She said she had a miscarriage — then got arrested under an abortion law
WINNEMUCCA, Nev. -- When the police showed up at her door, Patience Frazier assumed the officers had come for someone else.
As a woman in uniform started asking her questions on a Saturday morning in May 2018, five men eyed Frazier from the driveway, most in heavy tactical vests, the words “sheriff” and “police” emblazoned on their backs. A few had already fanned out to survey her home’s perimeter, hands on their holsters as if bracing to shoot.
Frazier told the female sheriff’s deputy that her boyfriend wasn’t home, guessing he was in some kind of drug trouble. Then the woman asked about “Abel.”
Standing on the porch steps in socks and black leggings, the 26-year-old had a terrifying realization.
The officers were there for her.
Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show.
“Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?”
Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.
“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f---ing miscarriage?”
Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a broad consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as abortion restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions.
But those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies. Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion - like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder - while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus. In Nevada, Frazier would eventually be charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”
As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional - a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinic and can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions also often occur when women are thought to be relatively far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb.
Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby - culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”
Of all the officers and deputies who could have knocked on her door that spring morning, Frazier couldn’t believe she’d been unlucky enough to draw Jac Mitcham. The two women took their kids to the same babysitter in this small conservative town in the high desert. Every time she and the deputy ran into each other, Frazier recalled thinking, she felt judged, Mitcham’s eyes lingering on her kids’ dirty clothes and runny noses.
“How far along were you?” Mitcham asked. “Were you showing?”
“No, not that I know of,” Frazier said.
“Why is having a miscarriage a problem? Why is this illegal, apparently?”
“Because … we don’t know how far along you were,” Mitcham said.
Mitcham questioned why Frazier chose not to call 911 after the miscarriage, waving off her explanations about a broken down car and no childcare.
“Patience, I know your kids,” Mitcham said. “I would have taken your kids.”
When the interrogation was over, the police walked around the back of the house with a shovel, stopping in front of a small wooden cross.
Frazier watched as they cordoned off the area with yellow stakes and orange string.
Then Mitcham knelt in the dirt and started to dig.
- - -
To Frazier, the positive pregnancy test she got in February 2018 might as well have been an eviction notice. As soon as the man she’d been living with found out she was pregnant with someone else’s baby, she figured, she’d be out of his house, back to living alone, without her kids, in her broken down Saturn coupe.
Frazier and her two young sons had only been living with the new roommate - a man almost 20 years her senior, who would soon become her boyfriend - for two months when she learned about the pregnancy. She’d met him in early December at Mike’s MineShaft, a 24-hour bar with a pole for strip dancing and photos of topless women on the wall. He knew her as the girl who slept in the parking lot.
He was drunk and lonely, she recalled. She was lonely and freezing.
When he asked if she wanted to move into his spare bedroom, Frazier immediately said yes.
Frazier decided that he never had to know about the pregnancy. A few days after she found out, she called a clinic in Reno, Nevada, and scheduled an abortion.
The abortion laws in Nevada, which have not changed since Roe was overturned, allow abortion up to 24 weeks, around the point when a fetus could potentially survive on its own with immediate medical care.
The problem was that Frazier had no working car. Her transmission would overheat anytime she drove more than a few miles. She’d regularly post on Facebook begging friends to give her a ride to the grocery store.
Winnemucca is 2? hours from Reno.
Frazier had her first child at age 16 and left school. After years of abuse by her father - who broke her collarbone and fractured her arm in three places by the time she turned 4 - she repeatedly found herself living with men with similar habits, according to a summary of her statements in a court-ordered psychological evaluation. One ex-boyfriend attacked her and damaged a kidney, she told the psychologist. Another man, she said, raped her while holding her hostage in a trailer. (Frazier’s father could not be reached for comment.)
Frazier had moved to Winnemucca in early 2017 to care for her mother. She always hated the place. An old railroad town at the crossroads of Amtrak’s California Zephyr and Interstate 80, she imagined that everyone who passed through was on their way to somewhere better. She dreamed of one day flying off to see Alaska’s northern lights.
Even after she started dating the man she’d been living with, Frazier felt isolated at her new house, nine miles out of town on a gravel road with spotty cell reception. From the window, all she could see was trailers, sagebrush and 20-foot sand dunes. The neighbor’s dogs barked at her anytime she stepped outside.
