Patience

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This episode contains descriptions of miscarriage.

Please use discretion.

Patience hears a knock at the door.

She goes to open it, and there are a bunch of sheriff's deputies and police officers standing at the door.

Several of them are wearing sort of full, like SWAT-looking gear.

They've got tactical vests on.

In May of 2018, a 26-year-old woman named Patience Russo was living in a town in rural Nevada called Winnemucca.

A few months earlier, she and her two young children had moved in with a man who'd offered them a place to stay.

It was a Saturday morning when when a group of officers showed up at her door.

Here's reporter Caroline Kitchener.

Her first thought is: you know, they're here for the guy that she's living with.

You know, she figures, you know, maybe he's in some kind of drug trouble.

But then, one of the officers started asking patients about something she posted on Facebook earlier that month.

And

she realizes that they're here for her.

About a month earlier, patience had had a miscarriage.

Afterwards, she found a miscarriage support group on Facebook that suggested that it could be helpful to name the baby she'd lost.

She decided to call him Abel.

She put up a small cross in the yard to remember him and posted on Facebook about him.

She wrote, quote, I'm so sorry, Abel.

The officers at her door were asking questions about the cross.

At first, she told them the cross was for a cat she buried.

One of the officers was recording everything with a body cam.

Here's audio from that day.

Yeah, if you know anything about me, I've rescued cats here for a while.

Quite some time.

Okay.

And then an officer starts asking patients about the Facebook post.

Well, let me let me explain something to you, okay?

And I see a post on Facebook that says, oh, I'm so sorry, Abel.

That's not something you would put for a cat.

Why would you be sorry?

Why would you be sorry, patients?

I'm not allowed to have personal things in my life.

Seriously?

I had a miscarriage, okay?

Why is having a miscarriage a problem?

Why is this illegal, apparently?

Because I've done nothing wrong.

We don't know how far along you are.

The officer wearing the body cam and speaking in the footage is a sheriff's deputy named Jacqueline Mitcham.

In the body cam footage, Jacqueline Mitchum and another officer continue speaking with patients, asking her questions about how far along she was, whether or not she currently has a job.

What are we doing?

Can we go?

Can we stop this?

Nope.

Why?

Because we have a search warrant.

We need to stay right where you are, okay?

So what are you searching for?

We're going to search in the

house and we're going to search where the cross is.

Okay.

Okay.

Later in the footage, Deputy Mitchum walks away from the house towards another officer holding a bucket and a shovel.

He's standing near a small wooden cross.

Did you see them going towards the cross?

I mean, what did you see?

I watched him walk over there and I watched him dig him up and then

unwrap him

and then carry him into the van.

And were they telling you what law you had broken?

No.

I'm Phoebe Judge.

This is criminal.

Months earlier, in December of the previous year, Patience hadn't had a place to live.

She was living out of her car, trying to figure out how to take care of her two young children.

She met a man at a bar who asked if she wanted to move into his spare bedroom.

She said yes.

Soon after that, in February, Patience found out she was pregnant.

She was worried that if the man found out, he'd kick her out and she'd have to live in her car again.

The baby wasn't his.

Abortion is legal in Nevada, so patients decided to get one.

I mean,

I didn't want to have another kid

because I couldn't offer the ones I had a very good life at the moment.

I

called the abortion clinic in Reno

and tried to make an appointment.

I was unable to get to Reno

and let alone afford the cost of it.

Patience didn't have a working car and Reno is about a two and a half hour drive away from Winnemaca.

There wasn't a closer option.

Neither Patience nor the man she lived with had much money.

At one point, Patience had to sell the tires on her car.

She says she didn't have a working phone.

The man she lived with eventually became her boyfriend.

Patience remembers he spent a lot of time smoking meth, and he would try to get her to join him.

She says she tried to resist, but sometimes she'd give in.

When she couldn't get Jorino for an abortion, she says she tried to figure something else out.

I read online that if you took

an excessive amount of cinnamon, that it would

naturally, without causing any harm,

cause an abortion.

There are some websites and forums talking about cinnamon and miscarriage where people suggest that cinnamon is a natural way to end a pregnancy.

But there is no scientific evidence that this is true.

Patients took the cinnamon capsules for a month.

Then she stopped.

She says she couldn't stand the taste, and nothing happened.

Around 1 a.m.

on April 21st, patients woke up with an intense pain in her back.

And I I couldn't breathe.

