“It was a lot more work than we anticipated for sure, and that it kept being so much work, I think was surprising,” Bartlett said. “It wasn’t just a quick six months of work, and it’s over. It really was a substantial amount of work over a long period of time.”
Initially, the progress was rapid. Data from the state Office of Public Defense shows Clark County courts vacated 1,200 eligible cases in 2021 and 2,500 cases in 2022. But since then, the pace has slowed. The data shows Clark County courts vacated just 600 cases in 2023 and 700 cases in 2024.
Of the county’s roughly 20,000 total eligible cases, about 5,000 of them have been cleared from people’s records, according to the state data.
Clark County, however, leads the state’s overall pace. According to reporting from Investigate West, state officials say roughly 18 percent, or 114,000 of the state’s 626,000, of the eligible drug convictions have been vacated.
Bartlett estimates the already short-staffed Clark County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has spent hundreds of hours reviewing thousands of motions to vacate convictions to ensure the Blake decision applies. It was the office’s responsibility to determine what the ruling meant for pending cases, criminal histories, and outstanding arrest warrants and search warrants for those crimes.
The prosecutor’s office started by proactively clearing the cases it knew about. Now, the office relies on people to reach out through a recently established email address.
Defense attorney Roger Bennett said many remain unaware of the ruling and the availability of legal fee refunds.
“The state’s done a heck of a job trying to publicize this, but I get people all the time, and they’ll want to do one service or another, and I tell them about this Blake decision — they’re shocked,” Bennett said.
Bennett said his office has helped people get hundreds of convictions cleared. Every week, he gets another request from someone who thinks they have a qualifying conviction.
“We’ll get one, and then they’ll mention, ‘Hey my wife’s got one,’ or ‘My friend’s got one,’ ” Bennett said.
When people contact Bennett’s office and he starts the process with them, progress is slow, he said. They must wait on a prosecutor to review and confirm that a case is eligible, the county clerk’s office to calculate the applicable refund amount, and the state’s refund office to grant the request. Knowing each of the agencies involved are reviewing countless similar requests, along with their other job responsibilities, Bennett said getting a single case vacated can take months.
“In a perfect world, a client would contact me, and I’d research their history, and I’d draft up the motion. … These cases easily could be done, in terms of the work, in a month,” Bennett said. “But they can’t because there’s so many of them, I guess is the problem.”
Local officials say they don’t know when Clark County will be done with vacating Blake eligible cases. They don’t have their own reliable spreadsheet indicating which cases remain, Bartlett said.
“Whatever the numbers are, I feel confident that we’ve done what we can so that we’re not missing anything that’s been brought to us, and we’re not acting as a roadblock,” Bartlett said.