Her boyfriend, who did not respond to requests for comment, would spend evenings in his room with his methamphetamine pipe, she said, sometimes pressuring her to join him. And while Frazier tried hard to stay clean for her kids, she said, every once in a while she relented.
She didn’t think to worry about the security camera her boyfriend had positioned beneath his bedroom window.
Without a car or anyone to drive her to Reno, Frazier decided she would try to take care of the pregnancy herself. She wasn’t sure how far along she was - she thought maybe as far as four months. Frazier never saw a doctor or received an ultrasound during her pregnancy, according to police reports and her own recollections. She would later explain to investigators that she only had a few periods a year, making it difficult to even approximate the gestational age of her fetus.
On March 9, Frazier purchased a bottle of cinnamon capsules from a local health food store, receipts show. According to her internet searches, she said, 2000 milligrams of cinnamon a day would help end her pregnancy.
For a month, she ate twice that amount.
There is no evidence to suggest that cinnamon has any effect on pregnancy outcomes, according to several leading medical experts who would later be called to testify in the case.
Frazier felt fine until about 1 a.m. on April 21.
She tried not to wake her boyfriend as she slipped out of bed, her stomach riddled with sharp cramps. Sitting on the toilet, she peeled off her blood-soaked pajama bottoms. A rush of red flowed into the bowl. Then she felt a sudden pressure in her lower pelvis.
Worried that her boyfriend might come into the bathroom, Frazier pulled her pants back on and ran.
She only made it to the porch before she had to squat.
The fetus that dropped into her underwear had perfect facial features, she recalled: a tiny nose and mouth. He wasn’t breathing, she said in subsequent interviews with police - so she laid him down and tried to give him CPR.
“Nothing worked,” she would later tell officials.
Cradling her dead son against her chest, her body wracked with sobs, Frazier finally let herself consider the question she’d been pushing away all night.
Did I cause this?
That question gave way to another.
What do I do with his body?
- - -
Deputy Jac Mitcham was driving in circles around downtown Winnemucca, looking for speeding cars, when her cellphone rang.
It was Elishia Hill, a close friend and former colleague at the sheriffs office, who babysat for both Mitcham and Frazier.
“I have to tell you something,” both women recall Hill saying on the afternoon of May 24, more than a month after Frazier buried Abel. “I think Patience got rid of her baby.”
Hill had told Mitcham all about Frazier. When things got slow at work, the two women would sit together in the dispatch center, trading gossip as they waited for calls to come in, Mitcham said. They talked about their colleagues, their marriages and, occasionally, what they both saw as Frazier’s total inability to care for her children.
By that spring, Hill and her teenage daughter had been babysitting Frazier’s kids regularly for well over a year, Hill said - at first taking them a few days a week, and then for weeks at a time after Frazier moved into her car. Mitcham would see Frazier’s kids at pickup and drop-off.
Whenever Hill would talk about Frazier, Mitcham said, the sheriff’s deputy would commend her devoutly Christian friend for having a “golden heart” - assuring her that anyone else would have called Child Protective Services.
Hill would later say in court that she never saw Frazier abuse her sons or saw any marks on them while they were in her care.
Pulled over on the side of the road in late May, Mitcham listened to Hill recount all she knew about Frazier’s situation. Earlier that spring, Frazier had looked very pregnant. Now her belly was flat and there was no baby. Hill had evidence to back up her suspicions, she said: photos sent to her daughter by Frazier’s mother, who she said was worried about her “grandbaby” but too scared to call the police herself.
Mitcham flipped through the pictures Hill texted as soon as she got off the phone:
Frazier in a hoodie, visibly pregnant.
A red cross planted in the dirt.
The names of Frazier’s three children written in colored chalk on cement, with one more name at the end: “Abel.”
Looking at the pictures, Mitcham said, she immediately thought of her own 1-year-old son asleep in his crib, completely dependent on his mother for protection. How, she wondered, could anyone hurt “such an innocent little angel?”
The medical examiner who would eventually be called to evaluate the remains of Frazier’s fetus found no evidence that a baby was born alive. But before Mitcham had conducted any interviews or examined a single report, she said in a recent interview, she decided that Abel had been born alive and Frazier should be charged with murder.
“She killed her baby,” Mitcham thought as she put her car in drive and turned toward the sheriff’s office.