So I kind of

like smacked the back of my my rib cage here,'cause sometimes it makes it easier to breathe'cause I have issues with my back and ribs.

And that didn't work.

So I went into the bathroom and took a shower.

And that's when I noticed I was

bleeding really bad.

Um

and I sat in the shower and cried for

for a little while.

Patience didn't want the man she was living with to come in and realize what was going on.

He still didn't know she was pregnant.

So I got dressed quickly and ran out to the porch

trying to hide from him.

And that's

when I ended up

having Abel.

Did you know immediately that

there was no life?

Yeah.

I I tried um giving him CPR.

I

I tried it I tried everything I could think of.

I couldn't get any any movement out of him.

And then what did you do?

I ran to the garage and to where all of my stuff was in boxes

and I found

some blankets and a towel and a teddy

stuffed monkey.

And I wrapped him up

and and I went and buried

him and put a cross up.

We'll be right back.

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After she had a miscarriage in the middle of the night, Patience Russo decided not to call 911.

She says she didn't feel like she needed to go to the hospital and didn't want to leave her kids.

Patience says she kept what happened to herself until she found the support group on Facebook and wrote her post about Abel.

And that Facebook post is what ultimately makes its way through a couple of different people to the sheriff's deputy.

Deputy Jacqueline Mitchum and Patience already knew each other.

Winnemaka is a very small town, and they took their kids to the same babysitter.

Jack Mitchum actually was friends, you know, quite good friends with the babysitter, and they would often talk about patients.

You know, the babysitter spent a lot of time with Patience's kids.

So, you know, she would sort of confide in Jack Mitchum and talk to her about kind of

what was going on with patients, sort of how often she was taking care of patients' kids.

And I think there was a lot of conversation about Patience's parenting.

About a month after Patience had the miscarriage, the babysitter told Jacqueline she thought Patience had been pregnant and gotten rid of her baby.

She showed Jacqueline a picture where Patience looked visibly pregnant and a picture of the wooden cross.

Jacqueline told reporter Caroline Kitchener that the photos made her think about her own baby.

She had a one-year-old son.

She told me in that moment looking at those photos, she felt

very confident that this baby had actually been born alive and that patients had killed it.

Now, I think we need to pause and say that there's no evidence that that is the case, but that is

I think it's important to say because it's what she felt and she had a she just had a real conviction about it.

You know, having no evidence, she still felt very strongly that that is what had happened.

And that conviction was what drove her to really pursue the case, even when

multiple people kind of told her to leave it be.

But why did why did she think that?

Why didn't she believe that this could have just been a miscarriage?

I can't say exactly why she felt that.

When I interviewed her, she just said

she kind of felt it in her bones for whatever reason.

For Deputy Mitchum, who was also a mother of young children,

this all just felt very personal.

And it felt very emotional.

And

she really, you know, quite early on in this case, started to see

this

fetus or this baby that patients had lost as her own in a way and felt a lot of ownership over the case for that reason.

But there were people telling her to let it be, to not pursue this.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, her first thing that she did when she got these photographs was to drive, you know, right to the sheriff's office and go to her superior and her superior superior and say, you know, I've got these.

We got to get a warrant.

We got to get a warrant right now.

And both of the guys above her said,

no, you know, you don't have enough for a warrant.

And so she actually goes around those two guys.

And she told me that she called the district attorney herself and said, you know, I...

I really, I really think I need to get a warrant for this.

And she then went to find another detective who she thought would be more sympathetic to this case.

And he was willing to sit down with her her and write up a warrant.

We reached out to Jacqueline Mitcham for the story, but she declined to comment.

After she and the other officers dug up the remains, they brought them to the medical examiner.

The medical examiner determined that patients' pregnancy had ended in the third trimester between about 28 and 32 weeks.

Was there any evidence that the fetus had been alive at birth?

No, there was not.

And that was something that really kind of came up again and again.

Was this fetus, you know, or baby, was it born alive?

And there was never any evidence that was found to show that it was.

Which meant Deputy Mitchum couldn't charge patients with murder.

And so,

you know, Deputy Mitchum talked with the other detective, Detective Walls, about, you know, other kinds of charges that they might pursue.

And it was actually Detective Walls that found this very unique and obscure 1911 law.

And that law is titled Taking Drugs to Terminate Pregnancy.

Basically saying that you can't terminate a pregnancy on your own.

