[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEVADA

[Rick Halperin]

May 28




NEVADA:

On the Record: The policy positions of Democratic Clark County District 
Attorney candidate Rob Langford



It happens like clockwork.

Candidates announce their bids for office. Then the attack ads follow in short 
order, unabashedly targeting their voting records and more.

We're here to help. The Nevada Independent already produces fact-checks for 
political advertisements and off-the-cuff remarks, but we also want to get 
ahead of the campaign game.

When politicians announce their candidacy for public office, we'll roll out "On 
the Record" - our look at their voting history and stances on a broad array of 
subjects.

Now up: Rob Langford, a longtime criminal defense attorney who filed to run 
against Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson. Both Wolfson and Langford 
are Democrats.

Reasons for running

Langford filed to run on the last possible day to do so, and just a day after 
the publication of a Las Vegas Review-Journal story detailing how Wolfson 
declined to press charges or publicly report a close aide???s theft of $42,000 
from his campaign account to cover a gambling habit.

But Langford, who has spent 8 years on the board of the American Civil 
Liberties Union of Nevada, said he had been involved in recruiting what he 
called a more progressive challenger to Wolfson prior to the Review-Journal 
story, but decided to jump in the race himself after that potential candidate - 
whom he declined to name - decided not to run.

Langford, 59, said the office had typically been seen as an "entry-level" 
political position used as a stepping stone for higher-level office, but cited 
a growing awareness of the power of public prosecutors in the realm of criminal 
justice, coupled with the state's prison population constantly over capacity.

"You know, all of Nevada would be affected by a progressive D.A. in Clark 
County," he said. "And so I felt like somebody had step up."

On several occasions in an interview, Langford cited progressive Philadelphia 
District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of 
the department's strategy and policies since being elected last November, 
including dropping minor marijuana and sex work cases, referring more cases to 
diversion courts and easing the city's rules on probation.

Few other players in the criminal justice system have as much power as 
prosecutors, as author Michelle Alexander wrote in her 2010 book The New Jim 
Crow.

"Few rules constrain the exercise of prosecutorial discretion," she wrote. "The 
prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all, 
regardless of the strength of the evidence. The prosecutor is also free to file 
more charges against a defendant than can realistically be proven in court, so 
long as probable cause arguably exists. Whether a good plea deal is offered to 
a defendant is entirely up to the prosecutor. And if the mood strikes, the 
prosecutor can transfer drug defendants to the federal system, where the 
penalties are more severe."

Death Penalty

Although he is not outright opposed to the death penalty, Langford criticized 
the current district attorney's office for how it approaches death penalty 
cases.

Wolfson has reduced the number of death penalty cases sought compared to his 
predecessor, but his office is still an outlier both in the state and 
nationally in the number of capital punishment cases sought. A 2015 review by 
the Fair Punishment Project reported that Clark County approved 9 death 
sentences between 2011 and 2015, including 6 under Wolfson's tenure.

Langford accused the office of using the death penalty as a negotiating tactic, 
which he called "medieval," and that the office was spending millions of 
dollars to bring those cases forward, despite actual executions being 
relatively rare.

"We've been litigating millions and millions of dollars of litigation year in 
and year out, and they are not being executed nor should they be, in my 
opinion, because they're not the worst of the worse and/or the manner in which 
the case was litigated is faulty," he said. "So I think that it's insane the 
amount of money that we're spending, and at some point somebody has to stand up 
and say no."

As an example, he pointed to all of the recent litigation around Scott Dozier, 
the inmate who has given up all appeals on his death penalty case but has 
nonetheless spent months in court amid a battle over the correct drug cocktail 
the state will use in the execution.

"How much money was spent just on deciding whether the one drug was going to 
work the way they intended it to work?" he asked.

He said that shifting resources away from capital punishment cases would free 
up attorneys in the office to focus on other, more pressing cases.

"If you???re not doing a death penalty case, you're doing better job on other 
cases," he said. "You have more resources to spend on other cases. You know, 
there is a reason that Metro and the district attorney's office can't really 
prosecute residential burglaries the way they should, because we spend all our 
time on death penalty cases that people end up that they're really life without 
possibility of parole cases."

(source: The Nevada Independent)