Nevada Pardons Man Imprisoned 21 Years as a Result of Wrongful Capital Murder Prosecution

Nevada has par­doned Fred Steese (pic­tured), who spent 21 years in prison after Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors wrong­ly sought the death penal­ty against him while with­old­ing evi­dence that he was not even in the state at the time the mur­der occurred. In what news reports described as ​“a clear rebuke to the Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors,” the Nevada Board of Pardons Commissioners vot­ed 8 – 1 on November 8 to grant Steese a full pardon. 

“I’m a new man now,” Steese said. ​“It’s lift­ed a black cloud over me.” 

The sev­en jus­tices of the Nevada Supreme Court and Governor Brian Sandoval vot­ed in favor of clear­ing Steese’s name; only Adam Laxalt, the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al and a cur­rent can­di­date for gov­er­nor, vot­ed against the pardon. 

Steese was charged with cap­i­tal mur­der in the high-pro­file 1992 killing of Las Vegas cir­cus per­former, Gerard Soules. He was pros­e­cut­ed by Bill Kephart and Doug Herndon, who both went on to become dis­trict judges in Las Vegas. 

Steese was in Idaho at the time of Soules’s death, but signed a false con­fes­sion after a five-hour inter­ro­ga­tion and 35 hours with­out sleep. At tri­al he pre­sent­ed numer­ous ali­bi wit­ness who tes­ti­fied that he was in Idaho at the time. 

Kephart — who also com­mit­ted mis­con­duct in sev­er­al oth­er cap­i­tal tri­als before being elect­ed as a judge in 2014 — argued to the jury (with no sup­port­ing evi­dence) that the wit­ness­es had seen Steese’s broth­er in Idaho and that Steese had man­u­fac­tured the ali­bi. After Steese was con­vict­ed in 1995, pros­e­cu­tors with­drew the death penal­ty and Steese was sen­tenced to two life sen­tences. He spent two decades in prison before fed­er­al pub­lic defend­ers proved that his broth­er, estranged since child­hood, couldn’t have helped with Steese’s ali­bi. The fed­er­al defend­ers’ inves­ti­ga­tion also unearthed phone records in the prosecution’s files that proved Steese was in Idaho at the time of the murder. 

In 2012, a Nevada Eighth Judicial District Court judge issued an Order of Actual Innocence, declar­ing that Steese didn’t kill any­one. But the Clark County District Attorney’s Office refused to admit it had con­vict­ed an inno­cent man. In 2013, Assistant District Attorney Pamela Weckerly told Steese she’d agree to release him from prison only if he entered an Alford plea, in which, while main­tain­ing his inno­cence, he admit­ted there was suf­fi­cient evi­dence on which he could be convicted. 

After gain­ing his free­dom, Steese — still with a mur­der con­vic­tion on his record— strug­gled to find employ­ment and expe­ri­enced peri­ods of home­less­ness before find­ing work as a cross-coun­try truck­er. At the par­don hear­ing, Steese’s pro-bono attor­ney lawyer, Lisa Rasmussen, said that from the time of his inter­ro­ga­tion through the time of his release from prison, his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights had been ​“vio­lat­ed in a huge way.” Rasmussen con­demned the pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct in the case as ​“an embar­rass­ment and a black mark on Clark County and the state of Nevada.” 

After Steese him­self tes­ti­fied, the board heard from Kathy Nasrey, the sis­ter of Gerard Soules, who demand­ed that Kephart, Herndon, and oth­ers be held account­able for know­ing­ly con­vict­ing an inno­cent man while her brother’s killer remained on the loose. ​“Now that it was clear that cer­tain lawyers and detec­tives helped con­vict an inno­cent man,” she said, ​“will they be held account­able for tak­ing away 20 years of his life?”

In May 2017, Kephart was charged by the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline with sev­er­al vio­la­tions of the judi­cial code of con­duct after mak­ing state­ments to the media that could ​“affect the out­come or impair the fair­ness” of appel­late pro­ceed­ings in anoth­er con­tro­ver­sial murder prosecution.