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Chaos reigns on 'Sin City Law'
A gripping new series documents crime and the courts in Nevada. Law & Order, it isn't.
Associated Press
Published September 6, 2007
Sin City Law
The eight-part documentary series premieres at 9 p.m. Monday on the Sundance Channel.
On theWeb: www.sundancechannel.com.
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NEW YORK - This is reality television.
Beau Maestas allegedly plunged a 12-inch butcher knife into two helpless children after a drug sale dispute with the girls' mother. The 3-year-old was killed inside the blood-spattered family trailer, her 10-year-old sister paralyzed when the blade severed her spinal cord.
Maestas now sits on trial for his life.
In another case, Tonya Sue Baker sits in a lawyer's office, unable to fathom why her surrogate son would rather take a lethal injection than snitch on his fellow gang members in the slaying of a 9-year-old girl caught in a crossfire.
"What's this honor (expletive)?" she asks. "Ain't no honor in getting a death penalty for somebody else."
These disturbing cases are happening in Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas and - as noted in the opening credits of the riveting new Sundance Channel series Sin City Law - 40-million annual tourists, 70,000 criminal offenses, thousands of methamphetamine-fueled crimes and 274 gang-related shootings.
It's all real, often too real, and sometimes surreal. And it's another triumph for producers Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier De Lestrade, winners of a 2005 Peabody Award for the eight-part Sundance Channel documentary The Staircase and an Oscar for the 2001 documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning.
Poncet and De Lestrade, with director Remy Burkel, offer a harrowing tour of the Clark County legal system.
Little time is wasted as each episode begins, and there's soon plenty of detail to digest. The first two segments, involving Maestas (Butchered Innocence) and accused killer Pascual Lozano (Skin Tone), open with local news reports providing a quick case synopsis.
The documentary cameras then delve into the stories as seen by various participants: the prosecutors, the public defenders, the killers, the victims, family members, investigators. Courtroom footage appears between behind-the-scenes shots: a shopping trip to outfit a killer for court, blunt discussions between defendants and their lawyers.
Unlike the typical TV crime show, the true-life crime dramas aren't neatly wrapped up - everything is messy, from the crimes to the conclusions.
Judge Donald Mosley, after presiding over the Maestas case, offers this fitting epitaph: "It is a tragedy all around . . . It's just a disaster."
[Last modified September 5, 2007, 17:50:45]
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