LOOKING IN ON: CARSON CITY

Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

CARSON CITY - While Gov. Jim Gibbons is preparing to reduce the state's spending, his wife is pushing plans to raise the next biennium's budget by millions of dollars to curb methamphetamine use.

Dawn Gibbons is a member of the Governor's Working Group on Methamphetamine Use, which has tentatively proposed new programs to treat methamphetamine users and to restore some lost federal funds.

Among other efforts, the committee wants the state to replace the more than $6 million in federal prevention and treatment funds that Nevada will lose over the next decade.

The group also has called for the establishment of a Drug Endangered Children program to support and fund community-based early identification programs for first-time juvenile and adult offenders. It recommends establishing minimum requirements for a comprehensive prevention education in grades K-12, increasing the salaries of prevention specialists, raising money for a media campaign and providing expanded training for judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers.

The working group, created by Gov. Gibbons, is due to expire Dec. 31 but has asked the governor to extend its authority until June 30, 2009.

So far the group has not put a final price tag on its recommendations.

It's tough to damage the reputation of a killer who was once on death row, even with false statements, the Nevada Supreme Court has ruled.

Inmate John F. Mazzan filed a defamation suit against Washoe District Judge Chuck Weller over comments that Weller made before he became a judge. The killer specifically objected to Weller's saying: "I put Jack Mazzan back in prison, where he belongs."

The state Supreme Court, in dismissing Mazzan's suit last week, said even if the statement were false, "it does not tend to lower Mazzan's reputation in the community or excite derogatory opinions about him."

Any harm to Mazzan's reputation, the court said, came when he pleaded guilty to the 1978 fatal stabbing of Richard Minor Jr. in Reno in an apparent robbery for drugs and money. Minor was the son of a former district judge.

Mazzan was sentenced to death, got a second penalty hearing and again received the death penalty. But he received another trial and now is serving a life term.

Nevada's use of three drugs to execute a convicted killer is a dignified way to die in which an unconscious inmate cannot feel any pain, the state attorney general's office contends.

The attorney general's office is urging the Nevada Supreme Court to reject a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenges the method used by the state to execute inmates.

The ACLU and Mario De La Rosa of the Ahora newspaper were able to block the scheduled October execution of Las Vegas killer Patrick Castillo, who had given up his appeals and was ready to die. The court issued an order stopping the execution only hours before it was scheduled to occur.

The court also has ordered briefs on whether the three-drug procedure represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Castillo was sentenced to death for the November 1998 tire-iron slaying of 86-year-old Isabelle Berndt in her Las Vegas home. He stole money, a VCR and silverware after the killing.

In the attorney general's filing, Chief Deputy Attorney General Daniel Wong argues that use of the three drugs does not cause "unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain."

The first of the three drugs administered - sodium thiopental - knocks out the inmate in about one minute. "The condemned cannot feel because the condemned is unconscious from the sodium thiopental," Wong wrote in his brief. The three-drug combination, when properly administered, "will result in a pain-free, dignified end of life for the condemned inmate."

The ACLU's petition, however, says injecting the inmate with the second drug, pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, masks signs of the excruciating pain the inmate feels when the death drug, potassium chloride, is administered.

Wong said the attorney general's office is taking no position on whether the Nevada court should delay all executions until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a Kentucky case on the constitutionality of lethal injection.