“She’s a monster.”
In some ways, Frazier reminded Mitcham of her own mother, who she said often left her five children to fend for themselves in a drug-ridden neighborhood in Reno. By age 5, Mitcham said, she knew to duck behind the couch whenever she heard gunshots. By 10, she could make Hamburger Helper for herself and her siblings on nights when her mother wouldn’t come out of her room.
Her mother, who could not be reached for comment, cycled through a string of bad boyfriends, Mitcham said, dabbling in whatever drugs they favored.
After her mom allowed one to cook meth in their garage, Mitcham decided that she would live a very different life from her family - with a job that brought order to the chaos.
“I’m going to be a cop one day,” she told her mother at age 16. “And if you keep this up, I’m going to arrest you.”
When Mitcham arrived at the sheriff’s office in Winnemucca with photos of Frazier’s pregnant belly on her phone, the deputy walked right in to see the undersheriff, Kevin Malone - and told him she thought Frazier had killed her baby. Malone then consulted with one of the lieutenants.
Both men agreed Mitcham did not have enough evidence for a search warrant, she and Malone recalled.
While Mitcham aspired to be a detective, she was still a deputy, one of the lowest-ranking people in the office. She listened to the men explain why the photos did not constitute “probable cause,” the legal standard necessary to secure a warrant. They were citing case law, using dense legal terms like “hearsay” and “reasonable suspicion.”
Mitcham had no time for that, she thought. Not when she believed there was a baby in the ground.
Knowing she could be reprimanded for sidestepping her superiors, Mitcham called one of the district attorneys, who she said encouraged her to file for the warrant. She wasn’t sure how to apply for a warrant herself but called a lead detective she suspected would be passionate about this case: Dave Walls, a devoted father who had been in law enforcement for 20 years.
They wrote the application for the search warrant together, Walls recalled, citing “suspicious circumstances related to a possible unreported birth, death, and clandestine burial of an infant.” By that point, Hill, the babysitter, had sent Mitcham one additional photo: a screenshot of Frazier’s Facebook post apologizing to her son.
“I’ve been holding it in n hiding it but I can’t anymore,” Frazier had written. “I’m so sorry Abel. I’m sorry I’m a horrible person.”
The justice of the peace immediately approved the warrant.
After they conducted the search of Frazier’s home on May 26 - interviewing Frazier on the porch steps and excavating Abel’s remains - Mitcham and Walls tried to figure out how to proceed based on the evidence they had. If they couldn’t prove the baby was alive at birth, they couldn’t charge Frazier with murder. The state’s abortion law doesn’t allow women who seek abortions to be charged. But Walls found another law he thought might work, he recalled: Chapter 200, Section 220 in Nevada’s criminal code, “Taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”
If a woman uses “any drug, medicine or substance, or any instrument or other means” to have an abortion after 24 weeks - and ends the pregnancy as a result - she can be charged with manslaughter, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“We have to find a charge that works,” Walls recalled thinking at the time, also convinced that Frazier had killed a live baby. “She has to be charged with something.”
According to the county’s medical examiner, “Baby Boy Frazier” was “the product of a third trimester pregnancy,” with an estimated gestational age of between 28 and 32 weeks. The medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.
Based on Frazier’s account alone, Walls and Mitcham said they knew the charge they had identified wasn’t a slam dunk. Frazier had admitted to trying to cause a miscarriage by eating cinnamon and “lifting things I wasn’t supposed to be lifting.” But after a few quick internet searches, Mitcham and Walls said, they knew those actions probably didn’t end the pregnancy.
They had to prove she’d done more.
Frazier’s mother, Jaci Armstrong, gave the officials what they felt they needed to arrest her daughter in an interview on May 27. Armstrong, who told The Post that she is staunchly opposed to abortion, told the police that Frazier had tried to end one of her previous pregnancies. She said she felt compelled to speak out, according to police body-cam footage of the exchange, to protect her other grandchildren.
“She was drinking bleach,” said Armstrong, a claim Frazier denies. “She was taking meth, she was doing all kinds of pills. … She said I would be disgusted with her if [I] knew all the ways she tried to eliminate” her son.
Armstrong showed investigators text messages from around the time of that pregnancy, where Frazier said she “tried to miscarry the whole time I knew I was pregnant” by taking pills and “lifting like 100lb bags.”
