Former Utah County Attorney David Leavitt will still receive a public reprimand from the Utah State Bar over comments he made in a death penalty case, the Utah Supreme Court has decided.
The court, in a unanimous decision released Thursday and written by Justice Paige Petersen, said Leavitt “should have known” that comments he made at a news conference could have prejudiced jurors against Jerrod William Baum — who was facing murder and kidnapping charges in the brutal killings of 17-year-old Brelynne “Breezy” Otteson and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Riley Powell, in 2017.
Leavitt had appealed the bar’s public reprimand, seeking either a reversal or to have it lowered to an admonition — a lesser punishment that typically would be private, listed in the bar journal without the attorney’s name attached.
In a 2019 news conference about the case, Leavitt told reporters that “I am going to give power back to people, in the form of juries, to decide. It is the jury’s role to determine the guilt or innocence of this alleged killer. If they find him guilty, then it is the jury’s role to decide whether he should receive the death penalty or not.”
What the bar disciplined Leavitt for were his answers to a reporter’s “off the cuff” questions about the credibility of the sole witness to the crime. Freyja Johnson, one of Leavitt’s attorneys, told the Utah Supreme Court during arguments in February that Leavitt was trying to say that the witness affirmed Leavitt’s decision to take the case to trial.
In making those comments, though, Leavitt referred to evidence that was inadmissible in court.
Leavitt commented on Baum’s character, “vouched for the credibility of the state’s witness ‘based on a lot of evidence that the jury will never hear,’ suggested that Baum was guilty, and made other potentially inflammatory statements,” Petersen wrote.
Those comments, a district court ruled and the Supreme Court confirmed in its decision, were “textbook examples of extrajudicial statements carrying a substantial likelihood of prejudicing the adjudication of this case.”
A jury in 2022 found Baum guilty of kidnapping and killing the teens, whose bodies were found in an abandoned mineshaft outside Eureka months after their murder. Baum was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Also in 2022, Leavitt lost his reelection bid to fellow Republican Jeff Gray, the current Utah County Attorney.