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.

In testimony for her 2017 private prison ban bill, she argued that private prisons have a perverse incentive to keep inmates behind bars longer rather than rehabilitate them, and supporters of her bill argued that private prison operations are less transparent than when they are under state control.

Although NDOC spokeswoman Brooke Santina couldn’t provide exact figures on how many inmates had been released with no ID, the agency releases about 6,200 people a year, so Dzurenda’s estimate of 50 percent would mean more than 3,000 inmates are leaving without one each year.

An average of nearly 600 people who served more than a year in prison attempt to buy a firearm and are rejected every year because of the state’s background check system, according to data from the Nevada Department of Public Safety. And over the last six years, an average of 319 people previously convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence and 46 people with restraining orders were prevented from buying a gun from a licensed dealer.

An independent study by UNLV Center for Crime and Justice Policy researchers on the state’s new Day Reporting Centers shows participants in the program generally had more success landing housing, holding a job and staying out of trouble than a control group.

“When the sheriff goes out and we go out in the community, we constantly hear these stories that you know, we’ve got a family that now is separated because of a very small thing like a traffic warrant,” Callaway said. “And so I think the sheriff has listened to that and he’s taken that to heart.”

Despite skepticism from some Republicans, members of the legislative Interim Finance Committee granted the attorney general’s office permission on Wednesday to open up bidding for an outside law firm to represent the state in litigation against opioid manufacturers. Ford, who between 2015 and 2018 worked for a private law firm that is representing numerous Nevada municipalities in class action lawsuits, also said Wednesday that he will recuse himself from selection of outside counsel.

One person poised to be at the center of the debate is Holly Welborn, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and the civil liberties organization’s primary voice at the table during the 120-day legislative session. Welborn, who graduated from UNLV and worked on political campaigns prior to joining the ACLU, sat down with reporters from The Nevada Independent on Friday to discuss her organization's priorities for the upcoming session.

Another investigation of the deadly attack on a Las Vegas country music festival has closed without clarity about the gunman’s motive, instead suggesting a complicated set of personality traits and health reasons may have played a role.

Wilber Ernesto Martinez Guzman, 20, made his first appearance in court on Thursday after he was charged with 36 counts of property crime including burglary and possession of stolen property. A native of El Salvador, he is also charged as a prohibited person in possession of a firearm because he is suspected of immigrating illegally to the U.S.

Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam says Wilbur Ernesto Martinez Guzman, a Carson City resident who is either 19 or 20, was taken into custody Saturday afternoon on suspicion of burglary, possession of stolen property and immigration law violations. He’s being held in the Carson City Detention Center under 24-hour watch from medical and mental health personnel.