SONORA, Calif. — William Nesler stood in a cramped courtroom Monday, a dozen years after his mother gunned down a man accused of molesting him, and admitted no remorse for taking the law into his own hands by murdering a man in a dispute over tools.
Nesler, who had just been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for stomping David Davis to death last summer, told Judge Eric L. Du Temple that "I've done bad things" but that he had been "railroaded" by the criminal justice system.
In a short, rambling monologue, Nesler said he came from a good family, even if his mother, Ellie Nesler, had "killed people in a courtroom for things they done wrong."
Nesler, 23, acknowledged that he was no judge or jury and that he did not know Davis, a 45-year-old father of two.
"A dead man is a dead man," Nesler said in a deep voice. "That's all I really have to say about him."
A second defendant, Dean Phillips, 39, received a similar life sentence for violating the state's three-strikes law. Phillips was convicted of being an accessory after the fact for driving Nesler away from the crime scene, a junk-strewn lot, which is owned by the Nesler clan, north of Sonora, 50 miles east of Stockton.
"I want the defendants to know the agony they've caused," Rita Brown, Davis' mother, told the hushed courtroom. "They've torn the heart from our family."
For Nesler, his sentencing was the latest act in a drama that began in 1993.
That was when his mother entered a courtroom in nearby Jamestown and pumped five bullets into the head of Daniel Driver, a twice-convicted child molester who was accused of molesting 11-year-old Willie at a Christian summer camp.
Her case drew national attention, with some praising her as an avenging parent and others condemning her as a vigilante.
Since then, Willie Nesler, as he is still known, has been in and out of trouble with the law.
He repeatedly landed in juvenile hall and in teenage work camps as a youth and in jail as an adult. In the last five years, deputies have booked him into the county jail 18 times on robbery charges, drug allegations and complaints about a pet Rottweiler.
Outside court, his sister, 19-year-old Rebecca, said Willie Nesler never had a chance in life, his fate sealed by the molestation and subsequent courtroom killing.
"They all think he's a monster," she said. "But the government created him. They've never been there for him. They never, ever once got him help."
