anything anybody wants to keep doing.

00:18:25 Speaker_08
This is why there needs to be, you know, an attorney general's counterpart to the defense work for people in private practice. It's just there's nobody who can just take time and do it. Like, I don't even know what it would cost you to do a case.

00:18:38 Speaker_06
Millions, millions. In a death penalty case, it's millions.

00:18:41 Speaker_08
Yeah. So you're going to be defended by the government. That's the bottom line. So the government should just invest in making that as equal as possible to avoid these errors. And I'm not sure why.

00:18:50 Speaker_08
Here's the other thing is every conversation we have in Utah, From, you know, city government to state government to criminal justice issues has some flavor.

00:19:02 Speaker_06
Colored in some way by.

00:19:04 Speaker_08
There's some influence of religious discussion and religious theology and religious doctrine.

00:19:09 Speaker_06
And that's that's ultimately what this boils down to. If there is any question of bias or impropriety, you got to do it over.

00:19:17 Speaker_08
If the government is going to be in the business of, at times, taking the lives of its citizens, the bar has to be almost to perfection. On the flip side, we have to do better by these victims' families.

00:19:32 Speaker_08
If there was a mistake that we got to fix it, the problem is how we fix it and how we deal with the human people who are impacted by the mistakes.

00:19:41 Speaker_06
And the time that's lost.

00:19:44 Speaker_08
The time is lost. And I think just making people feel a part of it. Kim's on the outside. She's calling a reporter or texting you. Right. It tells me we could still create a better safety net. So where does this go next?

00:19:57 Speaker_06
So what we understand, Amy, is there will be a new sentencing hearing supposedly at some time. My intention is to be there. I want to continue following this case.

00:20:07 Speaker_06
Look, when we came off of Cold Season 1, the Susan Powell case, which had millions of listeners, and we decided to follow Joyce's story for Season 2,

00:20:18 Speaker_06
I knew, and I think all of us behind the scenes knew, this was not going to be a high-profile, a flashy case, but we felt strongly about the importance of shining a light on it, for a number of reasons, as we've talked about.

00:20:31 Speaker_06
It highlights how so many victims, especially women in the criminal justice system, are treated when they come forward. We see the long tail as people like Kim Salazar and Joyce's family deal with the death penalty. So...

00:20:47 Speaker_06
I didn't feel like we could just, you know, wrap the season, clap our hands, clear the dust off and say, we're done, we're moving on forever. Clearly this is something that's going to linger, it's going to continue.

00:20:58 Speaker_06
I want to be there and I hope that people come along with us because as we talked about in the season, justice for Joyce, this idea, is justice done in this process? Well, it's ongoing. So we have to commit to be there every step of the way.

00:21:13 Speaker_06
And I just hope that you and anybody else listening will follow along with us.

00:21:18 Speaker_08
It's not over for you until it's over for Joyce and Joyce's family, until the case is really closed.

00:21:24 Speaker_06
Absolutely. Thanks, Amy. Cold is a production of KSL Podcasts and Wondery, in association with Workhouse Media. Cold is researched, written, and hosted by me, Dave Cauley. Mixing and mastering by Ben Kebrick. Michael Bonmiller composed our main theme.

00:21:43 Speaker_06
For Amazon Music and Wondery, executive producer Morgan Jones. With Workhouse Media executive producers Paul Anderson and Nick Piniella. And for KSL Podcasts, executive producer Cheryl Worsley.

00:21:59 Speaker_01
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