Special housing cells are shown during a tour Tuesday, July 23, 2013, of the Clark County Detention Center.
Sunday, April 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
None of the five jails in Clark County follows a Nevada law designed to provide the public information on in-custody deaths.
Assembly Bill 301, which unanimously passed in the 2019 Legislature and became law, in part requires jails throughout Nevada to create biannual reports to detail the number of inmate deaths and manner in which they died.
A Sun investigation, however, found that none of the four city jails in Southern Nevada has submitted these reports to their city councils. And more startling: Many local officials had no knowledge of the law or its reporting requirement.
Metro Police, which runs the Clark County Detention Center in downtown Las Vegas, submitted its biannual report Tuesday to the Clark County Commission. However, Metro’s reporting has never included required elements of the state law such as cause of death.
While records of inmate deaths in Nevada prisons are publicly available on the Nevada Department of Corrections website, there is no organized database for jails in the state. Prisons are for those convicted of severe crimes and sentenced to lengthy terms of incarceration; jails generally are for people awaiting criminal trials or those convicted of less severe crimes with shorter sentences.
The required reports and presentations at city council meetings were designed to provide a public record of deaths in city jails. But in Southern Nevada, those reports don’t exist.
Because in-custody deaths can occur for a number of reasons — everything from old age to heart attacks, cancer, accidents, suicide or homicide — negligence on the part of the facilities isn’t assumed. But sometimes there are questionable deaths.
“Some of these people that are housed in CCDC are really not able to take care of themselves and need to be monitored and treated, and they simply failed,” said Peter Goldstein, the lawyer representing the family of an inmate who died in 2023 and filed a federal lawsuit alleging medical neglect.
Unknown and unenforced
Four provisions of law outline the two reporting responsibilities for cities and their jails. First, it requires city jails to create biannual reports; and second, for presentations of the information to be on their city councils’ public agendas at least twice a year. County jails like Clark County Detention Center have the same requirements but submit their reports to county commissioners.
Asked about their compliance with the law, representatives for cities in Clark County gave varied responses, but none of them were aware of the law prior to the Sun’s inquiries. Several representatives for cities confused the state law with the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, which requires quarterly reports on in-custody deaths for states to receive their share of grant funding from the Justice Department. In 2023, Nevada received $2.3 million in grant money.
Those quarterly reports to Nevada Department of Public Safety are not shared individually or collectively with the public except in aggregated accounts, such as the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Mortality in Correctional Institutions report.
After being contacted by the Sun, at least three Clark County municipalities said they were working to rectify the situation and would schedule reports to be presented at upcoming council meetings.
A city of Las Vegas spokesperson called the absence an “oversight.” The city then confirmed it would schedule its first public report to be presented at the May 15 city council meeting.
The spokesperson additionally said members of the city council have been briefed on in-custody deaths at the Las Vegas City Jail.
A spokesperson for the Henderson Police Department said it “does not create or send ‘any regularly scheduled reports’ ” to Henderson City Council. The city responded to the Sun’s reporting by saying “starting this summer, biannual reports will be presented to the city council.”
The city of North Las Vegas closed its jail in 2012 for economic reasons but reopened it in 2020. A spokesperson for the city said officials there “were not aware” the law had been created prior to the jail’s reopening.
The first death in the North Las Vegas jail since its reopening was in January, according to a spokesperson.
Mesquite Police Deputy Chief Quinn Averett said in an email the department believed federal reporting collected by Nevada Department of Public Safety was sufficient for the city to comply with state law. Averett nor Mesquite city officials would respond to multiple requests for comment on why the reports were not on agendas for public meetings but said they would adjust their procedures to comply with the law.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Mesquite City Manager Martine Green said when asked about the law’s requirements.
‘Toothless laws’
Although none of Nevada’s city jails adhere to the provisions, the law lacks language specifying repercussions for jurisdictions that fail to meet requirements. Thus, the law has never been enforced.
The proposal was presented to the Legislature by former state Senate Majority Whip Teresa Benitez-Thompson, who said during its introduction that the bill was designed to increase transparency and communication between police and local officials.
The law was partly inspired by an investigative series in 2017 by the Reno Gazette-Journal about the Washoe County jail. The Gazette-Journal series pointed out a lack of supervision at the jail from the Washoe County Commission.
Benitez-Thompson, who now works as chief of staff for Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, declined interview requests from the Sun about how the law was designed to be enforced. Ford, the state’s top law enforcer, also declined requests for comment.
Because of the unclear consequences for councils that fail to request the report for their jails, the only potential ramifications for cities could be civil litigation, but even that is an unsure outcome. Paul Larsen, a Nevada-based attorney specializing in administrative law, called potential lawsuits a “long shot,” instead pointing toward simple administrative correction.
“In the absence of either the jail official or the governing body actually exercising their reporting and oversight responsibilities, I would expect concerned citizens or even the prisoners would have standing to seek a writ of mandamus under NRS 34.160,” Larsen said.
District judges, the Nevada Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals can issue a writ of mandamus — essentially an order to public officials to fulfill their official duties —“in all cases where there is not a plain, speedy and adequate remedy in the ordinary course of law.”
“Every time we try to further our meaningful regulations of these things, there are always very much these toothless laws that don’t have any consequences included within them,” West Juhl, a spokesperson for ACLU Nevada, said of the Sun’s reporting.
A detox cell for females is shown during a tour of the Clark County Detention Center Tuesday, July 23, 2013.
Unnamed and underreported
In-custody deaths are increasing at the Clark County Detention Center, Metro Police shared with the commission last week about the state’s largest jail. Last year, the jail booked about 52,000 people.
