The four girls were found on the kitchen floor, lying on sleeping bags, dead of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide. Their mother had put them to bed there. Gasoline had been poured and lit in the hallway and the bedrooms, and the oven stood open with burned items inside it.
Nikolet Amber Nieves was twelve. Rashel Hollie Nieves was eleven. Kristl Dawn Folden was seven. Jaqlene Marie Folden was five. Their brother was fourteen. He got out, and the jury that heard the case convicted his mother of trying to kill him too.
The fire was at the family's house in Saugus, in northern Los Angeles County, on July 1, 1998. Sandi Nieves telephoned the fire service that morning. By the time crews arrived the blaze had burned itself out and she was sitting in the living room with her son, covered in soot. She had also tried to kill herself. She was thirty-five. Her son and two eldest daughters were from her first marriage and the two younger girls from her second, and a third man had just broken up with her for the second time after learning she was pregnant. She had had an abortion a week before the fire and had threatened suicide, and she had written to the boyfriend that she could not live without him.
That last fact is not a footnote. It is the fact the whole case turns on, and both sides built their arguments around it.
The prosecution's case was that she had planned it. She had arranged for the children to sleep together on the kitchen floor rather than in their bedrooms. She had written letters saying she intended to kill herself and her children, and she had driven to the post office to mail them. One, to her second husband, was postmarked the day of the fire and read, "Now you don't have to support any of us!" Then she poured gasoline through the house and set it alight.
Her son, David, testified against her. She took the stand in the San Fernando courthouse and denied killing her daughters. A jury convicted her of four counts of first-degree murder, the attempted murder of her son, and arson. It also found three special circumstances true: that she had committed multiple murders, that each murder was committed while lying in wait, and that each was committed in the course of arson. Lying in wait is a finding of deliberate concealment and waiting. It is the opposite of a finding that a woman had come apart.
She was sentenced to death on October 6, 2000.
What was reported about her motive at the time, and what has been repeated since, is that she told police she killed her children to get even with the men in her life. That is a police account of something she is said to have said. What the documentary record shows is narrower and stranger: letters written before the fire saying she meant to die alongside her children, and a woman who survived when they did not.
It took the Supreme Court of California twenty-one years to review the case, and when it did, the problem was not the evidence. It was the judge.
L. Jeffrey Wiatt had been appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court bench in 1993. Over the course of the trial, in front of the jury, he made disparaging and sarcastic remarks about the public defender representing Nieves. He told him he was wasting the court's time. He called one of his questions ridiculous. He sanctioned him and cited him for contempt in the jurors' presence, and then told the jurors he had fined the man for misconduct. During the penalty phase he reprimanded and belittled a defense witness who was not an expert and had no reason to be handled that way. He openly doubted the credibility of a defense expert.
And he barred a psychologist from telling the jury anything about Sandi Nieves's mental health.
On May 3, 2021, in People v. Nieves, the court affirmed her convictions and the special circumstances and reversed her death sentence. Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote the opinion and six justices joined it. It was unanimous.
The reasoning drew a line through the middle of the trial. The judge's open disdain for the defense, the court wrote, lent credence to the prosecution's argument that she was manipulative and deceitful, the very traits it had pressed to justify death. Given the letters, the trip to the post office, the sleeping bags on the kitchen floor and the gasoline, the court held the misconduct could not have changed the jury's finding of guilt. It could not say the same about the penalty phase. A jury deciding whether a woman should live had watched her lawyer being fined, watched her witnesses being belittled, and been prevented from hearing a psychologist explain her mind.
It was the court's first reversal in a capital case since it set aside Scott Peterson's death sentence in August 2020. In the interval it had upheld eight death sentences, every one of them unanimously.
Judge Wiatt did not live to read the opinion. He shot himself in 2005, five years after the trial, while under investigation for alleged child abuse.
What Sandi Nieves is serving now is not established. The 2021 ruling left Los Angeles County free to seek a death sentence again at a fresh penalty trial. The district attorney at the time, George Gascón, had a standing policy against seeking death, and contemporary reporting expected her to be resentenced to life without parole, but that was a forecast rather than an outcome, and no record of a resentencing hearing or a sentence imposed has surfaced since. What can be said is that she stands convicted of four murders and that the sentence which replaced her death sentence is unknown.
She was one of twenty-three women under sentence of death in California, held at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla, and she was fifty-seven when the judgment came down. In practical terms the sentence was never going to be carried out: California has executed nobody since 2006 and the governor imposed a moratorium in 2019.
American appellate courts set aside death sentences fairly often, and when they do it is almost always because of what the lawyers did or failed to do. This one was set aside for what the judge did, in front of the jury, repeatedly, and the state's highest court said so in terms. The verdicts he presided over still stand.