No work session or committee vote was held on AB291 on Friday, but the bill is expected to receive a waiver from legislative deadlines for continued work and a future amendment — agreed to by several gun safety groups — removing language allowing local governments to preempt state gun laws and instead replacing it with “red flag” provisions, which allow law enforcement and family members to request a court order temporarily seizing an individual's firearms. It’s also likely to include aspects of Democratic Assemblyman Ozzie Fumo’s bill creating criminal penalties for negligently storing or leaving a firearm where a child can access it.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee voted 10-5 on Tuesday on AB236, a bill based on 25 recommendations from the state’s Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice after the Crime and Justice Institute combed through reams of data about what’s driving the state’s rising prison population. The institute said implementing the full slate of recommendations could save some $640 million in prison costs over 10 years.

The bill enshrines many recommendations developed during the interim by criminal justice leaders and the Crime and Justice Institute, which projected that implementing all the changes could cut prison costs by $640 million over the next decade.

The contract is based on contingent fees, an arrangement wherein the state will pay nothing up front but will owe a certain percentage of any damages received if the state prevails in the suit. The percentages in the contract are based on the amount of damages recovered and whether they are paid prior to or after discovery in any court proceeding. It sets maximum recoverable amounts by the firm in the following ranges:

In a six-page internal memorandum, which was sent to staff of the attorney general’s office last week and shared with The Nevada Independent, Ford and his staff outlined a number of ambitious recommendations and policy goals aimed at addressing the premise that just locking people up isn’t working.

Although state lawmakers in 2017 approved $200,000 a year in new funding for a grant management software program — a system backers said could result in up to tens of millions of dollars in untapped federal funds — a lawsuit filed by a company that sought but didn’t receive the contract has stalled implementation of the system for the foreseeable future.

Recently, advocates with the Mass Liberation Project visited Carson City to lobby their legislators for an overhaul of the bail system and laws that would reduce the prison population. PLAN Executive Director Laura Martin said in spite of uncertainty about how far the Democratic-controlled Legislature will go on criminal justice reform, she feels a clarity of purpose.

As introduced by Democratic Assemblyman Steve Yeager, AB411 would move the vast majority of traffic violations from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil offense, unless a more severe penalty for the offense exists in state law. It would affect a wide range of illicit traffic behavior including speeding, driving with individuals in a truck bed, illegal turns, driving without a seatbelt or not complying with directives in a construction zone, while retaining higher penalties for more serious crimes like DUI, reckless driving or drag racing.

Sponsored by Democratic Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson, AB431 would end the state’s byzantine legal structure for the restoration of voting rights for previously incarcerated people, and instead require that any individual not behind bars is afforded the right to vote. An estimated 90,000 Nevadans were unable to vote in the 2016 election because of prior convictions, or about 4 percent of the voting-age population.

Berry’s case took center stage on Thursday during a hearing for AB267, which would allow people who were wrongfully convicted to collect payments from the state to compensate for the time they lost. The pay scale is graduated starting at $50,000 per year imprisoned, but people like Berry who spent more than 21 years in prison could be paid $100,000 for each year they lost behind bars.

The court is also a sobering reminder of how far Nevada remains from meeting the needs of all of children on the spectrum. Of the nearly 8,500 children estimated to have autism within Nevada’s school system, only several hundred are getting help through the Autism Treatment Assistance Program or Medicaid, and some families are waiting years for services.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told an industry group Thursday that he supports the creation of marijuana consumption lounges as long as they don’t also include alcohol sales. His comment came as he provided insight from the law enforcement side during a Las Vegas Medical Marijuana Association luncheon.

Even when police and city officials see telltale signs that women are living full-time in massage parlors and working illegally as prostitutes, it can be a near-impossible task to get victims to testify against the people who are profiting from them and shut the business down once and for all, officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.

More than two decades after the last major overhaul of criminal sentencing in Nevada, lawmakers armed with data from a monthslong research project are taking up what the bill sponsor calls “probably the single most important and transformative criminal justice bill in the history of this building.”

Democratic Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, a former corrections officer who sponsored AB183 and a similar bill in 2017, wants Nevada to end its private prison contracts within three years. She argued private companies are driven by their bottom lines and have a disincentive to rehabilitate prisoners.

Death row inmate Kevin Lisle has voluntarily given up his right to appeal and is seeking to be executed, potentially setting up another situation in which Nevada struggles to carry out a death sentence.

Ben Lieberman is now working to get legislation passed in Nevada that would authorize police to use a device after a crash that detects swiping and typing on the driver’s phone. AB200, sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Michelle Gorelow, is up for a hearing Friday morning in the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

Under the existing law, someone might be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for murder but only have a weapons enhancement of 1-3 years of prison time because a gun was used in the crime. The measure — which reflects an older sentencing structure Nevada used in the 1990s and early 2000s — would raise such a sentence to 40 years to life.