CA Supreme Court Overturns Quadruple Murderer’s Death Sentence

by · Published · Updated

In a unanimous ruling yesterday, the California Supreme Court overturned the death sentence handed down 23 years ago for a woman convicted of killing her four young daughters and attempting to kill her 14-year-old son.  The Mercury News reports that Nikolet Amber Nieves’ boyfriend had recently left her pregnant,  which she aborted a week before setting fire to her home killing her four daughters and nearly killing her son by two previous marriages.   The girls, ranging in age from 5 to 12, died from smoke inhalation. In a note to one of her ex-husbands she wrote, “Now you don’t have to support any of us.”  A defense expert testified that he believed she had taken enough drugs to be unaware of what she was doing when she set the fire, but she did manage to call 911 to report it.  The jury did not buy it.

The Supreme Court upheld Nieves’ aggravated murder conviction, but found error by the judge at the sentencing hearing.  The court contended that the judge’s “conspicuous disdain for defense counsel and witnesses, and his repeated references to their improper or untrustworthy conduct, lent credence to the prosecution’s argument that defendant was manipulative and deceitful.”  The court held that this conduct prejudiced the sentencing jury, and thereby invalidated the death sentence.

1 Response

  1. Bill Otis says:
    May 4, 2021 3:21 pm at 3:21 pm

    One thing I notice about these cases where the mother kills the children is that the children tend to be quite young. Here, she nailed the girls from 5 to 12 but the teenage boy survived.

    Now why is that?

    Because a teenage boy can fight back.

    This is worth remembering the next time we hear about how some mother deserves mercy because she killed her kids in the grip of some defense-manufactured “syndrome.” Note that the syndrome is not so powerful over her thinking that it inspires her to try murdering someone who can defend himself. Now a five year-old, that’s a different story.

    Admittedly this case is different because, apparently, she tried to kill the teenage boy as well as the younger, weaker girls. It just struck me as another instance where the difference between the victim’s surviving and dying has nothing to do with the murderer’s supposed warped mental state. In most instances, it has to do with the killer’s being able to tell who’s easy prey and who isn’t.