Las Vegas Criminal Defense Blog

Last week several suspects broke Nevada kidnapping law by abducting a tourist at gunpoint on the Strip, holding him for more than a day, stealing his money and valuables and beating him. According to Lt. Clint Nichols, the tourist was picked at random near the overpass at Flamingo Road. The suspects remain at large.

NRS 200.310 defines Nevada kidnapping law in the first degree as willfully seizing, confining, inveigling, enticing, decoying, abducting, concealing, or carrying away a person with the intent to hold them either for the purpose of ransom or committing sexual assault, extortion, robbery, battery or murder. Nevada kidnapping law in the second degree occurs when the suspect willfully takes a person with the intent to keep them secretly imprisoned within the state, to convey them out of the state, or to hold them against their will.

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The Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping case has prompted parole officers in Nevada to search the backyards of the sex offenders under their supervision. In addition, they’re also checking satellite images of their residences on Google Earth. In an effort to crack down on sex crimes in Nevada, Governor Jim Gibbons said he wants to make sure "that our officers are checking things they may have bypassed in the past."

According to a legislative audit released last year, the Nevada Division of Parole and Probation (http://dps.nv.gov/npp/index.shtml) isn’t always meeting their standards: Thirty-one percent of the time, parole officers neglected to meet their twice-monthly requirement to visit sex offenders. And nearly fifty percent of the time, parole officers didn’t take the required DNA samples from the sex offenders. Since, then, however, these problems have reportedly been addressed.

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Recently four men have been arrested and booked in Las Vegas for pimping a 15-year-old girl. They face charges of living off the earnings of a prostitute and first-degree kidnapping in Las Vegas, the latter of which may carry a life sentence.

The suspects, who are all under twenty-two years old, are members of or associated with the LA-based gang “Blythe Street.” They’re accused of keeping a 15-year-old girl locked in a room at an Extended Stay Motel and forcing her to have sex with Johns. Allegedly they struck her in the face with a gun when she tried to leave and even played “Russian Roulette” on her with a gun.

Details of the alleged kidnapping in Las Vegas are still unclear, but the girl was apparently locked up for several weeks. The situation wasn’t discovered by authorities until a motel patron, whom one of the suspects tried to solicit the girl to, called the police.

The Nevada Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on August 3rd to determine whether to grant O.J. Simpson’s request for bail release pending his appeal. In 2008, Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping in Las Vegas.

This will be the first time in eight years that the Nevada Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for bail pending appeal. This could be due, in part, to Simpson’s celebrity, but it also suggests that he has potentially meritorious issues.

Simpson attorney Yale Galanter, who also defended him in his assault and kidnapping in Las Vegas case, admits he has a high burden to meet in order to prevail at this hearing, but he’s insistent that Simpson will not be a flight risk: "He's got no place to go, no place to hide. News crews follow him to the restaurant, to the golf course, to school to pick up his kids. He's truly one of the most recognizable people on the planet."