Utah Supreme Court overturns death sentence for man convicted of murder in rape cover-up

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SALT LAKE CITY — 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.

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. The Utah Attorney General’s Office — the prosecutors in the case — did not have an immediate answer Thursday as to whether Lovell could again receive a death sentence, spokesperson Alex Curcio said.

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 is entitled to a sentencing hearing free from this improper and prejudicial evidence,” the court said.

His attorney in the appeals case, Colleen Coebergh, declined to comment Thursday.

A state judge ruled in 2021 that the church did not interfere in Lovell’s trial when it laid out ground rules for what local church leaders could say before they testified as character witnesses. Lovell had claimed the witnesses were effectively silenced by the church or never contacted at all by his court-appointed attorney.

Lovell had been one of seven inmates on death row in Utah. The overturning of his sentence comes as another death row inmate, Taberon Dave Honie, faces execution by lethal injection on Aug. 8. 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.

The state has not had an execution since Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad in 2010.

BY HANNAH SCHOENBAUM