Mother Not to Blame in Deaths of Her 4 Girls, Lawyer Argues

In an unusual closing argument punctuated by objections, the defense attorney for Sandi Nieves, who is accused of murdering her four daughters, urged jurors to find her not guilty.

“Sandi Dawn Nieves is and was not a murderer,” said Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco, in a rambling closing argument that will continue today in San Fernando Superior Court. He asked jurors to “squeeze the grape of truth” so that “justice will come out.”

Waco accused prosecutors of bias and contended that Nieves was not legally conscious at the time of the deadly blaze. Along the way, he repeatedly apologized to jurors for his own conduct during the trial.

Prosecutors allege that Nieves, 36, was angry and wanted to take revenge against the men in her life. The mother allegedly gathered her five children in the kitchen of their Saugus house for a slumber party on the night of June 30, 1998, and started a fire sometime after midnight. Her daughters, Kristl, 5; Jaqlene, 7; Rashel, 11, and Nikolet, 12, died of smoke inhalation. Her son, David, who was 14 at the time, survived.

Nieves is charged with four counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder and arson. If convicted, she could be sentenced to the death penalty.

“Her children were her heart and soul . . . her whole world. In her right mind, she would never do them harm,” Waco said Monday.

Waco said that letters written by

Nieves before the fire had been mischaracterized by prosecutors as suicide notes. In one letter, an apparently angry Nieves wrote to an ex-husband who sought to reverse his adoption of the three oldest children: “Now you don’t have to support any of us.”

That language is “hyperbole,” Waco said, adding that using dramatic language was not unusual for Nieves. “She was a very depressed person. But not so depressed that she would want to kill her children,” Waco said.

He accused prosecutors and detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department of sneakiness and bias in how they handled the case.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Waco said, attributing the 19th century British statesman Lord Acton’s famous quote to Thomas Jefferson.

Also notable Monday was how frequently and successfully prosecutors objected to Waco’s arguments.

In the first three hours of Waco’s closing, Deputy Dist. Attys. Beth Silverman and Kenneth Barshop objected more than 60 times, arguing that Waco was misstating the evidence. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt sustained the vast majority.

“If I’m wrong, I apologize. I don’t mean to mislead you in any way,” Waco said, at one point.

Waco’s closing argument also caps a contentious three-month trial during which the lawyer was sanctioned repeatedly and fined thousands of dollars by Wiatt. Waco, alleging bias, has asked that Wiatt be removed from the trial. In court documents, Wiatt denied Waco’s allegations and said he followed the law in his rulings.