Four days after the police showed up at Patience's home, they brought her in for questioning.

They

told me I wasn't under arrest.

They just wanted to talk.

So they took me through a locked door and then through a second locked door into a conference room

and Officer Mitchum

detective walls I think was his name

and

another officer were in the room and they shut the door

and they made it sound like they they truly cared

and I truly didn't believe I'd done anything that wrong

so I told them everything that happened

and as soon as I was done talking

Mitchum told me to stand up and put my hands behind my back and that she was arresting me

Patience Russo was arrested and charged with manslaughter, as well as a lesser charge of concealing a birth.

Although abortion is legal in Nevada, the 1911 law the detectives found prohibits what Caroline Kitchener calls self-managed abortions.

The law says that if someone tries to have an abortion after 24 weeks by using, quote, any drug, medicine, or substance, or any instrument or other means, and succeeds in ending the pregnancy, they can be charged with manslaughter.

Nevada is the only state with a law like this.

Here's Caroline.

And so they need to prove that she took some action that ended her pregnancy, and that she did that with the intention of ending her pregnancy.

So there's a lot of talk about patients' drug use, and patients was a drug user.

She did smoke quite a bit of weed, and then

there was some evidence that she had also been smoking meth.

But the only thing that she did with the purpose of trying to end her pregnancy was ingesting the cinnamon.

But it's unclear, you know, there's no kind of scientific link between cinnamon and having a miscarriage.

At a preliminary hearing, Deputy Jacqueline Mitcham claimed that patients told her she smoked marijuana every day in an attempt to have a miscarriage.

But Caroline says there's no record of patients telling the police she used either meth or marijuana to try to end her pregnancy.

If she was found guilty, patients could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.

She says she was worried about what would happen to her children.

Her public defender made a deal.

If she pleaded guilty, the prosecutor would recommend a lighter sentence, probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail.

She says her public defender told her it was her best bet, so she agreed.

While she waited for a sentencing hearing, she got out on bail.

It seemed like everyone in town knew about what had happened.

She remembers that once at a grocery store, some teenage boys yelled at her, calling her baby killer, and chased after her.

I was messaged

all the time, being told to go kill myself,

and it became a lot for me to handle.

In a court filing, Patience's lawyer wrote:

Winds of prejudice have arisen.

A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the city of Winnemucca.

We'll be right back.

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Patience Russo's sentencing hearing was on May 7th, 2019, nearly a year after her arrest.

Because of the deal she had made with the prosecutor, she expected to be sentenced to probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail.

But the judge sentenced her to between two and a half and eight years in prison.

She was taken to the Florence McClure Women's Correctional Center in Las Vegas, about a seven-hour drive from Winnemucca.

Between her arrest and her sentencing, patients had started seeing someone new, and they got married.

Her kids stayed with her husband when she went to prison.

And what was prison like for you?

It was awful.

When I first got there, one of the other girls had gotten a hold of my paperwork

and spread it throughout the prison.

And what is it like to be in a in a women's prison with the charge that you had?

You get treated

like you're the worst of the worst.

I had one lady threaten to

pull me off my bunk and

beat me with locks and a sock until I was not breathing anymore.

She says she tried to talk on the phone with her kids as much as she could.

They'd ask her when she was coming home.

And then, about a year into her sentence, patients got a phone call.

I honestly thought it was a joke at first.

Why?

Because it was too good to be true.

The call was from a lawyer named Laura Fitzsimmons.

What did she say?

That she believed in me.

And what did she want to do?

She wanted me to get free, to go home with my kids.

She believed I was innocent.

Laura Fitzsimmons had been a criminal defense lawyer.

By the time she reached out to patients, she was retired, but was still involved in abortion rights in Nevada.

In 1990, she helped pass a referendum to keep abortion legal in the state.

One of the reasons abortion is still legal in Nevada, even after Roe v.

Wade was overturned.

Laura first heard about Patience's case when an acquaintance from Planned Parenthood reached out.

And she called me and she said, I just heard there's a woman in prison for terminating her own own pregnancy.

And I said, well, that can't be.

Laura started reading about Patience.

She learned about Patience's background, that she'd been physically abused by her father as a young child and had her first kid at 16.

She'd been physically and sexually abused by boyfriends over the years.

Laura read the case files about Patience's miscarriage and about the 1911 law.

She's the only person, as far as we can tell, and we've really searched for it, that was ever prosecuted under this statute.

