Judge testifies against Mack

As Family Court Judge Chuck Weller spoke to his assistant at the Washoe County courthouse in Reno, he heard a loud noise and felt a burning sensation on the left side of his chest.

He thought his cell phone had exploded in his shirt pocket.

Then he saw the hole in the expansive glass window of his office, and he remembered he didn't have a cell phone in his shirt pocket.

"It occurred to me I had just been shot through the window," Weller testified in District Judge Douglas Herndon's courtroom Tuesday. "So I threw myself down on the ground."

Pawnshop operator Darren Mack is being tried on an attempted murder charge in the June 12, 2006, shooting of Weller from the parking garage across from the judge's window. Mack also is charged with murder in the slaying of his 39-year-old wife, Charla Mack, whose throat was slashed in the couple's upscale townhouse hours before Weller was shot.

Weller, 55, underwent surgery, received about 40 stitches and still has bullet fragments in him.

He continues to be a target in the trial as attorneys hash out the allegations of Mack and his friends that the judge is corrupt.

Weller rebutted those claims Tuesday, saying he has found that those who lose in family court often blame attorneys or judges, instead of themselves.

In the Macks' divorce, "I was trying to pick what I thought best for the child," Weller said, referring to the 8-year-old daughter the couple shared custody of.

Mack's defense lawyers, Scott Freeman and David Chesnoff, have argued that Mack acted in self-defense when he killed his wife and then snapped and went after Weller, who had been presiding over the couple's nasty divorce.

After being shot, Weller said, he crawled out of his office and shouted for someone to call his wife to get his family out of their home.

His assistant dove for cover under another secretary's desk to make the call and later realized the stinging sensation in her neck and hip were from bullet fragments, one of which she pulled from her skirt.

When authorities questioned the judge about who his attacker might be, Weller gave them one name: Mack, a prominent businessman whose divorce had been ongoing in his court for more than a year.

A couple of months before the shooting, Weller had become aware of a fathers' rights group, Nevadans for Equal Parenting, that had written insulting remarks about him online, comparing him to Hitler and calling him unfair, corrupt and biased.

A group member told him later that Mack was behind the online attacks, he said.

There was also the "look of death" Mack gave Weller after he had finalized the couple's almost $1 million divorce settlement in May 2006 to Charla Mack, which Mack had tried to appeal. "He gave me this glare that was withering," Weller said.

In a taped interview shown to the jury that Mack gave to a father's rights group about his experiences in family court, he said Weller was forcing him to pay his soon-to-be-ex-wife 150 percent of his income and threatened him with a contempt of court charge and jail time if he didn't agree to the settlement.

During the interview conducted weeks before the slaying, Mack sat blankly as the interviewer suggested it might be easier to kill a wife, do a few years in prison and get on with life than face family court.

At least two of the prosecution's witnesses, who were Mack's friends, have testified they also believed Weller was corrupt and ruled favorably toward attorneys who donated to his campaign.

Alecia Biddison met Mack over the Internet in February 2006, connecting via their shared frustration regarding Weller.

Biddison and Mack began dating, and she was with Mack target shooting the day before Charla Mack was killed and Weller was shot.

Biddison said Mack seemed normal and they had made plans for the Father's Day weekend.

Biddison testified that she transferred her custody case to California to escape Weller.

"After I hired my second attorney I realized the error I had made in both my attorneys was that they had not contributed to Judge Weller's campaign. There was no way I was going to prevail," Biddison said.

Weller pointed out that one of Mack's divorce attorneys and his firm had donated $1,000 to his campaign, while Charla Mack's attorney had donated $250.

Weller said one of the problems he had with Mack was that he appeared to have been "disingenuous" about his income.

In Mack's financial disclosure for the court dated March 2005, he listed his monthly gross income as $44,014. In a subsequent disclosure form from November 2005, Mack listed himself as earning $5,000 a month.

In June 2005, Charla Mack had requested that her estranged husband be held in contempt of court because Mack had transferred voting interest in his pawnshops to his mother and transferred $280,000 from himself to the business, violating a court order freezing the couple's assets.

Weller said he held Mack in civil contempt until he regained the voting interests that he had given his mother.

Mack is set to plead not guilty by reason of insanity to the shooting of Weller, and Chesnoff is trying to convince jurors that Mack's complaints about the "tyranny" of family court show he was delusional.

Along those lines, Chesnoff questioned Weller about a number of allegations Mack has launched against him.

"You hadn't been sleeping with Charla Mack had you?" Chesnoff asked him.

"No sir," the judge tersely responded.

"That would be crazy," Chesnoff said.

"You treated Mr. Mack differently than other people who appeared before you, didn't you judge?" he asked.

"No," Weller responded.

"That also would be crazy," Chesnoff said.

After Chesnoff made Weller read a 2006 Washoe County Bar Association survey that gave Weller the lowest retention rate among the 12 judges and began asking him about any social relationship he had with Charla Mack's divorce attorney, Weller decided he had endured enough.

"I've never had my reputation attacked the way you're attacking it," he said. "It's unfair."

Herndon admonished the judge for lecturing from the witness stand.

"You know better than that," Herndon told Weller. "This isn't the forum for that."

After the judge testified, Chesnoff asked Herndon for a mistrial because Weller had referred to Charla Mack's death as murder and had suggested Chesnoff had mistreated a judge.

Herndon denied the motion. After the jury left the courtroom, he said he took no pleasure admonishing a fellow jurist.

"I've got great sympathy for Judge Weller," he said.

"The man was shot, after all."

Contact reporter K.C. Howard at khoward@reviewjournal.com or (702) 380-1039.