Mitcham and Walls brought Frazier into the sheriff’s office three days later, sitting her down for an interview that ended with the 26-year-old mother in handcuffs.
After Frazier admitted again to ingesting cinnamon and doing intense physical labor to try to end the pregnancy, Walls said he decided in the moment that they had enough evidence to arrest her on two charges: The 1911 law on taking drugs to end a pregnancy and a second, lesser charge on concealing a birth.
“Can’t I even say goodbye to my own kids?” Frazier asked, sobbing. “Do I have to go to jail? Please.”
“You do,” Mitcham said, her voice calm and flat. “Because what you did was illegal.”
Mitcham said she recognized the dire straits that had led Frazier to this moment. She could imagine how desperate she might feel in the same situation, with three kids she couldn’t care for, living with a man she didn’t trust. The deputy felt sad for her.
But none of that excused what Frazier had done, Mitcham thought. She had no patience for Frazier’s emotional display, which she later likened to a child pretending to cry to get out of trouble. In her view, women should be required to take responsibility for their actions: If you choose to have sex and get pregnant, you have two options. Keep it or give it up for adoption.
Someone would have taken Abel, Mitcham recalled thinking. She would have taken Abel.
Mitcham patted down Frazier’s pockets and unclasped her silver necklace before walking her out to the police vehicle.
Frazier cried all the way to the jail.
Mitcham turned up the radio so she didn’t have to hear it.
- - -
When Frazier arrived at the courthouse for her sentencing, she felt confident that she wouldn’t have to go to prison.
Her public defender had worked out a deal: If she pleaded guilty, the district attorney assigned to Frazier’s case would ask the judge for probation, drug treatment and no more than one year in the county jail.
The prosecutor was true to his word.
“If she can do these things, she will serve herself, she will serve the community, she will pay retribution for her criminal act and she’s not going to just come back here the same mess that she is now,” the prosecutor, Kevin Pasquale, said to the judge during the sentencing hearing on May 7, 2019.
But not everyone agreed. At the hearing, Pasquale clashed with Frazier’s presentence investigation specialist, a Nevada Division of Parole and Probation employee who recommended a prison term of up to 10 years.
The presentence investigation specialist, Debbie Okuma, spoke up as soon as Pasquale finished, asking the judge if she could add “just one thing,” according to a transcript of the hearing. Frazier’s defense attorney had been using the term “fetus.” Okuma said she wanted to call the court’s attention to the autopsy report in the case, which estimated the age of the “male infant” to be between 28 and 32 weeks.
“They used the term infant, not fetus, your honor,” said Okuma, highlighting a common semantic flash point for antiabortion advocates. Okuma declined to comment to The Post.
Sitting in the courtroom in a blouse and new high heels she’d bought for the hearing, Frazier shot a nervous glance at her lawyer - hoping Okuma wouldn’t hold much sway.
She was desperate to finally put this all behind her.
Out on bail in the months before that day’s sentencing hearing, Frazier had felt like an outcast in her small town of 8,000. Her best friend had stopped talking to her. False details about her case swirled around Facebook. The first time she tried to go to the grocery store, she said, a group of teenage boys chased her down the aisle yelling, “baby killer.”
“Winds of prejudice have arisen,” Frazier’s public defender, Matt Stermitz, wrote in a court filing. “A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemucca.”
Frazier wished all the people vilifying her had been around to see all the good things she’d done as a mom: the time she built her kids a playground from a bunch of old tires or helped them paint rocks to hide around town. She wished people knew she’d tried to do what she could for Abel - wrapping him in a bandanna and a towel, swaddled in the arms of her oldest son’s stuffed monkey so he wouldn’t be alone.
Since her arrest, Frazier had sat through several hearings at the courthouse, a large building with Grecian columns and a copy of the Ten Commandments printed on a stone slab out front. Frazier said she often felt frustrated as she listened to the testimony - wondering how many of the questions related to her case.
To charge Frazier under the 1911 abortion law, prosecutors had to prove not only that she did something that prompted a miscarriage, but also that she’d taken that action with the specific intention of ending the pregnancy. Rather than the cinnamon, which has not been linked to miscarriages, in court the lawyers and detectives focused mostly on Frazier’s drug use while she was pregnant, after the toxicology lab found remnants of both marijuana and methamphetamine in Abel’s remains.
