A rural Nevada county has paid $1.6 million to settle claims brought by a woman who was convicted of manslaughter after miscarrying a baby and who served two years in prison before her conviction was overturned.
Patience Rousseau was 26 years old and living in Winnemucca when she miscarried in 2018. She was convicted under a Nevada law, put on the books in 1911, that makes it illegal to take drugs to end a pregnancy after the 24th week. Civil rights lawyers and abortion rights advocates say the statute is the only law like it nationwide and unfairly targets women who want to end a pregnancy.
Rousseau says the money from Humboldt County is welcome but not enough to make up for years of trauma. She wishes the county had been forced to pay more.
"They fought so much to avoid paying me," said Rousseau. "I went through so much and so did my children, who are still facing these issues. It's not fair."
Rousseau told The Nevada Independent her life was turned upside down by the nearly decade-long ordeal. Already suffering from depression and substance abuse before her miscarriage, in its aftermath she was labeled a "baby killer," sent to prison and separated from her young children for more than two years before her conviction was tossed out for ineffective assistance of counsel.
"The trauma of all of it was pretty horrendous," said Paola Armeni, the Las Vegas-based civil rights attorney representing Rousseau. Armeni likened Rousseau's treatment after her miscarriage to being attacked by a lynch mob, "all the while under a statute that was on the books before women were even allowed to vote in Nevada."
Her lawyers say the money is a final act of justice in a case that should have never existed. They submitted a demand letter to Humboldt County in March, outlining their view that the county had broken state law, violated Rousseau's state and federal constitutional rights and intentionally inflicted emotional distress upon her. The settlement was finalized in early August and the money was received last week.
Roughly $1.2 million of the settlement is reserved for Rousseau, who now lives in South Dakota with three sons, aged 4, 7 and 9. She said she will use the money to finance her house, buy her mom a car and open a store selling rare aquatic plants and animals — she's an animal lover who owns five dogs and three cats.
The rest of the money will go to pay lawyers and to repay the state of Nevada for a $100,000 settlement it awarded Rousseau in February.
The settlement money was paid by the Nevada Public Agency Insurance Pool, an entity that provides liability coverage to a variety of rural counties and represented Humboldt County throughout the mediation process. Agreeing to settle does not mean Humboldt County admits any wrongdoing, said Armeni.
The Nevada Public Agency Insurance Pool did not immediately return a request for comment. Humboldt County District Attorney Kevin Pasquale, who prosecuted Rousseau in the case, wrote in response to an email from The Indy, "What settlement is she talking about?" He did not return a request for clarification.
Rousseau's case attracted nationwide attention after The Washington Post ran a feature story on it in 2024. The story reported that following Rousseau's miscarriage, the ashes of her infant's remains came into the possession of one of the Humboldt County officers who arrested her, deputy sheriff Jacqueline Mitcham. When Mitcham moved to Texas, she allegedly took the ashes with her; Rousseau learned all this from the Post's reporting. Her lawyers told The Indy that Mitcham harbored personal resentment against Rousseau, in part due to Mitcham's staunch anti-abortion beliefs.
As part of the settlement terms, the ashes have been returned to Rousseau.
"That meant everything to me," she said.
"I'm so sorry"
Rousseau was living in Winnemucca in February 2018 when she discovered she was pregnant. She and her two young sons had recently overcome a period of homelessness by moving in with an older man involved in drug dealing. Rousseau was not sure how far along she was and wanted an abortion, but a broken-down car made it impossible to reach Reno for an appointment.
Searching the internet for advice on how to naturally end an unwanted pregnancy, she began to consume copious amounts of cinnamon and lift heavy objects. In April, she miscarried, delivering a stillborn baby boy whom she named Abel and whose remains she buried in her backyard.
On a Facebook post soon after, Rousseau allegedly wrote, "I'm so sorry Abel. I'm sorry I'm a horrible person."
