Judge says he'll have time to hear Nevada execution plan

LAS VEGAS — A federal judge acknowledged Monday that with the proposed date for Nevada's first execution in 15 years to be scheduled for late July, he'll have time to review the state's unannounced lethal injection plan and decide what information about it should be made public.
"We still need to move quickly because of the proposed date," U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware II said.
An execution date is expected to be set for convicted mass murderer Zane Michael Floyd by a state judge on Friday.
Floyd, 45, is fighting his execution for the 1999 shotgun killings of four people and the wounding of a fifth at a Las Vegas supermarket. He lost federal appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take his case.
Boulware told attorneys for Floyd, the state and the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he was inclined to grant a stay of execution so he can review the execution process, called a protocol. But the judge said no decision-making can take place until state officials supply details about the protocol.
"We're waiting for a key piece of evidence that is central to all this inquiry to be finalized," Boulware said.
Nevada Department of Corrections Director Charles Daniels testified last Thursday that he has not finalized the execution plan — including the drugs that would be used. Daniels said he'd like to be given up 120 days to do so.
Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson had wanted to seek Floyd's execution in early June. Last Friday, prosecutor Alexander Chen said Judge Michael Villani will be asked this week to set Floyd's execution date during the last week of July. Nevada would join Texas, Idaho and Pennsylvania as the only U.S. states with executions scheduled.
State prison officials want to keep secret their records about the drugs that would be used, how they are obtained and the names of the manufacturers.
The last execution in Nevada was of Daryl Mack in 2006. He was convicted in a 1988 rape and murder in Reno and asked for his lethal injection to be carried out.
The court fight over Floyd's execution is shadowed by delays of an execution that was scheduled twice — in 2017 and 2018 — for convicted killer Scott Dozier.
Dozier pleaded with the state to put him to death, but his lethal injection was called off twice by court fights over the protocol, the never-before-used combination of drugs and the unwillingness of pharmaceutical companies to let their products be used. Dozier killed himself in prison in January 2019.
Death penalty opponents want the Legislature to repeal capital punishment in Nevada. They have said the process is expensive and unwieldy and that the 64 people currently on the state's death row should have their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.
The state Assembly approved a repeal bill in April, but leaders in the state Senate have not indicated whether they’ll take up the measure before the Legislature adjourns next month. Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, opposes it.
Leaders of civil rights and Black community groups held a virtual news conference Monday to describe what they called inequities in Nevada’s capital punishment law and to call for the repeal bill to get a Senate hearing.
“Why, I ask you, are we wasting money on killing people? Why?” asked Ender Austin III, a regional leader of Faith in Action Nevada. He said millions of dollars spent on death penalty case investigations, trials and appeals could be better spent educating children.
Boulware set another hearing about Floyd's case for May 20.