A few weeks after Frazier’s arrest, Walls and Mitcham also obtained the home surveillance tapes and images from Frazier’s boyfriend’s bedroom - which showed Frazier smoking what “appears to be a methamphetamine pipe” in February, according to a police report.
While meth use may increase the risk of pregnancy loss - and leading medical associations discourage pregnant women from using both meth and marijuana - there is no evidence to suggest either drug prompted a miscarriage in Frazier’s case, according to the medical examiner and several other experts who would later analyze related records. Frazier said she regularly smoked marijuana and occasionally used meth. She never told investigators that she took either drug to try to end her pregnancy, according to a Post review of recordings and records.
But when Mitcham took the stand at a preliminary hearing, she told the judge the opposite, claiming Frazier told her she was “smoking marijuana every day” to try to miscarry the baby.
When Frazier heard that, she said, she had wanted to stand up and yell, “liar!” Frazier had told her lawyer that Mitcham was “out to get her,” she recalled, describing the way she looked at her - “like she wished I would die or something.” She also told the attorney about the surprisingly personal comment Mitcham had made when she showed up at her house with the search warrant: “I would have taken your kids.”
Stermitz, who declined to comment for this story, did not draw the judge’s attention to Mitcham’s statement about the marijuana, according to a transcript of the proceedings. During his cross-examination of Mitcham at the preliminary hearing, Stermitz never asked about potential bias.
Mitcham said she wasn’t “trying to be deceitful” when she mischaracterized Frazier’s statements. She said she just wanted to make sure the judge knew Frazier had admitted to taking drugs.
As Frazier waited for the judge to issue his sentence in May, Mitcham was sitting in the front row.
The deputy wasn’t required to come to the sentencing, but she thought her presence might send the right kind of message to the judge. She was seven months pregnant at the time - about as far into her pregnancy as Frazier was when she lost Abel, according to the autopsy report.
In the final moments before the ruling, Mitcham stared at the judge while rubbing her belly, she recalled, willing him to see the “life” that Frazier “threw away.”
The judge sentenced Frazier to between 30 months and eight years in prison.
- - -
Almost a year after the sentencing, Mitcham was processing some paperwork at the funeral home when she decided to ask about Abel.
The funeral director pointed her toward the morgue refrigerator - and a small bag labeled “Frazier.”
The remains had never been claimed.
Acting as a deputy coroner - part of her duties with the sheriff’s office - Mitcham authorized the remains to be cremated, recalled the funeral home director.
After that, Mitcham couldn’t get Abel out of her head. She pictured him with brown hair, brown eyes and pudgy cheeks. In her mind, he weighed about eight pounds, she said, a little heavier than her own son had been when he was born. While she tried to imagine Abel alive, sometimes his mangled remains still appeared in her nightmares.
By that point, Mitcham had been promoted from deputy to detective, a change she attributes to the role she played in Frazier’s case. She started calling the funeral home every few weeks with the same question: “Has anyone come for Abel?”
When the ashes were still at the funeral home after two years - the point at which the director said the home can dispose of unclaimed remains - Mitcham decided she had to act.
“I’m taking him,” Mitcham recalled saying to the funeral director. “That’s my baby.”
Mitcham said she was the only one who ever loved him.
The funeral director listened to the detective recount the whole story, Mitcham recalled, then allowed her to take the remains home without question.
Abel’s ashes now sit on a shelf by Mitcham’s front door, in a small wooden box with a blue heart.
Mitcham speaks to Abel every morning before she leaves for work.
“I hope that you and God protect me,” she says to the box as she laces up her leather boots. “I’m going to make sure another baby doesn’t get hurt.”
- - -
Frazier struggled to sleep in the cell with fluorescent lights and bright white walls, she said, her metal bed a few feet away from the toilet.
When she arrived at the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in Las Vegas, rumors of her charges spread through the prison just as quickly as they had in downtown Winnemucca. Within days, she recalled, everyone saw her as the woman who had killed her baby. One inmate, Frazier said, threatened to pull her off her bed in the middle of the night and beat her as punishment for what she’d done.
Almost every day, she said, she’d talk on the phone with her sons, who were living with the man she’d been with since before she went to prison.
“When are you coming home, mommy?” one of them would ask at the end of the call.
