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Amidst the Trump verdict and the SCOTUS drops, it might be easy to miss a smaller verdict this week: Chad Daybell guilty of murder.
If this doesn't ring any bells, you can watch a whole damn documentary about it, should you feel so inclined. Or read a book about it. Or just a timeline. Go ahead! It's okay. I'll wait.
Anyway, this is perhaps the second-least surprising verdict of the week. Absent literal video of the murders, the evidence that Daybell took part in these killings is about as ironclad as it comes. So the trial, really, was about which part. This is often a challenge when "conspiracy" comes into play. If you have two good suspects, and you think they worked together, but each points a finger at the other, what do you do?
Lori Vallow was sentenced last year to life in prison for killing two of her children and conspiring in the murder of Chad Daybell's first wife. In arguing that case, prosecutors were tasked in part with establishing both that Vallow was mentally competent to stand trail, and that she was not entitled to mitigation on grounds that she was being manipulated by Chad. In fact the prosecution went further, asserting that Vallow was the one manipulating Daybell "through emotional and sexual control." Vallow was convicted on that account of events.
CW angle: quite naturally, that was a big part of Daybell's defense. "The state already proved that I was being manipulated by Vallow!" Indeed. In no time at all, a journalist (and author of the book linked above) was ready to call that defense "misogynistic."
Returning to today, Daybell was convicted on three charges of first degree murder as well as three charges of conspiracy to commit murder (plus some irrelevant lesser charges). While Vallow was given multiple life sentences (reportedly, the death penalty was taken off the table due to the prosecution making a late discovery submission), Daybell's day in court isn't over: prosecution is pushing for the death penalty.
Overall, this seems like a case where police investigation basically functioned as intended. The "doomsday cult" stuff makes for sensational reading/viewing, and there were indeed a number of plots to untangle--a fact which took law enforcement a little time to pick up on. Aside from Chad's sentencing (and the inevitable appeals), one loose thread remains: Vallow has been extradited to Arizona, to stand trial for conspiring to murder her fourth husband and planning the attempted murder of her niece's ex-husband (her now-deceased brother was the one with the gun).
So I don't feel like there's a lot of reason to pick at the CW bits, it looks like justice is broadly being done. It's a bit of a mental splinter to me that the prosecution never had to really get its story straight, and that Chad and Lori have both been convicted, in part, on the theory that they masterminded the whole thing and the other party was merely a catspaw. Perhaps the Arizona trial will give us a clearer picture--Alex Cox, Lori's deceased brother, appears to have also been a bit of a Daybell disciple. Before his death he reportedly expressed concern that he might become Lori and Chad's fall guy.
Perhaps all that remains is some inescapable head-scratching over the relationship between mental illness, religious zeal, and romantic entanglements. I would colloquially and informally call these people crazy. As far as I can tell, Chad's wife was murdered because he wanted out of a marriage without the hassle (or "sin?") of divorce, and Lori's children were murdered because they were interfering with her living her best life with husband number five. (I assume that Daybell and Vallow were not actually perceiving demons, which appears to be how they justified the killings to themselves, and only perceived "darkness" possessing others as a post hoc excuse for hating those who disagreed with them or otherwise interfered with their aims.) Competence to stand trial does not require a person to be in perfect mental health, they just need the ability to have a rational and factual understanding of what the judges and lawyers tell them. Vallow and Daybell appear to meet that standard, so why the state's song-and-dance of insisting that each of them, separately, was psychologically dominating the other? Why not just tell the most likely story--that these were mutually unstable people who fed one another's delusions?
The practical answer, I suspect, is just that the state did not want either jury to perceive the slightest possibility of mitigation. To prevent the obviously guilty from getting off light, the state focused not on the (perfectly adequate!) truth in a logically consistent way, but on the most compelling available narrative in any given moment. Given that I have no sympathy for Vallow or Daybell, I'd say "and nothing of value was lost," but I value the truth too much to dismiss even this slight disregard for consistency across claims as "of no value."
I leave you with this small excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters:
As I understand it, prosecutors are allowed to make inconsistent arguments so long as they're in separate cases — that they claimed "X" in one trial is no bar to claiming "not X" in another trial.
There are many contexts in which the prosecution is allowed to make inconsistent arguments in the same case--for example, stating claims "in the alternative." The American court system is basically structured under the assumption that prosecutors are interested in truth and justice, rather than in winning their cases and clearing their dockets (see also: prosecutorial discretion). Honestly, I think it works out that way more often than not. But there is nevertheless an awful lot of prosecutorial fuckery.
I think you are incorrectly framing this as though the ability to make inconsistent arguments is a unique power held by prosecutors. Any party in any kind of litigation is always free to make inconsistent or alternative arguments. The catch is that typically the jury gets to hear about your inconsistencies, and can choose to hold this against your credibility if it wants to. I didn't read your links, but from your description of the case it sounds like the jury was told about the inconsistent arguments and ultimately still believed the defendant was guilty.
Yeah, the old joke that I've heard frames it as coming from the defense: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I wasn't even there! And if I was, I didn't do it. And if I did, it was self defense. And if it wasn't, I was insane!"
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