An appellate attorney is out of a job after speaking publicly about a lack of funding in a death penalty case — comments that Weber County officials deemed “harmful to the county’s reputation.”
Defense attorney Samuel Newton had been representing Douglas Lovell, who was sentenced in 2015 to be executed for killing 39-year-old Joyce Yost in 1985 to keep her from testifying that he had previously raped her.
Newton, who is based in Montana, had a contract with Weber County to represent the death row inmate in his appeal and was contracted to handle all of the other appeals for indigent criminal defendants in the county.