“I don’t know, buddy,” she’d tell them. “Not for a while.”
Frazier had been in custody for over a year when her lawyer reached out in the fall of 2020 about a high-profile attorney in Carson City, Nevada, who asked to look into her case.
Laura FitzSimmons had been a lawyer in the state for over 40 years, arguing more than three dozen cases before the Nevada Supreme Court. She’d helped wage several legal battles over abortion in Nevada and learned about Frazier’s case from the political director of Planned Parenthood.
At first, Frazier wasn’t sure what to think. When they spoke on the phone for the first time, FitzSimmons told her she believed she’d been wrongly imprisoned, then recounted a string of abortion rights victories dating back to 1990. Frazier wasn’t sure what all that had to do with her case. But if this woman really wanted to help her, she wasn’t going to say no.
Eight months later, Frazier was sitting in a visitation room, watching FitzSimmons argue for her freedom on a 30-inch TV. Appearing before a judge newly assigned to the proceeding, FitzSimmons said her plea should be withdrawn and the conviction set aside because Frazier’s previous attorney had not provided her with adequate representation. She never should have been advised to plead guilty, FitzSimmons said.
Frazier couldn’t believe the array of experts FitzSimmons had assembled to testify on her behalf. There was a professor of pathology from Kentucky. An OB/GYN in Washington, D.C. The president-elect of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
It was scientifically impossible to determine what caused the miscarriage, they said, which could have occurred for a whole host of reasons, including malnutrition, other underlying health issues or Frazier’s methamphetamine use. Even if methamphetamine had caused the miscarriage, FitzSimmons emphasized that prosecutors never demonstrated that Frazier smoked meth with the intention of ending her pregnancy - essential to proving her guilt under the 1911 law.
Stermitz, the public defender, who agreed to testify at the hearing, acknowledged that he would probably approach the case differently if he was to try it again.
“I fall on the sword,” he said.
The judge issued his ruling on June 28, 2021: Frazier’s conviction was set aside based on ineffective assistance of counsel.
She was free to go home.
“Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system,” Judge Charles McGee wrote in an emotional 40-page decision, describing Frazier’s case as a “total miscarriage of justice.”
The emotional intensity of the abortion issue subtly propelled Frazier’s case from the start, the judge said later in an interview with The Post.
By taking up Frazier’s case, he said, the prosecutor in Winnemucca was able to send a clear message to the antiabortion constituents who elected him: “We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff here in cowboy country.”
Pasquale - the prosecutor who argued at Frazier’s sentencing, now Winnemucca’s lead district attorney - said McGee was “absolutely dead wrong.”
“I never viewed it as an abortion rights case,” he said. “The law is no different in Winnemucca than it is in Reno.”
After two years in custody, Frazier walked out of prison on July 8. With FitzSimmons by her side, she ate a steak and lobster dinner that night, then called her sons to say she would see them soon.
Frazier now lives with her kids in a trailer home in South Dakota. She had another baby a year after her release, a boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. When she found out she was pregnant, she’d wrestled for weeks with whether to have an abortion; everyone told her that was the right decision. But ultimately, Frazier said, she couldn’t go through with it.
Abel’s face just kept flashing through her mind.
While she struggles to pay her bills with the money she makes bartending, Frazier said, she can’t resist buying any little thing that might make her littlest boy smile. A model car big enough to ride in. A raised bed for growing tomatoes. Mini monster trucks in every shape and color.
More than anything, she said, she wants to be a good mom.
Frazier’s sons don’t know their mother’s case is still open. If the prosecutor decides to retry her, she could be sent back to prison.
The district attorney refused in subsequent hearings to allow Frazier to plead out on a lesser charge, something the judge proposed which would have closed the case for good. FitzSimmons tried once more to get closure for Frazier, asking the Nevada Supreme Court to declare the 1911 law unconstitutional. But last year the court refused to rule on the statute.
Lying in bed in her new home, Frazier often worries about the call she might one day get from FitzSimmons, letting her know that she has to return to that desert town she hoped to never see again.
In a recent interview with The Post, Pasquale said he stands behind his decision not to close the case. While he’s not inclined to retry Frazier anytime soon, he said, he reserves the right to change his mind.
“There’s still a body,” he said.
“You have to keep your options open.”
- - -
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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