Idaho prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Andrea Shaw, the Payette mother charged with murdering her 18-month-old twins, who says vaccines killed them.

This trial will be a fight between two experts' stories about the same two children. The state says the autopsy points to smothering and that a vaccine reaction was ruled out. The defense says medical records show a reaction days before the deaths. A death notice raises the stakes on both sides, and it also means a jury that convicts would have to go a step further and find an aggravating factor before death is even on the table.

Prosecutors in Payette County, Idaho, will seek the death penalty against Andrea Shaw, 23, who is charged with murdering her 18-month-old twin boys, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. The state announced the decision in a court filing on Friday, Oct. 16, and Payette County Prosecutor Mike Duke filed a separate document on Monday arguing that Shaw is likely a threat to society and that the case meets the statutory conditions for capital punishment, according to the Daily Mail. That filing said she showed "exceptional depravity" and "utter disregard for human life," according to court documents reviewed by The New York Times. A jury would have to find at least one of those conditions proved beyond a reasonable doubt before Shaw could be sentenced to death, the Daily Mail reported.

The twins were found dead in their bed on May 1, 2025, at a trailer home in Payette, about 60 miles from Boise, the Daily Mail reported. Prosecutors say they were smothered. Shaw has said they died after receiving hepatitis A, DTaP and flu vaccines. Ten days after the deaths, she appeared on a podcast hosted by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded and once led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and described the twins becoming lethargic the day after their shots, the Daily Mail reported. "They looked as if they had gone in their sleep," she said on the podcast, according to the Daily Mail. She has retained a lawyer who works with the group, and her defense team has said it will keep arguing a vaccine-injury defense, the outlet reported. The Idaho Statesman reported in July that the defense says medical records show a vaccine reaction days before the twins died.

"This is not a vaccine case," Duke has said in court, according to the Daily Mail. In a court filing, he wrote that an autopsy found the twins died from pulmonary vascular congestion, a buildup of fluid and blood in the vessels of the lungs, and that investigators ruled out heat and carbon monoxide, the Daily Mail reported. Duke has argued that smothering is "the only reasonable explanation for why both would die at the same time." He also said Shaw changed her story during the investigation while her husband, Nathaniel Shaw, gave a single account. "There are only two people who could have been involved in this crime," Duke said, according to KSL. "One of them was straightforward and cooperated with law enforcement." Those are the prosecution's arguments, and the defense disputes them.

Shaw was taken into custody in June, the Daily Mail reported, and KTVB and KIVI-TV reported in early July on an indictment alleging she suffocated the twins. The Lewiston Tribune reported in August that she pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. She is awaiting trial in the Payette County Jail, according to the Daily Mail, and the trial is scheduled for January.

If Shaw is convicted and sentenced to death, she would be the first person executed in Idaho since 2012, the Daily Mail reported. Idaho made the firing squad its primary execution method in July, after the state called off the 2024 lethal injection of Thomas Creech when the execution team could not find a vein, according to the outlet. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.