Nevada is a very pro-choice state, but we're the same state, the only state in the country that has a statute that subjects a woman to imprisonment for her own pregnancy outcome.

After Roe v.

Wade was overturned, many states put abortion laws into place that can punish doctors and other people who help facilitate abortions, but not the people getting abortions.

In any case, when Laura read Patience's case files, she realized the 1911 law shouldn't even apply to her.

Laura started gathering witnesses that could testify on Patience's behalf, the medical examiner, doctors, and other medical experts, and Patience's public defender.

Part of Lohr's argument was that the public defender hadn't done his job properly, that he shouldn't have told patients to plead guilty.

And at a hearing in front of a judge, the public defender agreed.

And he acknowledged that he, you know, he didn't do what he should have done, which is pretty remarkable because lawyers have egos, and that doesn't happen very often.

It was extremely impressive.

The public defender said, quote,

I fall on the sword.

Patience wasn't allowed to be at the hearing, but she watched it from prison on a TV monitor.

The coroner was my first witness, and she said, listen, you know, nothing, I can't say,

as a medical professional, that anything patience did or everything she did, smoking pots, smoking meth, you know, taking cinnamon, none of that led to this pregnancy outcome.

Another witness was this incredible

OBGYN.

So he testified, and it was just a mind-blower.

He said, listen, this pregnancy outcome most likely came

from other factors in her life, such as trauma, such as all this stuff.

you know, no matter how much you point your finger at this woman and criticize her,

no court of of law could conclude that she caused this miscarriage.

About a month later, the judge made his decision.

And he writes this really emotional 40-page decision.

He says, 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.

And he describes Patience's Patience's case as a, quote, total miscarriage of justice.

The judge vacated Patience's conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel.

Bora called to tell Patience the news and was there to meet her when she got out on July 8th, 2021.

She'd been in prison for just over two years.

And I, you know, was waiting outside the prison gates and she walked walked out.

And that was the first time that I'd ever seen her.

Laura's, she's awesome.

If I could have a second mom, it would be her.

She's

extremely understanding, but she's tough when she needs to be,

even when she knows I don't want to hear it.

Laura and Patience flew from Las Vegas to Reno, and then Patience drove home.

What was it like seeing

your kids again?

It was great.

They had grown so much in the two and a half years.

Patience and her kids left Winnemaca and moved to South Dakota to live with Patience's mother.

So was that it?

Case closed?

It was over?

Oh, gosh, no.

Are you kidding?

Sorry.

You can tell I'm still really angry about this.

Because the judge had vacated the conviction on the grounds that Patience's public defender hadn't done his job correctly, the district attorney still had the power to retry Patience.

For years, the possibility of being called back to Winnemaka to stand trial hung over Patience's head.

In 2022, Patience had another child.

She considered getting an abortion, but in the end, decided not to.

I know from my conversations with her that she,

Abel really,

he has stayed with her, and

I think she felt like she needed to have this baby in some ways

because of Abel.

When she first got out of prison, Patience didn't know where Abel's remains were.

It wasn't until Caroline Kitchner wrote a story about patients for The Washington Post and interviewed Jacqueline Mitcham that she found out.

Abel's ashes were on a shelf in Deputy Mitcham's home.

The remains had been cremated at a local funeral home, and with patients in prison went unclaimed.

So Deputy Mitcham told the funeral director everything that had happened and said, I'm taking him.

That's my baby.

The funeral director said, okay.

When Caroline Kitchener asked Deputy Mitcham about it, she said that she was the only one who ever loved Abel.

Laura Fitzsimmons is working on getting Abel's ashes back to return them to Patience.

She spent years trying to get Patience's case closed for good.

And in April of this year, almost four years after Patience got out of prison, the judge who originally sentenced her issued a ruling.

He said, I'm dismissing this case with prejudice.

You don't have any evidence that can show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's over.

It means

they can't touch me.

Patience and Laura stay in touch.

They talk on the phone every Tuesday.

For a while, Patience lived with her mother in western South Dakota, but she and her kids recently moved across the state to Sioux Falls.

It's a bigger city than Patience is used to.

But she says it's worth it for her kids to have more to do.

They like to go to the lake and the zoo, and she says they're planning to visit every park in the city, one by one.

Caroline Kitchener's article for The Washington Post is called, She Said She Had a Miscarriage, Then Got Arrested Under an Abortion Law.

We'll have a link in the show notes.

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