Nevada will pay $447,000 in court-ordered fines for continued delays in providing mental health care to criminal defendants deemed unfit for trial in Clark County, according to an Associated Press report on state and court actions. The fines reflect what the report described as a persistent pattern of missed transfer deadlines amid shortages of mental health treatment capacity.
The sanctions trace to a Nevada system in which defendants found unfit for trial are supposed to be transferred to a mental health facility within seven days of a court order. The AP report said the state has repeatedly failed to meet that deadline, with the delays continuing despite a shortage of available mental health facilities.
After a Clark County judge held the state in contempt last year, sanctions were set at $500 per day for each instance in which a transfer was delayed. The AP report said that since then, there have been 32 orders in which sanctions were applied, totaling the $447,000 penalty Nevada will pay.
The AP report said the state has also faced additional fines over similar delays, totaling $1.4 million over the past two years. It said more than half of that total came last year through a $753,500 penalty in Washoe County.
Nevada’s Board of Examiners, a panel made up of the governor, attorney general and secretary of state, approved the Clark County-related payments on Tuesday without discussion, the AP report said. The Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health, which the report identified as responsible for connecting defendants with treatment, did not respond to a request for comment.
The money still requires one more approval, according to the AP report: Nevada’s Interim Finance Committee, a group of lawmakers that makes financial decisions when the Legislature is not in session. After that step, the report said the funding would go to Mojave Mental Health, a clinic affiliated with UNLV.
In explaining the sanctions and the broader compliance issues, the AP report cited comments from Judge Christy Craig during a December Clark County court hearing. The report said Craig questioned why the division had not addressed the issue earlier and expressed concern about how frequently delays occurred even as the agency sought to lower wait times.
The AP report said the division has described efforts including placing some defendants into nursing facilities, hiring staff aimed at diverting people who might be better served outside hospitals, renovating a mental health building to increase capacity, and starting mental health programming in detention centers where defendants are held before receiving treatment. It also described a budget allocating $17.6 million for 21 additional beds for Southern Nevada patients and 53 new positions related to care for criminal defendants, and said the state plans to build a new mental health treatment facility in Southern Nevada set to open in 2029.
At the December hearing, Craig also warned that delays can create downstream harms while defendants wait for transport and treatment, the AP report said. The report quoted Craig as saying, “Incapacitated criminal defendants suffer from various harms while they languish in facilities that are not equipped to treat them while awaiting transport,” and said those harms can include worsening mental illness, bodily harm and even death.
The AP report said Craig described how the problem can worsen in specific cases, including one referenced incident in which a man detained in a county jail while awaiting mental health treatment picked up an additional battery charge while in custody. The report also said Craig told the court, “It seems as if it’s just become a kind of a cost of doing business — that sanctions are going to be imposed and that the division is going to pay them,” adding that the state had been dealing with the issue for “20 years of these issues.”
The issue dates back at least to 2005, when a man sued the department after he was not transported to a treatment center, the AP report said. It said the state previously sought to stop fines, arguing that the seven-day timeline would be “impossible” to meet and that consistent fines would put the agency “on a debt treadmill,” but that the Nevada Supreme Court upheld the sanctions in 2023.
As of last February, the AP report said treatment wait times had been decreasing, and that the agency did not respond to a request for more recent wait-time data.