Judge rules on Lori Vallow Daybell’s request to have Nate Eaton as a witness in her murder trial
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An Arizona judge has removed EastIdahoNews.com reporter Nate Eaton from a witness list in the conspiracy to commit murder trial involving Lori Vallow Daybell.
As a news organization and a firm supporter of the First Amendment, EastIdahoNews.com applauds the judge’s decision.
“The judge’s ruling today recognized that Nate Eaton, like all journalists, has a First Amendment right to attend and report on the proceedings in a public trial,” said Matthew Kelley, an attorney representing EastIdahoNews.com. “We’re pleased that the court has held that Mr. Eaton will not be excluded from the courtroom.”
Our newsroom learned two weeks ago that Daybell had put Eaton on her witness list. She is representing herself during this trial with the assistance of an attorney and an investigator. Daybell is on trial for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder of Charles Vallow, her former husband, who was fatally shot at her Chandler, Arizona, home on July 11, 2019.
Her legal maneuver concerned us for several reasons. The first was that if Eaton were a witness in the case, it would preclude him from watching any of the trial proceedings and being able to cover them. By law, witnesses are excluded from trial proceedings to not bias their testimony.
Eaton has extensively covered the Daybell case over the past five years.
Our newsroom also had serious concerns about the constitutionality of putting a reporter on the stand. We have taken a firm stance on not revealing unpublished information from any sources used in our reporting. Thankfully, Arizona has a strong shield law, which protects journalists and their sources from being brought into court.
Last week, Eaton, at the advice of our local attorneys, filed a pro se motion (he represented himself) with Maricopa County in Arizona to be removed from Daybell’s witness list. He suggested Daybell had filed the motion to keep us out of the courtroom and prevent his reporting. Shortly afterward, EastIdahoNews.com hired Kelley, with Ballard Spahr in Phoenix, to make further written arguments on our behalf regarding Arizona’s shield law and journalists’ protections under the First Amendment.
On Monday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Justin Beresky heard the issue in court.
During the hearing, Daybell laughed at the premise of our opposition and said she didn’t even realize putting Eaton on the witness list would preclude him from covering the case. She said her reasoning was that Eaton had interviewed many of the witnesses to be called at trial, and she wanted to use him to “lay a foundation to impeach the witnesses.”
In other words, Daybell wanted to compare a witness’s testimony on the stand with statements given to Eaton that were used in news stories. She hoped to find discrepancies between the two.
Beresky correctly pointed out that Daybell could use EastIdahoNews.com’s public video and written reporting without needing Eaton to tell the court himself. He explained if a witness said something different in testimony than in a news interview, Daybell could use the reporting itself to “impeach the witness.”
Based on that argument, Beresky told the court he was inclined to strike Eaton from the witness list.
Later in the hearing, Daybell also insinuated Eaton had colluded with Maricopa County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Treena Kay to avoid being called as a witness. Daybell even filed a motion to dismiss the case based on prosecutorial misconduct.
For the record, while Kay interviewed Eaton, she never gave him legal advice, and the only people involved in our opposition or court filings were Eaton, myself, and our legal counsel in Idaho and Arizona. Any suggestion otherwise is patently false.
Beresky agreed and denied Daybell’s motion to dismiss the case based on prosecutorial misconduct.
Eaton will remain in the courtroom for the next several weeks, posting live updates on EastIdahoNews.com. We will also provide video from the courtroom on a 30-minute delay per Beresky’s instructions.
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