Utah Supreme Court overturns death sentence, upholds conviction for murder of Joyce Yost
Jul 25, 2024, 3:06 PM | Updated: 5:00 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder over the discussion of his religion at his sentencing hearing.
“Lovell has not shown that his conviction for the murder of Joyce Yost should be overturned,” the Utah Supreme Court wrote in its 42-page opinion. It said his then counsel “rendered ineffective assistance” during his sentencing and agreed that Lovell is entitled to new proceedings.
“We agree that Lovell did not receive the representation the United States Constitution guarantees him,” the court wrote.
His lawyers argued that his sentencing counsel failed to effectively object or respond to testimony regarding his religious status, specifically his excommunication from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that was used as a test of his remorse in the courtroom. The court states:
We agree that reasonable counsel would have recognized both the problems with this testimony and its potential to invite the jury to base its decision on something other than its own assessment of Lovell. And we agree that reasonable counsel would have done something—either object to the entire line of questioning, seek curative instructions, or move for a mistrial—to protect their client.
Lovell has twice been sentenced to die for abducting and murdering Yost, a South Ogden woman, in August of 1985. Her body has never been located.
Before his sexual assault trial, he hired two different men to kill Yost to prevent her from testifying. When both backed out, Lovell crept into Yost’s apartment through an unlocked window and allegedly strangled her to death in the mountains near Ogden. Even with Yost’s disappearance, he was convicted of sexual assault.
In 1993 the prosecution and the defense reached an agreement to spare Lovell the death penalty if he led prosecutors to Yost’s body. Weeks of searching failed to locate her remains, and the judge invalidated the plea agreement and sentenced Lovell to death. Lovell attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, but the court upheld it.
In 2011, the Utah Supreme Court invalidated Lovell’s death sentence, and he was sent back to a lower court, where his defense team conceded his guilt. He then had a second sentencing and was sentenced to death again, where the Utah Supreme Court ruled Thursday that he had ineffective representation and that the decision of a death
The ruling states: “The United States Supreme Court has instructed that “it is constitutionally impermissible to rest a death sentence on a determination made by a sentencer who has been led to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the defendant’s death rests elsewhere.”
The murder of Joyce Yost, the search for her remains and the criminal case against Douglas Lovell are covered in detail in the KSL Podcasts series COLD season 2: Justice for Joyce.
