Carson City
Mothers of the dead teens sit and stare, intermittently, at the lawyers trying to free the killer from prison. They mutter as they glare, perhaps about his natty appearance, his slick-attorney look, or his assistant and her thick swatch of hair, her black business suit, the way she chats up the television news people in the room.
Nothing wrong with that. When your kid is run over and killed by a pot-smoker, there's some unwritten law that lets you glare coldly, supremely, at those trying to free the pot-smoker from prison.
There's another law that prevents the glared-at from glaring back.
Here's another unwritten law. Nevada Supreme Court justices aren't free. They have mortgages. Kids in private schools, colleges. They like to vacation in Europe. Maybe they have a few new cars with payments every month.
And they are elected. Which means they need approval, not from lawyers or defendants, but from the masses glaring at them after an unpopular decision.
Which is to say that Jessica Williams lost this round. Though the state Supreme Court won't decide for months whether to grant her a new trial, the drift of things was evident in the courtroom Monday afternoon. That drift wasn't changed by the fact that arguments for and against were utterly confusing to most people.
(Williams, you'll recall, was sent to lock-up for running down six teens, after having smoked marijuana.)
First came Clark County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Nelson, who gave a rapid-fire, almost inaudible discourse on the superiority of his case versus the case of John Watkins, Williams' defense attorney. I couldn't tell if he was reading, so he must've had it memorized, a point-by-point deconstruction of the kind of legal esoterica that keeps lawyers in business. And a condescending tone—not to the judges but to Watkins. And the Clark County judge who ruled in Watkins' favor.
"I, frankly, don't understand the District Court's definition, the meaning is clear," Nelson said, the first of many attacks. Then again, there's an unwritten rule in courtrooms that if you get too big for your britches, if you sound too haughty, too know-it-all, judges don't like that.
Nelson seemed bored with his own words. The judges looked bored, too. They looked down at the hair of their collective knuckles, pursing their lips.
"The second error the District Court made …" and Nelson was on a roll.
I wonder if Justice Maupin's lit up a few times before. He looks to be in his 50s, which would have made him prime age to have tried the Evil Weed in the late '60s. Justice Rose looks like he has fun with his life. I wonder if he's tried it, too.
Not that I'm unsympathetic to the mothers of these kids. If my child were killed, I'd want vengeance. I'd want them to pay. But I'd want certainty, too. I know I've fallen asleep at the wheel when I wasn't drunk or impaired in any way. Part of Williams' defense is that she merely fell asleep, that she wasn't impaired. That the dope she'd smoked had already worn off.
Does she sit in prison for most of her life for falling asleep? Or because she drove when she knew she should not?
Watkins' booming voice shakes the court's dreamers awake. He's louder, clearer. He points his fingers in unison like an airline steward directing passengers to the exit doors. This is a case where the prosecutor has taken lawful conduct and convicted Jessica Williams, he says.
"That's wrong!"
And his defense boils down to a convoluted, arrow-pointing affair, a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of an argument, weaving through a series of levers and pulleys until ... ta-da! ... Jessica Williams deserves a new trial.
Except the judges didn't seem to follow. They asked lots of questions and pointed out what they thought were contradictory versions of state laws, laws that Watkins was pointing to as proof, proof, that Jessica Williams sits in prison for being convicted of a law that doesn't exist—specifically, that she was convicted of having a marijuana metabolite in her system, but that metabolite isn't in a list of drugs ruled "dangerous" by the Board of Pharmacy.
And they said nothing about the glaring moms sitting just to Watkins' right, nor anything about the fact that some of them have elections next year, elections in which voters might want to ask just exactly how they came to a decision to give a new trial to a girl who killed six kids.
Nelson, addressing the court when Watkins finished, gave them the kind of answer voters understand.
"Foolish" is the way he labeled Watkins' arguments.
After the hearing, "frustrating" was the word Watkins used.
One of the moms shakes Nelson's hand, then doesn't let it go.
"Well, my prayers help," one of them says.
A reporter tells Watkins that the judges "seemed a little skeptical" about his argument.
He shakes his head, but he's not finished. There's another unwritten rule that almost every lawyer knows, but few acknowledge.
Nevada's elected Supreme Court is notorious for making rulings that federal courts eventually overturn.