Murder charge against Chad Daybell will stand despite wrong date of child's death, judge says

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A typo in the triple murder indictment of an Idaho man accused of killing his wife and his girlfriend’s two children doesn’t mean that he should be acquitted of one of the deaths, a judge said Thursday.

Prosecutors had been carefully detailing the case against Chad Daybell to jurors over the past three weeks. Shortly after they closed their case Thursday afternoon, 7th District Judge Steven Boyce alerted the attorneys to a major error: The date of 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow’s death was wrong in the indictment.

That sparked a flurry of arguments over whether the problem could be fixed or if Daybell should simply be acquitted of that charge.

“We’re all kind of falling on our sword here,” special assistant attorney general Ingrid Batey told the judge Thursday, describing the issue as “clearly a clerical error.”

Boyce ultimately agreed with prosecutors, describing it as an “inadvertent mistake” and saying jurors could be given special instructions allowing them to still consider the full case.