Clark County’s DA endorsed Republican Joe Lombardo today. Look at the men Ford would spare from execution, and it’s not hard to see why.
Steve Wolfson is a Democrat. He’s been one his whole career.
Today he endorsed a Republican for governor.
Wolfson is the Clark County District Attorney. He runs an office of nearly 800 people.
His deputies handle roughly 140,000 cases a year. He seeks the death penalty more often than almost any prosecutor in America.
And he’s backing Gov. Joe Lombardo over his own party’s nominee, Attorney General Aaron Ford.
“I’m a Democrat, and he’s a Republican, but that has never mattered when it comes to public safety,” Wolfson said.
Wolfson doesn’t hand out cross-party endorsements lightly. So why this one?
Well, let’s look at where Aaron Ford stands on the worst killers this state has ever convicted.
“I’ve been unequivocal about my position on the death penalty,” Ford told The Nevada Independent this year. “I am opposed to it, and I would sign the bill to repeal.”
Back in 2023, he went further.
“I have always been and will always be opposed to the death penalty,” he said.
Always. Will always. Unequivocal.
Plenty of people oppose the death penalty. In theory.
Until they learn what these men did. So let’s refresh some memories.
The Men Wolfson Wanted Executed
This past April, Wolfson asked judges to sign execution warrants for three death-row inmates. Their appeals had run out. Juries had spoken decades ago.
Here’s who they are.
Zane Floyd. Before dawn on June 3, 1999, Floyd walked into an Albertsons on West Sahara with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Hours earlier, he had kidnapped a woman at gunpoint and raped her. Then told her she had 60 seconds to run before he killed her.
He then went to the store and started shooting. He killed four employees.
A 40-year-old man, shot in the back. Another man, 40. A woman, 60. A young man, 31. A fifth worker, just 21, survived by playing dead after being shot twice.
The store cameras caught all of it.
Prosecutors called it the worst massacre in Las Vegas history at the time.
Donald Sherman. In 1994, Sherman broke into a home in Sun City. A retired doctor was asleep in his own bed.
Sherman beat him to death with a hammer.
Sherman was on parole at the time. For a previous killing.
The system had already let him out once. He used that freedom to kill again.
Sterling Atkins. In 1994, Atkins and two other men attacked a young mother in North Las Vegas.
They beat her. They sexually assaulted her. They strangled her.
Atkins has been on death row for more than three decades.
These are the three men Wolfson wanted to finally face justice.
Under a Governor Ford, they never will. And they aren’t alone.
More Men Ford Would Spare
Nevada’s death row also holds others whose crimes defy description.
Javier Righetti. On September 2, 2011, a 15-year-old high school freshman texted her mom that she was walking home.
She never made it.
Righetti followed her with a knife. He raped her. He stabbed her more than 80 times. He carved initials into her body.
Then he went home and searched the internet for how to dispose of a body.
He came back with gasoline and set her on fire.
Her burned remains were found in a vacant lot. Her mother could see it from her bedroom window.
Righetti pleaded guilty. A jury sentenced him to death.
Ammar Harris. At 3:00 a.m. on February 21, 2013, Harris pulled alongside a Maserati on the Las Vegas Strip and opened fire.
He killed the 27-year-old driver. The car careened into a taxi. The taxi exploded in a fireball. The cab driver and his passenger burned to death.
Three people dead on one of the most famous streets in the world. The jury found ten aggravating factors.
Jeremiah Bean. Over Mother’s Day weekend in 2013, Bean needed drug money.
He broke into the home of an elderly couple in Fernley, shot them both, and drove off in their truck.
He wasn’t done.
By the end of that weekend, he had killed five strangers in three separate attacks. He set one home on fire to destroy the evidence.
The Nevada Supreme Court upheld his death sentence unanimously.
Joseph Weldon Smith. In 1990, in a gated Henderson neighborhood, Smith beat his wife and two stepdaughters with a hammer and strangled them.
One stepdaughter was 20. The other was 12.
Then he left a note at the scene with a fake story blaming mystery creditors.
Every one of these men was sentenced to die.
Aaron Ford would make sure none of them ever do.
Then There’s the Norman Smith Case
In 2015, Smith killed a pregnant woman in a Las Vegas parking lot. He was out on bail at the time, facing charges for a string of armed robberies of Strip tourists.
He was charged with murder and convicted of voluntary manslaughter and armed robbery. He got 10 to 39 years.
This year, Ford personally sponsored Smith’s bid for clemency.
Under Pardons Board rules, an inmate’s application sits in a queue until a board member chooses to sponsor it. Ford chose Smith’s.
A review of this year’s agendas found it was the only commutation request Ford sponsored all year.
The board turned it down. Ford didn’t even show up for the hearing.
Later that day, a tracker caught him at the Las Vegas airport and asked about Smith. Ford said he didn’t know which case the man meant. Then he walked away.
When reporters pressed, Ford’s office said he acted after a letter of support from the prosecutor.
Here’s the problem. That prosecutor works for Steve Wolfson. And his letter to the Pardons Board didn’t support clemency.
It described the crime. It described the victim’s family filling the hearing room.
Wolfson’s office publicly disputed Ford’s account. Ford’s office then said it meant a different letter, written earlier, to the parole board.
That letter has never been released.
Wolfson said today that he and Lombardo have worked “to put violent criminals away and keep them there.”
Aaron Ford tried to get one out early.
When It Mattered
In December 2022, outgoing Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak tried to commute every death sentence in Nevada with one vote.
He put it on the Pardons Board agenda in the final weeks of his term.
Wolfson went to court and stopped it.
Ford sat on that board. He stayed quiet.
He later explained that he’s careful about what he says out loud, since he’s counsel to the board.
He wasn’t so careful this year when he put his name on Norman Smith’s application.
The Contrast
Joe Lombardo spent more than three decades in law enforcement. As sheriff, he worked side by side with Wolfson’s office. And on the death penalty, he’s been clear.
During his 2022 campaign, he said he supports it, as long as there’s due process.
In 2025, the Democrat-controlled Legislature passed SB 350.
The bill would have stretched the window for carrying out an execution order from 60–90 days to 120–180 days.
More time. More delay. More appeals.
Lombardo vetoed it.
In his veto letter, he wrote that the bill would make justice “even more elusive for victims and their families.”
One candidate looks at these case files and sees men who earned the sentence a jury gave them.
The other looks at the same files and says, unequivocally, that he’d sign a bill to spare them.
The Juries Said Death, Ford Says No
Four grocery workers who just showed up for an early shift.
A retired doctor asleep in his own bed.
A young mother left dead by three men.
A 15-year-old girl walking home from school.
A cab driver and his passenger, burned alive on the Strip.
A 12-year-old girl, killed in her own home by her stepfather.
Juries looked at what was done to them. They said death.
Aaron Ford has seen these files. Every autopsy. Every crime scene photo.
And he still says he’d sign the bill to spare every one of these men.
Steve Wolfson and Joe Lombardo stand with the victims.
Aaron Ford stands with the men who killed them. Remember in November.
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