“What are you people going to do all day?” she thought. “That’s what you have to do? You have to be a lawyer?”ĭuring her second year at the University of San Diego School of Law, she felt disheartened when everyone started getting dressed up and going off to interviews at business law firms. One day, she saw a patient being escorted by a woman in a suit and asked who she was. Eytan knew she did not want to be a part of that system-she wanted to change it-but she didn’t know how. She saw people being overmedicated for the staff’s convenience. So to help pay tuition and expenses, she took a night job at the county mental hospital that changed the course of her life.
As a first-generation American, she felt isolated and embarrassed that she did not fit that “American Girl-doll kind of look or feel.” She wanted to help kids who felt different and decided on a career in child psychology-a natural fit in a family where her father and brothers were doctors.īut when her parents learned she was dating a non-Jewish boy at school, they cut her off financially. Her parents, originally from Iraq, immigrated to Israel and then Arizona before she was born. In the conference room, Eytan is explaining how she became a criminal defense attorney. “Dru can hardly get a word in edgewise,” she says. “They’re extremely different people who complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”Īs an aside, Mackey suggests talking to the women separately. You have to step back when Iris is on a terror. “Iris is passionate, wildly emotional, very very intense, and can be over the top. “Dru is calm, meticulous and has outstanding judgment,” Mackey says. phone call or take care of their clients’ emotional needs the way Eytan and Nielsen do. “Iris is a force of nature when she gets unleashed on a case, and Dru is a steadying hand,” he says.ĭefense attorney Pamela Mackey of Haddon Morgan and Foreman says there are a lot of people in Denver with terrific legal skills, but not everyone will accept her 2 a.m. “We didn’t have to prove his innocence, but we did,” Eytan says.Ĭivil rights attorney David Lane, of Killmer Lane & Newman, says the Fallis trial-particularly the thoroughness of their investigation and creativity in forensics-is a prime example of why he calls Eytan and Nielsen two of the best criminal defense lawyers he’s met.
The jury came back with a “not guilty” verdict in under four hours. They built the Fallis bedroom, complete with the actual furniture and measurements down to the millimeter and during a cross-examination in a Weld County courtroom, they did for the jury what they had practiced hundreds of times in their office: Nielsen pretended to be the victim to show that Ashley Fallis would have had to have been standing on the dresser when Tom Fallis shot her for the dimensions and bullet trajectory to add up. Instead, Eytan and Nielsen did it for them. But with this one, it was so absurd that they were charging him with murder and it was a nationally televised case, we were thinking, ‘Have they ever even put together the scene so that they could really understand how unjust this prosecution is?’” So you’re not going and developing evidence for them. “As defense lawyers,” Eytan adds, “we are trained to be very careful about how we defend cases because prosecutors abuse facts that are completely benign to get a conviction. “I’m holding her back, holding her back!” “Can you see Iris doing that?” Nielsen says with a laugh. “A simple cross examination to show they don’t have the evidence,” Eytan continues. “Show there’s reasonable doubt,” interjects Nielsen. She is sitting beside Nielsen, her legal partner and best friend, in the conference room of Eytan Nielsen, the Denver firm they co-founded in 2015. “All we have to do is prove they don’t have a case,” explains Eytan, her voice rising.
#Dru nielsen trial
During the high-profile murder trial of Tom Fallis in 2016, defense attorneys Iris Eytan and Dru Nielsen weren’t just interested in creating reasonable doubt they wanted to convince the jury that their client-accused of shooting his wife, Ashley, after a New Year’s Eve party in 2011-was completely innocent that he had simply watched in horror as his wife killed herself.
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