Austin Sarat ScheerPost
Last spring, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson announced he would be seeking death warrants for three of the fifty-seven inmates on Nevada’s death row. He said at the time, “A jury found that these three individuals should be executed for their behavior. The jury weighed aggravating and mitigating information. These defendants received a great deal of due process: a trial by their peers, the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, and all the other attendant due process rights.
Wolfson added, “And at the end of the day, it’s time to move forward with the jury’s declaration.” But he did not seem very hopeful that his plan would succeed. “I am a gambler,” Wolfson explained, “but I’m not sure how much I bet on this one.”
In July, Wolfson paused his requests because of cases pending before the Nevada Supreme Court. In one of them, the court will consider the constitutionality of the state’s clemency process, and in the other, whether the state’s current execution manual is valid.
And there are no executions currently scheduled in Nevada for the rest of this year and next year.
But that is not the only reason to spend a little time looking at the death penalty in the Silver State. Even more revealing is what has happened to its death sentences.
Nevada once had the highest death sentencing rate in the United States. It sent 60 people to death row for every 1000 homicides. During the same period, the rate in Florida was 34 per 1000 homicides, and in Texas, 20 per 1000 homicides.
A 2021 article in The Dispatch said that “Nevada prosecutors have pursued the death penalty so frequently that they have helped make their state an outlier even by national standards. Nevada has about 70 people on death row. Relative to the state’s population, that is the second-highest number in the country, behind Alabama.”
And at the start of the twenty-first century, Columbia Law Professor James Liebman and his colleagues called the death sentencing rate in Nevada “striking,” and added, “Not only does it lead the nation, but it also is strikingly higher than the closest state.” That was Oklahoma, whose rate was 51 death sentences per 1000 homicides.
Clark County (where Las Vegas is located) was responsible for a large share of Nevada’s death sentences. As the journalist Dana Gentry noted that “Clark County prosecutors won nine death cases between 2010 and 2015. No other county in the state sentenced a defendant to death during that time.”
She adds that “A 2016 study… found that only 16 of the 3,143 counties in the United States sentenced five or more convicts to death between 2010 and 2015. Clark was one of them.”
But starting around 2000, all that changed.
From 2002 to 2016, there were 22 new death sentences handed down in Nevada. There were four in 2017 and one in 2018.
Then, between 2019 and 2024, no one received a death sentence in a state that once led the nation in death sentencing rates. There was one in 2025, and none so far this year.
This precipitous change in death sentencing can be attributed to several factors, including the high costs of capital prosecutions and concerns about racial bias and the risk of executing innocent people. Those concerns led the Nevada Assembly to vote in 2021 to abolish the death penalty, “the farthest efforts to end capital punishment have ever advanced in the state.”
The bill died in the state Senate.
In the heyday of its use of capital punishment, Nevada stood out in another way. A study done ten years ago found that Clark County had the highest rate of overturned convictions or death sentences due to prosecutorial misconduct in the U.S.
Overall, prior to 2020, more than 46% of its death sentences were overturned by a state or federal court. And in 31% of the cases, an inmate was “permanently taken off death row because of a reversal or a vacated conviction or penalty.”
Why would a prosecutor pursue death sentences if they knew that success would mean years of appeals, and the chances are 50/50 that the sentence will be overturned?
In addition, Nevada is one of a number of states with sizeable death row populations (it’s ranks ninth in the country) where no one has been executed in a very long time. Its last one was in 2006, when it put Daryl Linnie Mack to death after he was convicted of rape and murder.
Mack was the first person in Nevada whose conviction and death sentence had been based solely on DNA evidence, and he remains the only Black man executed in Nevada since capital punishment’s reinstatement in 1977. He was also a so-called “execution volunteer.”
He waived his available appeals and asked to be executed, repeatedly telling the court he would rather die than wait another 20 years for the appeals process
Twelve years later, Nevada was poised to execute Scott Dozier in 2018, who, like Mack, voluntarily waived his appeals. A year after his execution was postponed, Dozier committed suicide in his cell.
The state failed to pull off another execution in 2022 when, as the Death Penalty Information Center explained, “At least three Nevada execution personnel backed out of participating in Zane Floyd’s… execution after a U.S. district judge asked about their education and training.”
What is now happening with Nevada’s death penalty is out of step with the state’s long history of putting people to death. Indeed, it began its history of execution as a territory in a traditional way.
John Carr was the first recorded execution in Nevada, put to death by hanging in 1860. His execution was followed by 20 more hangings until 1903, when all executions were moved to the Nevada State Prison.
Since then, 73 people have been put to death there.
Today, Nevada is one of a number of death penalty states with no executions and very few death sentences. Others in that category include Arkansas, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming (which has gone more than thirty years without an execution and two decades without a death sentence).
If Nevada can be turned from a death-sentencing leader to a place, like those other states, where capital punishment is a vestige of an earlier era, perhaps it points toward a different future for places like Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, and for the entire nation.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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