NEW CLARK COUNTY POLL: Voters Strongly Oppose Death Penalty For Mentally Ill; Steve Wolfson Keeps Seeking It
“These cases are filed like candy,” a lawyer told Vegas Watch about Wolfson’s routine use of the threat of execution in cases.
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Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson says that he uses capital punishment rarely and only for “the worst of the worst,” but his record shows otherwise. Over 10 years, Wolfson has been one of America’s deadliest prosecutors, repeatedly seeking death against people who are mentally ill and have intellectual disabilities—including former service members struggling with PTSD.
Wolfson’s record runs counter to both national and local consensus. A new Vegas Watch poll shows that Clark County voters of both parties overwhelmingly oppose seeking death against broad categories of vulnerable and impaired people—including people with mental illness, traumatic brain injuries, and intellectual impairments, along with people who have returned from military service with PTSD.
Clark County defense lawyers say that, far from restricting capital punishment to the most extreme cases, Wolfson routinely uses the threat of execution to gain tactical advantage, pushing people to plead guilty instead of exercising their right to a trial. In Clark County, one defense lawyer told Vegas Watch, death cases “are filed like candy.”
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In testimony last year before the Nevada state legislature, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said that he seeks death verdicts against only the “worst of the worst.” He was testifying against legislation to abolish the death penalty and, with it, his power to threaten people with execution—powerful leverage for prosecutors pushing people to plead guilty. His message was one of assurance, that capital punishment should be preserved because it is sought so rarely. “I strongly believe that the death penalty should be reserved for the very rare and extreme circumstances,” he said.
But only weeks later, Wolfson filed court papers to execute Zane Floyd, a decorated Marine who was born brain damaged and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome after his deployment in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Decades ago, in the throes of a psychotic break, Floyd put on his military uniform and shot five people in a grocery store. According to one mental health expert who examined Floyd, his mother’s prenatal alcohol and drug use caused a “brain-based, congenital, lifelong, impactful disorder equivalent to intellectual disability,” and “moving forward with this execution would be turning a blind eye to the scientific and medical consensus” that Floyd, far from the “worst of the worst,” was—and remains—severely impaired.
Across the country, other prosecutors have stopped seeking death sentences and executions in such cases, including in solidly-Republican jurisdictions like Utah County, Utah, where Donald Trump won by 41 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election but capital punishment is now off the table. And last year, Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed the nation’s first state law barring capital punishment against people with severe mental illness.
This approach is consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent, which says that death sentences are constitutional only for those with “extreme culpability,” and, for that reason, bars capital punishment for children and people with intellectual disabilities.
Such restraint is also endorsed by the overwhelming majority of Clark County voters. New Vegas Watch polling shows that voters of both parties oppose capital punishment for broad categories of vulnerable and impaired people. For example, 62% of Clark County voters, including 52% of Republicans, oppose death against military veterans like Floyd who suffer from PTSD. Only 23% of voters support the death penalty in such cases, a gap of 39%.
Substantial majorities also oppose Wolfson seeking death for people with a diagnosed mental illness (59% oppose), people with serious intellectual impairments (60% oppose, including 52% of Republicans), and people with traumatic brain injuries (59% oppose).
Against this local and national consensus, Wolfson has emerged as one of America’s deadliest prosecutors. Wolfson, who is a Democrat, has secured at least a dozen death sentences over the last decade—more than all but one other prosecutor in the entire country, and second only to Republican District Attorney Mike Hestrin in Riverside, California. Right now, there are 59 capital cases pending in Clark County, one of if not the highest per-capita rate in the country, according to county defense lawyers.
“[Wolfson’s] approach is not aligned with our community’s needs and struggles,” Mark Bettencourt, Project Director of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, told Vegas Watch, adding that “there is nothing selective about the way death penalty cases are being pursued by [Wolfson].” Instead, new cases filed “at an astonishing rate.”
