by KARA SCHWEISS
What’s the most serious crime a driver could be charged with for deliberately running someone off the road — even if no one is hurt and there’s no damage? Most people guess something like reckless driving. But legal expert Eartha Johnson says the correct answer might surprise you.
“How about aggravated assault with a deadly weapon?” Johnson said. “Your car can be a deadly weapon –– and that would take it to an aggravated felony, where it’s more serious and you get more jail time.”
It’s questions like these that inspired Johnson to create CRIME NO CRIME, a board game built around several hundred legal scenarios. The game invites players to test their instincts, challenge assumptions and learn the law in a compelling, curiosity-driven way.
“Most people know they’ve committed a crime, but very few realize the gravity of their conduct,” Johnson said. “Our goal was to educate people on both the law and the gravity.”
Johnson said young people are the game’s most important audience.
“They fall victim to the system a lot of times because they don’t know the law,” she said. “When people know better, they do better. And our goal is to educate them so they will know better.”
The game took years to develop, but Johnson’s motivation was clear: to help people make better decisions before they find themselves in trouble.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Johnson said. “It satisfies their curiosity on the law –– they get to know it.”
Johnson attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1977 to 1982 before going on to law school. She is the semiretired CEO of LegalWATCH, an international training and staffing company she founded in 1997. Her career has included practicing corporate law, working for an international law firm and the U.S. Department of Justice. She received UNO’s Citation for Alumni Achievement Award in May 2025 and serves as a University of Nebraska Foundation Trustee.
Her years at UNO were formative, even if they weren’t easy. Johnson was a student when she married her husband, Lonnie, in 1979 — both were Goodrich Scholarship recipients — and their first two children were born in 1980 and 1981 during her undergraduate years. A third child was born in 1984 while Johnson was in law school. Her Christian faith has always been a sustaining force, she said.
The Johnsons ultimately became a family of legal minds, with Lonnie, Eartha and all three children entering the field of law. Everyone contributed to CRIME NO CRIME.
“My oldest daughter is a criminal district court judge here in Houston, and the middle has been a prosecutor for over a decade and just went to the public defender’s office. My baby does criminal defense. My husband and I both did corporate law. So, we get it from every angle,” Johnson said.
CRIME NO CRIME, which debuted two years ago (crimenocrime.com), is just the beginning.
“It’s going to be a line of games that educates people in every aspect of the law,” Johnson said. “That’s my long-term goal.”
