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)
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