Nina Kilian Peace: In the Name of Justice

by Charles McGuigan 1997

Nina K. Peace was a force of nature and a brilliant litigator and judge who was crucified by a gang of petty men in Virginia’s General Assembly. Seven years after this story appeared, Nina died suddenly and Hanover has never been quite the same. 

We walk into  a place on 301 within throwing distance of the courthouse that’s part general store and part antique dealer and part deli. Nina picks up a bag of Fritos from a wire rack, pulls a diet Coke from a glass-fronted refrigerator then orders her regular, an Elsa Gray sandwich, named from the clerk of juvenile court. We sit on stools before a small round table surrounded by antiques. 

First and foremost Nina is an advocate. She goes to bat for damned near anyone—abused spouses, children, the disadvantaged and the detritus of society who filter down through the cracks in life into a sort of limbo where they are crushed by the system, seldom able to get back to the light of day. For more than 20 years she’s represented all these people in Hanover courts for reduced fees at best. A lot of her work has always been pro bono. 

Nina’s heart is in the practice of the law. She has compassion for those she represents and understands that all human beings are capable of doing wrong. “My philosophy is that most people are good, but capable of doing bad, there but for the grace of God go I,” she says. “And that’s why we should judge actions, not people. There is really only one judge of people. I honestly love people and believe that by helping others you help yourself.”

Her beliefs in part were formed by her upbringing in Washington, D.C. Nina’s mother, Katherine, was a social worker. Her father, Clifton Himmelsbach, was a physician. Her biological father, U.S. Army Colonel James Kilian, died when Nina was eight.

“I learned about tolerance and acceptance very early,” she tells me as she sips from the can of diet Coke. “I attended public schools in an area that was very cosmopolitan. My mother always reminded me—and still does—that material things are not the end-all of life. I will say that Jesus Christ has been a very great infl uence on me. His teachings that our rewards are not received here, that bad things happen to good people, that forgiveness is a way of life.”

After high school, Nina attended Goucher College where she studied to become a teacher. During her junior year, while she was doing a political science internship, a member of the General Assembly took Nina aside and said, “Why don’t you become a lawyer working with kids instead of a teacher.” 

Nina went to law school at Georgetown for three semesters then enrolled at T.C. Williams at the University of Richmond. At the time she was married to a professor at Randoph Macon in Ashland. “The commute to D.C. was just too much,” she tells me.

For Nina Peace, 1975 may well have been the most eventful year of her life. She took on more responsibility than anyone twice her age could, and Nina was just 25 years old. She graduated law school that year, and if that wasn’t enough she won the Democratic primary for the Ashland District seat on the Hanover County Board of Supervisors. That same year she was made assistant to the dean at T.C. Williams. And then in the fall Nina became the youngest and only woman ever elected to the Board of Supervisors in Hanover.

She had found her home in Ashland and absolutely adored the county and was bound and determined to protect it. As the only liberal, and a woman at that, on the good-old-boys board of supervisors, Nina had her work cut out for her. It was a joy to watch her debate, running circles around the men who often looked confused at the end of it all. She employed her acid wit and dagger tongue and gladly locked horns with fellow supervisors. Nina’s voice always kept the board in check and it was a gray day when she stepped down. Actions of the board since have so favored development that it appears politicians, at least in Hanover, can be bought.

Nina, on the outside, is self-assured and confident, strong-willed and independent. “People see me as a strong woman,” she says. “But being the strong one isn’t always easy. I was dating this guy in college and he was dating someone else. So one day both of us showed up at his apartment and he said to me, ‘Oh God, what’s Beth going to say?’ And I said, ‘What’s Beth going to say? What am I going to say?’ As a strong person you always end up taking care of yourself.” 

Later, at her office on England Street, Nina sorts through stacks of file folders, looking for something. “I question everything,” she says. “I can always see the speck in the apple and always want to get rid of it. Some people think that’s a fault. I don’t.” 

Carter Redd enters the office and he and Nina start planning ways Democrats might gain strength in Republican Hanover. “The staff is running the show,” says Nina. She then characterizes the board of supervisors as puppets. I leave the two so they can sort out the county’s problems. 

The following Saturday at her home in Ashland, Nina grabs a diet Coke from the refrigerator and talks about some of her most important influences. She mentions Emion Smith, a former teacher and principal at Beaverdam Elementary School. “She was very smart and outspoken and she knew every kid and what their problems were,” says Nina. “She would even stoke the school’s furnace.”

Then she invokes the father of our country. “George Washington knew who he was and he was not tempted by power,” Nina says. “When the people wanted him to be king, he declined. He put his money where his mouth was. He had his feet bleeding on the battlefield at Valley Forge. He risked everything, and if the Revolution had gone the other way, he would have had nothing. Lord Fairfax, when the Revolution began, said to Washington, ‘I’m going home to England.’ Washington said: ‘I am home.’ He was not afraid to fight.”

This eve of Palm Sunday is one of those rare, early spring days when the sun shines strong and bright and the wind gusts with controlled fury. Everything is distinct and separate in the sunlight, even the distant redbuds on the high limbs of the trees that encircle Nina’s back yard. Everything seems to be awakening and on fire with its own life, impatient to start the tour of life. This is burning sentience in every blade of emerald grass.

Nina tells me how certain parties manipulated the press and the system to oust her from the bench where she sat as Juvenile and Domestic Relations judge. Even friends betrayed her, sold her over, powerful men who feared a powerful woman out of their ignorance and insecurities.

All complaints lodged against Nina stemmed from lack of judicial demeanor. She was accused of eating M&Ms on the bench, allowing someone to drink a Coke in court. And, of course, for being outspoken.

“I got in trouble for being too me,” she says. “Social services during one case told me they didn’t know they could look into a mother’s criminal file on child abuse. I couldn’t believe it! I was good with the people who came before me. But I was hard on some of the staff when they didn’t provide services properly. As a judge I had little tolerance for people who didn’t do their job. I’m not in the least sorry that I was hard on social services. We’re talking about peoples’ lives here.”

Nina strolls over to the fish pond that was installed last year and tugs on one end of the tarp that covers it. Some of the stones that hold the tarp in place plunk into the water and drift in slow motion to the bottom. “I think some of the people who got rid of me on the bench hoped that I would leave the county,” she says. “I’ll never leave Hanover and I’ll never not say what’s on my mind. I’m the only person I know who attended her own funeral and lived to tell about it.”

She quotes a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Love is not all,” Nina says. “It is not meat, nor drink, nor shelter from the storm. It can’t cleanse the thickened lung. But yet even as we speak, men are dying from lack of love alone.” The words fall from her mouth hard and real as stones.

As a cloud blocks out the sun and a shadow falls on the fish pond and the bloated lily pads and the wrinkled tarp, Nina recites from memory a portion of verse from one of her favorite poets—the Welshman Dylan Thomas. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” says Nina Peace. “I don’t want to die, but I’m not afraid of dying. You know, if there’s nothing you’re willing to die for, there’s nothing to live for. Well, I have things I’d die for and I have a lot to live for.”

She pulls the tarp away from the edge of the pond and slabs of rock spill out of it onto the ground. Some of the rocks slip into the pond. Nina folds the tarp and begins to stack the rocks on the edge of the pond. She kneels before the pond and thrusts both arms into the cold water until they’re elbow deep. She searches the bottom without her eyes, using her fin-gers to seek out and claim a stone slab that she then brings up to the surface. Nina uses both hands to bring the stone up. It is a heavy stone.