There was a moment during Lori Daybell’s most recent pre-trial conference, right after Judge Beresky asked Lori if she had any complaints about the jury questionnaire other than it having her name on it, when Lori half-heartedly tossed her reading glasses onto her table and then said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, “No, Your Honor.”
I thought, And that’s why she has to wear the RACC belt.
The camera was behind Lori, so those of us watching at home couldn’t see her face, but her voice was terrifying. It sounded like it had floated up from the deepest, coldest of depths an Arctic pit, a place light doesn’t touch and has never touched. I was staring at her Sun In-lightened, rollered curls, but they might as well have been the shifting spots of a leopard, because in that moment – for the first time – I saw the Lori who killed her children. The predator was revealed.
Let’s be clear: what Lori wanted from Judge Beresky was absurd. She was claiming that if potential jurors in her next trial saw her name on their jury questionnaire, they would immediately look her up online and then try to get on her jury so they could unfairly convict her. That’s not impossible. It could happen. She even implied that the issue with Juror 15 from her last trial could have been avoided if her name had been removed from the previous jury questionnaire. (If Juror 15 did look her up before jury deliberations, there’s no evidence that his doing so had anything to do with seeing her name on the jury questionnaire.) The problem with what Lori wants is obvious: potential jurors can’t be screened for prior knowledge about Lori and her many cases without being told her name. In fact, Lori would have to go through trial anonymously, silently, and invisibly in order to entirely prevent the possibility of being recognized.
When Judge Beresky asked how they were going to screen jurors without using her name, Lori had no answer. But it was clear from the ice in her voice when she told him that she had no other issues with the questionnaire that she had reached her limit with the judge. This wasn’t a practical issues Judge Beresky had with her motion: this was personal.
Shortly afterward, she demanded that the judge recuse himself due to bias. Her evidence of bias was that he’d ruled against her motion. She complained that he had never granted a single one of her motions, at which time he pointed out that – not ten minutes before – he’d granted a motion to meet with her standby counsel during lunch. She responded that this was the first time he’d ever granted one, and he told her that her motions lacked legal foundations.
Lori was not pleased.
Admittedly, I have yet to hear Lori win a motion of any substance. I’m not sure exactly how standby counsel works, but it’s clear that they aren’t feeding Lori ideas and suggestions. Of the five reasons she included in her motion for a new trial, four were utterly flimsy (only the issue regarding Juror 15 could potentially rise to the level of requiring a new trial). It’s clear that she lacks a fundamental understanding of the law and how it works—I’m not a lawyer, and even I can tell that she’s doing a terrible job at this.
So what does Lori think that the legal system is? Well, let’s look at that. I’m basing this analysis on what I’ve observed of Lori during various hearings and during her trial for conspiracy to commit the murder of Charles Vallow, which I watched in its entirety, and her public interviews. Oh, and a little bit on her father’s book, How the American Public Can Dismantle the IRS. (He also represented himself against criminal charges, although he wisely chose to plead guilty, which already puts him head and shoulders above Lori.)
Lori’s idea of how the court system works appears to be based entirely on television and movies. This isn’t surprising really: most Americans probably get the bulk of our legal knowledge from TV. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m just being realistic. Most of us, however, realize that life and television are different. Lori doesn’t. She has repeatedly demonstrated that she expects court to be an opportunity to tell her story, and seems confused and frustrated when she isn’t allowed to say whatever she wants. The rules of evidence are an absolute mystery to Lori. Hearsay? Never heard of it. During the same hearing at which she demanded Judge Beresky recuse himself, she refused to explain the relevance of three different witnesses’ testimonies and asked – incredulously – if she was expected to explain the relevance of their testimony in open court. This suggests to me that Lori believes her case should be some sort of surprise, that it’s a giant dramatic, one-woman show and she shouldn’t have to give away the ending to the audience. That’s not how court works. The only people surprised should be the jury.
Factual truth appears to have little – if any – meaning to Lori. I saw this on every page of her father’s book. They share a fundamental inability to identify reality, and I think that explains some of why Lori struggles with the rules of evidence. If you aren’t capable of the critical thinking necessary to test reality, how can you know what is true and what isn’t? It then becomes very easy to inadvertently distort reality. Throughout his book, Barry Cox repeats over and over that it’s obvious the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified. He fails to provide a single piece of evidence for this other than his claim that the ratification signatures looked fake to him. He refused to pay taxes, tried to sue the IRS, went to prison for tax evasion, continued trying to sue the IRS, and wrote a book about how the IRS is evil because he thought some signatures looked fake. He never says that he tried to prove or disprove their validity in anyway. I can’t imagine that he understands what such a process would entail, either practically or even conceptually, and I think Lori shares this kind of… logic blindness. Critical thinking blindness. Truth blindness. Lori’s request that her name not be mentioned on a survey asking people if they’d heard of her rests on the same kind of blindness. It’s not stupidity. It’s an inability to reason from point A to point B.
Instead of reasoning, Barry and Lori fall back on emphatic insistence. They feel that if they repeat themselves loudly and confidently enough, that will “prove” them right. Exactly why or how they came to believe this, I don’t know. My guess is that, absent the ability to think critically, they fell back on emotion. Lori feels like it’s unfair that the judge rarely grants her motions, so it must be unfair. Feelings = Facts. She’s compensating for her cognitive failings with feelings. That also explains why she accused Judge Beresky of having a bias against her. She can’t comprehend his reasoning, so she assumes his feelings are the problem.
Lori believes that court is where you tell your story and play on the jury’s emotions, and she didn’t shy away from expressing her own feelings during her most recent trial. We saw her attack Nancy Jo on the stand, playing the scorned wife. We saw her outraged incredulity when her brother didn’t remember her green chili enchiladas (which were described by her only surviving child as “less than mid”). We saw her play the victim over and over. I was actually impressed by her opening statement: she told a good story. But I knew it would fall apart as soon as testimony began because it lacked any factual underpinning. Lori is at a loss when she’s asked for facts because she can’t identify them.
The criminal justice system is imperfect and fails more often than can be excused (just look at the Karen Read trial), but it is fundamentally intended to get at the truth. I think that part of the reason we find courtroom drama so captivating is that those moments of intense emotion stand in such contrast to the dull recitation of reality that make up 95% of trials. Detectives outlining the chain of evidence, data nerds explaining how cell towers work, defense attorneys nitpicking at linty nothingburgers—it’s often pretty boring. Lori’s not wrong that we’d all rather be listening to dramatic bombshell testimony delivered by a blonde with sausage curls. But while I’ve heard jurors talk about the emotional impact of listening to heartbroken witnesses, I’ve never heard one mention such testimony when asked what evidence led them to find a defendant guilty or innocent. And that’s why Lori Daybell is going to lose—again.
Perish the Thought 