Rousseau said the miscarriage came at a low point in her life, when she had fallen in with a bad crowd.
What she really needed, she said, was someone to "talk to me as a friend. Don't talk to me as someone that I have to worry about saying the wrong word and you're going to call the cops on me and have me arrested. … That's where a lot of us women are struggling. We don't have people we can trust in our lives."
About a month after her miscarriage, she was arrested and charged with felony manslaughter. The charges stemmed from a Nevada law, dating to 1911, which states that a woman who ingests drugs with the intent to terminate a pregnancy past 24 weeks has committed manslaughter.
Investigators initially blamed Rousseau for her miscarriage by pointing to her ingestion of cinnamon, but it was a strenuous link. So they instead seized on the fact that Rousseau had used methamphetamines, marijuana and cigarettes while pregnant, arguing she had taken those drugs to induce a miscarriage and thus broken the state's law.
At the encouragement of her public defender, Rousseau pleaded guilty to the manslaughter charges and entered prison in 2019. She served a little more than two years before her conviction was vacated in 2021 for ineffective assistance of counsel. Her lawyer by then was Laura FitzSimmons, a Carson City-based attorney who has represented her since 2020 and who helped secure Nevadans' reproductive rights via a 1990 referendum.
FitzSimmons argued the prosecution could not prove Rousseau's drug use caused her miscarriage, pointing to testimony by the county's medical examiner that the baby's cause of death could not be determined. She also argued Rousseau's drug use was a longstanding habit, not something she took up with the intent to induce a miscarriage. And she said that Rousseau, who was unsure when she got pregnant, could not have known she passed the threshold for legal abortion. In Nevada, abortions are not permitted past 24 weeks of gestation, with exceptions only if the woman's life or health is endangered.
Thanks to FitzSimmons' efforts, Rousseau's conviction was tossed out in 2021, although Humboldt County officials expressed interest in prosecuting her again. In 2025, the charges were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they can never be brought again.
Rousseau is the only person who has ever been charged under the 1911 abortion law, according to FitzSimmons. She and other abortion advocates say the rule is uniquely punitive toward women who want to end their pregnancy.
Farah Diaz-Tello, legal director at the reproductive law organization If/When/How, previously told The Indy that other states have found backdoor ways to prosecute women for seeking abortions, such as applying statutes that deem it illegal to use drugs while pregnant.
But Nevada's law is more explicit, Diaz-Tello said, making it "the only state where it is a felony to have an abortion."
An effort to repeal the statute died without receiving a hearing in the Democrat-controlled Legislature last year; The New Republic reported that Senate Democratic leadership, along with some of the state's pro-choice groups, opted against lobbying for the bill because they wanted to focus efforts on an abortion rights ballot measure. Sen. Rochelle Nguyen (D-Las Vegas), who introduced the bill, previously wrote in a statement to The Indy that, "Making laws can be complicated, and not every bill passes."
Continuing fallout
After the judge vacated her conviction, Rousseau moved to South Dakota. Soon she had another child, a boy who turned 4 this year.
She is sober, but continues to struggle with depression and loneliness. She recently quit her job cleaning Airbnb rental units. Many of her neighbors know about her past and still think of her as the woman who killed her child, she said.
One of Rousseau's four children has moved in with a sister whom Rousseau is estranged from, and another child, aged 9, is in treatment for anger management. Rousseau said she believes his behavioral issues stem from the years she spent in prison, when he was very young.
If she could speak to Mitcham and the others who helped convict her, she said she would tell them to "step off their little pedestal. … Instead of looking at everybody like they are a criminal, … look at them like they have a chance in life with the right direction."
Rousseau said the money is a welcome sign that this dark chapter is behind her. Her biggest relief, though, comes from knowing she'll never have to return to Humboldt County to face the charges again.
"I don't ever want to come back to Nevada again, or honestly ever see any of the people in Winnemucca again," she said. "They ruined it for me."