Thirteen people died in Metro Police’s custody in 2023, the most deaths at the facility in at least seven years, according to publicly available records. But how those 13 died is not readily apparent in the reports, which only state that all 13 were men, most died in the hospital and none were the result of suicide.
The report, according to the 2019 law, should also include: full names, the dates inmates were admitted and died as well as probable cause of death, which are defined in the law as “basic demographics.”
The department’s reports come in PowerPoint presentation form and provide limited information, only specifying the gender of the deceased, where they died and whether the death was caused by suicide.
The department’s reports have not always been so vague. When Metro began presenting the reports in 2021, the presentations included a six-year historical comparison and a more detailed list of causes of death. But while previous reports were more detailed, they still failed to reach the law’s requirements.
Asked why the reports had reduced their specificity, Metro Deputy Chief Fred Haas said he’d rather have Las Vegans hear updates directly from him.
“I want them to hear from my mouth, because I care what’s going on, I care for these people,” Haas said. “I want you to know that I’m committed to keeping this jail as safe as possible.”
Haas, who has overseen the jail since December 2022, has not presented the public report to the county commission in over a year, having only done it once during his tenure. Haas also said people can access the other parts of the report’s required elements through the county coroner.
The increase in deaths marks the third consecutive year where more than 10 people have died while in custody at the detention center. The increase comes as the jail’s population has been “greatly reduced” in the past five years, Haas said.
Over 10,000 fewer people were booked into the detention center in 2023 compared with 2018, according to Metro Police data, while deaths per 100,000 have seen an over 100% increase.
Haas attributed the increase to the fentanyl crisis, saying at least one death was caused by a fentanyl overdose.
Metro does not provide news releases for deaths caused by medical incidents, natural causes or suicide, a spokesperson said. One of those medical incident deaths in 2023 was 33-year-old Fernando Martinez Jr., whose mother is suing the department in a federal court over her son’s death in February 2023.
The lawsuit, which also names Wellpath, the company that provides medical care at the jail, alleges that Martinez died of starvation while in custody due to improper supervision and medical intervention from police and Wellpath.
The Clark County Coroner ruled that Martinez died of “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” however the man’s autopsy report lists Martinez’s cardiovascular system as “unremarkable.”
Martinez lost over 60 pounds during his 77 days inincarceration before his death, according to the lawsuit.
Martinez, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia prior to his arrest, was known to self-induce vomiting and did not take his prescribed medicine while incarcerated, which the lawsuit claims led to his death.
Martinez’s death was not addressed by Metro Police or county commissioners during the August 2023 report presentation. The report was placed on the consent agenda, which is reserved for items to be considered without discussion.
One person has died in the detention center in 2024, a spokesperson with Metro police said.
Metro has previously said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Failure on the national level
The Department of Justice calls for every jail in the United States to submit quarterly reports as part of the Death in Custody Reporting Act. The act collects data from cities on in-custody deaths for public consumption.
Officials questioned by the Sun in Henderson, Las Vegas, Mesquite and North Las Vegas thought the federal reporting also satisfied the 2019 state law. It doesn’t.
In a statement, Henderson officials said, “The Henderson City Jail submits quarterly reports to the state as the law requires.”
The federal accumulation of jail data was described as a “failure” by a U.S. Senate subcommittee that investigated the reporting act after the Government Accountability Office found 990 in-custody deaths not reported. The GAO looked at news stories about inmate deaths and wondered why some weren’t included in the reporting.
A 2022 report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found 70% of the DOJ’s collected data through the reporting act was missing at least one of the required elements.
“Without this information, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do the level of policy reform necessary to stop preventable deaths in custody,” said Bree Spencer, senior program director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The fact that we don’t even have a basic count — the United States government cannot tell us how many people die in custody each year — it is both a moral and a practical failure.”
Spencer’s work for the nonprofit group is in tandem with Project On Government Oversight and has largely focused on the federal government’s lukewarm enforcement of the reporting act. The groups co-published a report in 2023 dedicated to highlighting the importance of the reporting act and the shortcomings of its enforcement.
A lack of prioritization and shifting methodologies are what Spencer and others point to as why the federal government’s collection of data has failed.
“The data form that is being used has six questions, and one of them is the person’s name,” said David Janovsky, senior policy analyst at Project Government Oversight. “So, if you’re talking about a missing data field, you’re already talking about a huge percentage of the total information that’s being solicited.”
The Performance Measures Questionnaire, which jails and prisons are required to fill out for reporting instances when an inmate dies, has nearly identical reporting requirements to the “basic demographics” outlined in Nevada’s law.
All jails in Southern Nevada submit their quarterly reports to the Nevada Department of Safety to satisfy the federal requirement, city officials said. The information jails submit is “publicly” available through a Freedom of Information Act request, however Spencer said FOIA does not make the information more accessible.
“FOIA just really doesn’t mean what people think it means, I think it gives people in the general public a false sense of access, honestly,” Spencer said. “And the number of times pro bono lawyers who are working with us have submitted FOIAs and they’ve gotten back outrageous estimates of cost. If a FOIA cost $400, or $1,000, or $10,000, or tens of thousands of dollars, is it really available to the public?”
One point is clear from the data available from the DOJ and the Sun’s inquiries to local officials: Deaths in custody are on the rise in Southern Nevada.
In Las Vegas alone, 16 people died in custody: 13 at the Clark County Detention Center and three in the City of Las Vegas Jail. Based on the report from the DOJ, jail deaths in Las Vegas alone are equal to jail deaths across the entire state in 2019.
“Why have we allowed, in our country, law enforcement to completely abdicate responsibility for data collection?” Spencer said. “So many other sectors would never get away with this lack of information.”
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