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About 25% of the people on Nevada’s death row, including those sentenced in Clark County, have severe mental illness, intellectual disability, or brain damage, according to the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty. That includes Keith Barlow, whose 2018 death sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend is Clark County’s most recent. When Barlow was in the seventh grade, his parents took him out of school and drove him to a psychiatric hospital where they left him for nine months. Barlow later served in the Army and was honorably discharged before he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attempted suicide.
In 2010, Clark County prosecutors secured a death sentence against John Watson, a 71-year-old former math teacher who had been convicted of killing his wife. Watson had twice been committed to psychiatric hospitals as a teenager, and had a long history of erratic behavior, including once breaking into a church to play the piano. After his conviction, Watson first asked to “stipulate to the death penalty” and then, before his lawyer gave closing arguments, Watson spoke and asked the jury to impose death. Today Watson is in his 80s, legally blind, bound to a wheelchair, and dying of prostate cancer, but Wolfson has continued to defend this death sentence in court.
More recently, Clark County juries have pushed back on Wolfson’s requests to kill mentally ill and intellectually disabled people.
In October 2021, Contrayer Zone was convicted in a love-triangle murder after he confronted and killed a man he believed his girlfriend was also dating. During the penalty phase of his trial, defense lawyers explained how, as a small child, Zone had to live with extended family after his mother died. There, at the age of six, he faced constant physical and sexual abuse and was purposefully starved, allowed to eat only leftover scraps that were thrown on the floor. To survive, Zone took food from a dumpster and hid under the front porch of somebody else’s house. This trauma led to a lifetime of PTSD, and Zone has long-struggled with bipolar disorder, endured hallucinations, and has “borderline intellectual functioning,” with an IQ in the low 70s.
Despite prosecutors’ pleas for death, the jury returned a life sentence.
The practice of targeting the most vulnerable and impaired people for death is “clear evidence that the Clark County District Attorney’s Office is slow to embrace the growing consensus against the death penalty,” Bettencourt told Vegas Watch, while other “DAs across the country, like our neighbors in Utah, are embracing the move away from this costly and broken system.”
Losing death cases like Zone’s has not been enough for Wolfson to stop bringing them. In fact, juries have returned life verdicts—or, in one case, a not-guilty verdict—in over half of Wolfson’s capital trials, according to data provided by Scott Coffee, an assistant public defender who represents people in capital cases.
The most common outcome in Clark County capital cases, though, involves no trial at all, but rather a plea agreement with the death penalty removed from possibility. Of the 128 capital cases resolved under Wolfson, 83, or 65%, have been resolved by a plea agreement—while only 12 (or fewer than one in 10), actually led to a death sentence, and four of those were later vacated or reversed by a reviewing court.
To Coffee, this shows how Wolfson uses the death penalty not as a last resort penalty in the rare case where justice demands it, but for tactical advantage in run-of-the-mill cases. “These cases are filed like candy,” Coffee said, and “every time a death notice is filed we have to work up the case as a capital case. If a death notice is supposed to signal a moral imperative that this guy dies . . . how do we end up with only 1 in [10] on the row?”
Wolfson declined to answer specific questions from Vegas Watch, but said that his office charges every case “based on its unique elements,” and that he’s “sensitive to the fact that there are certain mitigating circumstances that would preclude my office from seeking the death penalty.” “We will continue to consider all mitigating and aggravating factors when determining how murder cases will be prosecuted. Victims and their families, as well as defendants, deserve this consideration,” Wolfson said.
Among those who are on death row, Zane Floyd could be the first person that Nevada executes in 15 years. A state court has stayed proceedings in his case for now, as Floyd seeks relief both through the courts and the state’s Pardons Board, which holds exclusive power to commute a death sentence to life. Wolfson, meanwhile, has opposed even a hearing on Floyd’s petition asking the Board to consider commutation.
To federal public defender Brad Levenson, one of Floyd’s attorneys, such opposition doesn’t align with reserving death for only the most extreme cases. “Floyd suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and PTSD, and he’s a military veteran who has taken responsibility for the crime and shown remorse from day one,” Levenson told Vegas Watch. “He led a crime-free, exemplary life until that day, and has since, and that just doesn’t qualify as ‘the worst of the worst.’”