FREMONT COUNTY, Idaho — Lori Vallow Daybell and her husband, Chad Daybell, are now set to stand trial next January on murder charges related to the deaths of Lori's children, Joshua "JJ" Vallow and Tylee Ryan, but whether they'll stand trial together is a point of contention.
A Fremont County grand jury in May 2021 returned an indictment against Vallow and Daybell, charging them with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the deaths of the children. Chad Daybell is also charged with the murder of his late wife, Tammy Daybell.
At the time, the judge ordered the two to be tried together.
Seventh District Judge Steven Boyce on Friday heard arguments on the motion to sever, filed by Chad Daybell's attorney, John Prior, in September 2021. Daybell was present at the hearing, held on Zoom, but did not speak.
Right now, Lori Vallow Daybell is still considered mentally unfit for trial, and her case remains on hold. The central concern behind Prior's motion is that with less than a year before trial, the court has not yet determined what will happen in Vallow's case.
"There's a significant amount of preparation that needs to be done, and that preparation is going to include whether or not the cases are severed or whether they're joined together," Prior said in Friday's hearing. "I'm not going to get into tactics, but I can assure the court that there is going to be a significant difference between how I prepare in the event the cases are joined as opposed to whether they're separate."
Fremont County Prosecutor Lindsey Blake asked the judge to not rule on Prior's motion until more is known about the status of Vallow's case, and that Vallow also be heard regarding the motion to sever the trial, "since it also affects her trial rights."
If either Vallow or Daybell had made any statements in which one incriminated the other, that could be grounds to sever a trial. Blake said the defense and the prosecution already have all the statements that exist, and that incriminating statements "simply don't exist at this juncture."
One of the prosecution's arguments for keeping Vallow's and Daybell's cases in one trial is a principle called "judicial economy." Their trial, if held jointly, is already scheduled to take ten weeks, and take place in Ada County, nearly 300 miles from Fremont County.
If the cases were severed, Blake said, "We would be looking at the potential for 20 weeks that the state would have to replicate the same evidence essentially, require us to call all the same witnesses, require us to use all the same staff and resources to do those trials."
Blake also mentioned that a joint trial would mean victims and witnesses would not need to "repeat the inconvenience and sometimes trauma of testifying, and randomly favoring the last tried defendants who have the advantage of knowing the prosecution's case beforehand."
While Blake asked Judge Boyce to reserve a decision until more is known about Vallow's case, or at least allow the issue to be revisited, Prior doesn't want any delay.
"This motion's been pending for five months, and it hasn't changed in five months -- Ms. Vallow Daybell's position in terms of where she's at. We have no certainty as to where it's going to be in another five or six months, and I think it's inappropriate to put Mr. Daybell hanging in this situation, with the idea that we don't have any certainty as to where this is going," Prior said.
At the conclusion of Friday's hearing, Boyce said he was going to take the arguments under advisement and issue a written ruling, which is still pending.
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