Judge to decide Monday on whether Nevada can set execution

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A state judge will decide next week whether prosecutors in Las Vegas can plan the first execution in Nevada in 15 years.

District Judge Michael Villani said at a hearing Friday in Las Vegas that he will make a decision on Monday in the case of Zane Michael Floyd, who was convicted of killing four people in a grocery store.

Prosecutors are pushing to have Floyd executed in late July.

“At some point, this has to be final,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Alex Chen said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “If the court never sets a date for certain, then there really is no goal, and theoretically this litigation will just continue for years and years and years.”

State prison officials have not disclosed the names of the drugs or the injection procedure they plan to use in Floyd’s death.

Nevada requires executions to be by lethal injection, and state law requires prison officials to make public their execution plan, or protocol, only after a death warrant is issued.

Floyd, 45, does not want to die. He has been on death row since he was convicted in 2000 in the shotgun killing of four people and the wounding of a fifth person at a Las Vegas supermarket in 1999.

After he lost federal appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take his case, Clark County prosecutors earlier this year moved forward to carry out his sentence.

At the time, a measure was pending in the state Legislature to abolish the death penalty. It failed.

Attorneys from the federal public defender’s office in Las Vegas are fighting in state and federal courts to keep Floyd alive.

A federal judge signaled this week that he may block an execution date once it’s set in order to review the execution procedure and drug officials plan to use. U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware II set a June 10 hearing for prison officials to disclose the type of drugs that would be used.

Challenges of the drugs and the execution procedure that prisons officials drew up for the lethal injection of twice-convicted killer Scott Dozier stalled his execution twice, in 2017 and 2018.

Dozier had pleaded with the state to put him to death and expressed frustration at the delays. He killed himself in prison in January 2019.

Defense attorney David Anthony, who represented Dozier and now represents Floyd, told Boulware on Thursday that Floyd has also applied for a Sept. 21 clemency hearing before the state Board of Pardons. The panel is made up of the governor, seven state Supreme Court justices and the state attorney general.

The last person put to death in Nevada was Daryl Mack in 2006 for a 1988 rape and murder in Reno. Mack asked for his sentence to be carried out.

Source: The Associated Press, Staff, June 4, 2021

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