The ACLU of Nevada was notified on May 7, 2008, that inmate William Castillo has filed a motion with the Nevada Supreme Court to intervene in the ACLU's existing challenge to the state's lethal injection protocols.  This is a momentous change, because when the ACLU filed its initial challenge last October, Castillo was a "volunteer" for the death penalty, and had ordered his attorneys to drop all appeals.  He has now changed his mind.

The ACLU of Nevada, in cooperation with the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, is proud to announce the selection of Judy Cox as its first-ever Beverly Rogers Fellow, beginning in September 2008.

On Monday, the Nevada Supreme Court issued a ruling suggesting that it shares the ACLU of Nevada’s concerns about the constitutionality of a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department policy, the “"Downtown Area of Command Strategic Initiative.” Under the Downtown Initiative, people who have criminal records are arrested for minor infractions, while all others are just cited or ticketed. Although the order did not rule on the Downtown Initiative directly, it described the initiative as questionable.

The ACLU of Nevada and the ACLU's National Prison Project, filed a class-action lawsuit today against the director of Nevada’s Department of Corrections and other top governmental officials in Nevada for failing to rectify a pervasive pattern of grossly inadequate medical care at the Ely State Prison that creates a substantial risk of serious medical harm for each of the prison’s 1,000 inmates. The lawsuit charges that the prison lacks the most basic elements of an adequate prison health care system and deprives prisoners of the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities.

Members of the Churchill County community concerned the ACLU of Nevada with an administrative regulation which would allow drug dogs to sniff the belongings of high school students. These searches would be totally suspicionless and random in a school district that purports to have no serious drug problem.

In October 2007, the Esmerelda County School Board approved a policy that prohibits speaking Spanish while riding the school bus. The ACLU received complaints from parents whose children were affected by this policy, and sent a letter to the School District Superintendent Robert Aumaugher asking him to immediately rescind the policy. Mr. Aumaugher agreed to make it clear that students are allowed to speak Spanish while they ride the school bus and sent a letter to parents - in both Spanish and English - explaining the district’s language policy.