When the news broke in mid-May that Margaret Rudin’s conviction for the December 1994 murder of her husband Ron Rudin had been vacated by a federal judge, I couldn’t help but cheer for her.

Not because Rudin was an innocent woman wrongly accused, but because she was the victim of a level of courtroom incompetence that remains hard for me to describe even more than two decades after I covered the trial as a newspaper columnist.

The facts against her were damning, but Rudin’s defense attorney Michael Amador was an abject abomination and an embarrassment to the bar. Amador was the Las Vegas legal community’s embodiment of Shakespeare’s Parolles, the overdressed fake of whom it was said, “The soul of this man is in his clothes.”

From his meandering mashup of an opening statement, a three and a half-hour run-on riddled with self-aggrandizement and digressions that ended with him almost asleep, to his jaw-dropping lack of daily trial preparation, Amador was so off-kilter that some courtroom observers and Rudin herself believed he was on drugs. The chair the preening, scatterbrained Amador sat on could have done a better job defending the woman.

At one point, even he knew it. I recall writing that Amador was so pained he resembled a trapped animal trying to chew off his paw to escape his fate.

District Judge Joe Bonaventure, a respected jurist with a no-nonsense pugnacity, gave Amador daily verbal thrashings from the bench and threatened to halt the trial, which served to further alienate him from Rudin’s jury, but for 10 weeks the debacle rolled on.

Bonaventure made adjustments, propping up Amador with veteran defense attorneys Tom Pitaro and John Momot, but failed to protect the defendant from a laughable level of ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge would have no one to blame but himself for failing to protect the defendant’s right to a fair trial, and twice rejected calls for a mistrial.

Rudin, who hadn’t helped her case by going on the lam for two years following her 1997 indictment, was convicted of first-degree murder on May 1, 2001. Bonaventure rejected a motion for a new trial and sentenced Rudin to two life sentences with the possibility of parole.

She served 20 years and maintained her innocence. Year after year she watched in frustration as her appeal was fumbled from one attorney and courtroom to the next.

It wasn’t as if her appeal suffered from too few legal grounds. In his 2003 effort before the Nevada Supreme Court, the capable defense attorney Craig Creel called the trial in Bonaventure’s courtroom “the singular worst example of a criminal trial I have ever seen.” I suspect Bonaventure will seethe for the rest of his life over the pounding Creel gave his judicial legacy before the state’s high court.

Despite arguing that the case was irreparably damaged by 27 separate errors, any one of which were grounds for a mistrial, the high court failed to stop a miscarriage of justice in 2003, voting 4 to 2 to uphold the conviction. Only Justices Bob Rose and Bill Maupin dissented, noting Amador’s obvious incompetence and “substantial conflict of interest with his client” that he created when he carved out an agreement for the film rights to her story.

Eventually, fate dealt Margaret Rudin a winning card in the form of attorney M. Greg Mullanax. While researching another legal matter, in September 2014 he came across the Rudin case on the Ninth Circuit website that piqued his interest. When he read the facts contained in the court’s decision, and learned that Rudin’s case could not be retried because of all the appeal deadlines that had been missed, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“They basically said, her appeal could not go forward because the attorneys had screwed everything up,” Mullanax recalled in a recent interview.

He vowed to do something about it if he could. When the Ninth Circuit amended its opinion, giving Rudin a chance for appeal, Mullanax jumped on it. He was a criminal trial veteran, but had never actually handled a criminal case appeal. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he said. “It took a lot of work. I had to learn this from nothing, basically.”

He proved a quick study who had no lack of motivation.

“This case just pissed me off,” the attorney said. “It really bothered me. So, that’s why I got involved in the case. I just couldn’t believe that no one cared. This was unbelievable. I mean, what if this was your mother stuck in this? I had no idea it was going to end up being like this.”

The appeal continued even after Rudin won parole in 2019. In rare interviews, she maintained her innocence.

On May 15, U.S. District Court Judge Richard F. Boulware issued a rapier 68-page decision that reported what ought to have been obvious from the start: that Amador’s incompetence robbed Rudin of her right to a fair trial. The decision started a 30-day clock that gives the Clark County district attorney’s office the option of appealing Boulware’s decision or calling for a new trial.

In vacating her conviction, the judge did not make a determination of her guilt or innocence. He did, however, focus solely on Amador’s awful performance. If the state appeals, it would need to argue the realistically inarguable: that his behavior was somehow still good enough.

“I think it would be ridiculous because she’s already served her time,” Mullanax said.

Would Rudin have prevailed over the troubling facts had she enjoyed professional counsel from the outset of her case? I wouldn’t have bet on it at the time, but thanks to the carnival in district court it will always be impossible to say with certainty.

The butchery of the erratic blowhard Amador, the failure of Bonaventure to draw a hard line, and all the ensuing chaos cost her 20 years of freedom.

It would serve no justice but the jester to drag Margaret Rudin back into court.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in Time, Readers Digest, The Daily Beast, Reuters, Ruralite and Desert Companion, among others. He also offers weekly commentary on Nevada Public Radio station KNPR.