Thursday, March 29, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.
In 1993, a Las Vegas man named Robert Hays was convicted on eight counts of sexually abusing his 8-year-old daughter. Sentencing him to four consecutive life terms, the system declared: Case closed.
Yet after 15 years in prison, after several appeals were rejected, Hays was freed last week when a federal judge ruled he was not guilty.
Hays had been victimized by every major participant in his trial, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt said.
The prosecutor repeatedly bent the law to ensure victory, Hunt wrote. Hays' public defender made several elementary blunders, any one of which could have caused him to be found guilty.
The trial judge gravely erred by not allowing a hearing on what was a "clear conflict of interest" between Hays and his defender. And the lead Metro Police detective, Hunt ruled, may have lied several times on the stand, including about whether Hays ever actually confessed.
Not only is "Hays innocent of the charges against him," Hunt wrote in his 31-page March 22 order, but "his criminal prosecution was wrought with constitutional violations so egregious, resulting in consequences so grave, and incarceration so lengthy, that Mr. Hays is entitled to immediate and unconditional release."
In other words, said Chris Mears, Hays' civil attorney : "This really was a perfect storm of failure. There wasn't a single aspect of the judicial system that didn't fail him. As a result, he lost 15 years of his life."
Hays was released from prison Friday, a day after Hunt signed the order, and is staying at his mother's house in Las Vegas.
But on the advice of Mears, a Costa Mesa, Calif., lawyer, Hays isn't talking. Mears said he will file a civil suit against the chief deputy district attorney in the case, Thomas Moreo, Deputy Public Defender Drew Christensen, and perhaps others.
According to court papers, Hays, now 47, his wife, Karen, and their five young children moved from Brooklyn to Las Vegas in 1991. Hays worked a graveyard shift security job at a casino in Primm, then called State Line. Karen worked a different shift at a nearby casino.
Theirs was not a happy marriage. At the time of the 1993 trial, Karen was pregnant with another man's child. Perhaps more significant , witnesses have testified in various court proceedings that Karen was an abusive and neglectful mother. Most of that abuse fell on Jennifer, the couple's oldest child.
Ultimately, Hunt wrote, Karen hatched a plot to rid herself of her whole family.
"In order to be free of them all, Karen set in motion a most insidious plan to break the bonds that held her," Hunt wrote. "Karen schooled and coached 8-year-old Jennifer about adult sexual behavior and then threatened and coerced her into making accusations of sexual abuse against her father."
The plan worked. On Aug. 12, 1992, Hays was charged with four counts of sexual assault of a minor under 14, and four counts of lewdness with a minor.
Hays and his daughter each testified before District Judge J. Charles Thompson in Clark County. She said Hays had raped and otherwise abused her. He vehemently denied the accusations.
A nurse practitioner who was described as an expert in child sex abuse cases, Rene McClymont, testified that she found physical signs on Jennifer that suggested that repeated sexual intercourse had taken place.
Hays was convicted on all counts in June 1993 and was sentenced to four terms of life in prison and four additional terms of four years each on the remaining counts, to run consecutively. He served most of his time at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Northern Nevada.
Over those years, Hays filed requests for a new trial and habeas corpus petitions, which argue that he was being wrongly held. These included appeals that went to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Hunt says so many things had gone wrong for Hays during and after the trial that it should have been clear an injustice had been done.
Hays, through Assistant Federal Public Defender Lori Teicher, made 19 claims in the habeas petition, any one of which, Teicher argued, should have called for Hays' release.
Hunt agreed. Of the 19 claims Hays presented, the judge ruled that 15 were valid. Hunt found that:
No tape or transcript of the call was ever found.
Now a senior judge, Thompson declined to comment . Jacobsen, now retired, could not be reached.
Moreo also declined to comment, other than to note that his office, along with the state attorney general, who argued the state's case before Hunt, are weighing whether to appeal the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the state decides to appeal, and if the appeals court then overturns and vacates Hunt's order, Hays could be returned to prison to serve out his sentence, Senior Deputy Attorney General David Neidert said.
The state has 30 days to decide whether to appeal.
Neidert said he respected Hunt, and added that he believed Moreo was not considered a rogue prosecutor and that he did his job to the best of his ability.
The difference in their conclusions, Neidert said, is simply that Hunt decided to believe Jennifer's recantation. "Once he believed that," he said, "then he believed that Hays was wrongly convicted, and that pushed everything along."
Neidert would not say that he believed prosecutors were wrong to bring the case.
"The family dynamics were such that this was something that was looked at," Neidert said, referring to the possibility that Jennifer was pressured into making a false claim. "Although ultimately, you don't want to tell victims who come forward that the crime never occurred."
Christensen, who still works in the public defender's office, said in hindsight, he probably would have made different decisions. "At the time, I did my best. I did what I could," he said. Christensen said he was new to the office at the time, and the Hays case was one of his first .
He said he was proudly aggressive on some matters, such as when he heard about Jennifer's recantation - just after the trial ended. He immediately filed a motion for a new trial. "We made the motion and the judge denied it," he said.
Christensen's boss, Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn, acknowledged that the case "was a failure on so many levels." But he defended Christensen's role, and added that some policies had changed since that allow his deputies to more zealously represent their clients. For example, now, defenders are prepared to pay for expert witnesses when warranted. That was not the policy then, Kohn said.
Federal public defender Teicher said she worked on Hays' habeas petition for three years. After she heard the news last week that her client would be freed, she and several colleagues whooped with joy.
"He didn't do easy time," said Teicher, who said he was housed at Lovelock in a unit for sex offenders.
Since Hays ' release, Teicher said, he has watched a sunrise, taken several long walks, caught up with his kids and met a new grandson.
"I can't imagine," Teicher said about Hays feelings. "I spent all weekend trying to imagine, and I can't."
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