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Emile to take plea bargain in daughter’s murder, avoiding death penalty

By Mark Shenefelt - | Aug 17, 2022

BENJAMIN ZACK, Standard-Examiner file photo

Brenda Emile appears in the 2nd District Court in Ogden on Thursday, July 13, 2017. Emile and Miller Costello have been charged with aggravated murder in the death of their 3-year-old daughter.

OGDEN — When 3-year-old Angelina Costello died, she was emaciated and had cigarette burns around her body, one dabbed with makeup to conceal it. Five years later, her mother, Brenda Emile, who has spent most of her 20s in the Weber County Jail, has agreed to plead guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty.

During a routine pretrial hearing on Tuesday afternoon, Emile’s attorney, Martin Gravis, asked Judge Michael DiReda for a brief pause so he could speak to his client privately. When the hearing resumed, Gravis signaled that Emile is prepared to plead guilty to first-degree felony aggravated murder, and in return prosecutors will agree to drop their pursuit of a death sentence.

“At what point are we going to take a plea?” DiReda asked. Prosecutor Letitia Toombs of the Weber County Attorney’s Office confirmed that Emile has accepted the prosecution’s plea bargain offer, which “takes the death penalty off the table.”

DiReda scheduled a hearing for 3:30 p.m. Friday to formalize the plea bargain. He said he would not cancel Emile’s scheduled Oct. 3-Nov. 4 trial until the Friday hearing.

Toombs said the charge against Emile now will be treated as a first-degree felony aggravated murder, subject to 25 years to life in prison or life without the possibility of parole.

Emile, 27, and her husband, Miller Costello, 30, have been jailed since July 6, 2017, the day their daughter died. During a preliminary hearing in the case in 2018, a state medical examiner cataloged the toddler’s injuries, which included brain bleeding, cigarette burns on her back, fingers and face, a large burn on her chest, and extreme emaciation. An Ogden Police Department detective testified that seeing the girl’s body “brought back memories of Holocaust victims,” according to past Standard-Examiner coverage.

Early in the case, Gravis argued that physical evidence did not show Emile caused or was an accessory to the girl’s death. However, prosecutors pointed to her application of makeup to burns on the toddler’s body.

Costello is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 30 through March 3, 2023. First, a two-part hearing is scheduled for Nov. 29 and Dec. 9 on an evaluation of Costello’s intellectual capacity. His attorney, Randall Marshall, in May filed a motion contending that Costello is intellectually disabled — a finding that, if confirmed, may make Costello ineligible for capital punishment.

In the upcoming “Atkins hearing,” DiReda will consider arguments over Costello’s mental capacity, informed in part by state psychiatric evaluations that have been in progress. In the case of Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that executions of mentally deficient criminals are “cruel and unusual punishments” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

Emile’s plea comes after years of other motions and hearings over the death penalty. Last year, DiReda rejected arguments by Marshall and fellow defense attorney Jason Widdison that Utah’s death penalty law should be nullified on the grounds that a public consensus against capital punishment has evolved.

While prosecutors today have become more selective in pushing for capital punishment and jurors “aren’t eager to do it,” Utah lawmakers over the years have added more legal factors justifying execution verdicts, Marshall argued.

But DiReda ruled that the U.S. and Utah supreme courts “have made clear that the clear and most reliable objective evidence of contemporary values is legislation enacted” by state legislatures.

Several efforts to abolish the death penalty have been made in the Utah Legislature but all have failed.

DiReda also is handling the death penalty case of Douglas Lovell, who is on Utah’s death row for the 1985 murder of Joyce Yost of South Ogden. Lovell’s latest appeal is being heard by the Utah Supreme Court.

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