Nevada Has Strong Animal Cruelty Laws … and Prosecutors Who Won’t Use Them

In the summer of 2024, an English bulldog was found inside a sealed plastic tote abandoned behind a commercial building on E. Twain Avenue while temperatures outside hit 110 degrees. The dog, later named Reba, was rushed to care and died two days later from heatstroke. Her story went around the world. Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson went on television and said he’d been receiving an enormous amount of emails from Nevadans and people across the country urging justice on her behalf. He called for stiffer sentencing laws. He urged citizens to pressure their state legislators.

And then he cut a deal.

One of the two defendants charged in Reba’s death, Markeisha Foster, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and received a one-year jail sentence with credit for time already served — roughly seven months. She left custody without serving additional time. The other defendant, Isaac Laushaul Jr., pleaded guilty to a felony animal cruelty charge and received a sentence of 16 to 48 months with credit for time served, meaning he could be paroled after little more than a year. Wolfson had spent months publicly demanding that lawmakers give prosecutors more tools to punish animal abusers — and within days of the governor signing the bill he’d lobbied for, his office quietly negotiated a plea that kept one of Reba’s killers out of prison entirely. It was a familiar move. It was the same thing his office had been doing for years.

According to a Nevada Current analysis submitted to lawmakers during the 2025 legislative session, a review of 106 animal abuse cases submitted to the Clark County DA between 2023 and late 2024 found that of 13 adjudicated felony cases involving no underlying human crime, only two defendants received prison time. In one case, a man who took his dog into the desert, bashed her skull with a hammer, stabbed her, and then slit her throat twice, Wolfson’s office agreed to a suspended sentence, with the possibility of the felony being reduced to a misdemeanor after probation. In another, a couple in their seventies found to have 42 animals dead in a freezer faced 16 felony counts that were reduced to a single felony, with the DA’s office not opposing probation. These are not edge cases. This is the pattern.

Gina Greisen of Nevada Voters for Animals has been documenting this pattern for years, calling out the “sweetheart deals” publicly and watching it repeat. After Reba’s Law passed in June 2025, she noted plainly that laws on paper are not enough without the infrastructure, training, and will to back them up. She was being generous. The problem isn’t infrastructure alone: it’s a culture inside the DA’s office that treats animal cruelty as a category of crime that doesn’t warrant genuine prosecutorial aggression, regardless of what the statute says.

The law itself is now weaker than it should be. Assembly Bill 381 (Reba’s Law) was originally introduced with a mandatory one-to-ten-year sentence for willful cruelty resulting in death. By the time it passed, it had been amended down to a maximum of six years, with the mandatory minimum and a provision creating accountability for bystanders who fail to report both stripped out. Civil-liberties advocates including the ACLU raised concerns during hearings, as did legislators worried about the implications for domestic violence victims, and those concerns ultimately reshaped the bill. What passed is meaningfully stronger than what existed before. It is not what advocates originally fought for.

Reba’s Law is now being tested for the first time in the case of a Henderson man, Angel Ayala, accused of throwing his girlfriend’s kitten against a wall, filming it, and posting the video to social media. Clark County’s own charging documents describe the offense under the new statute as a category B felony with a one-to-six-year range and up to a $10,000 fine.

Early press coverage (and, reportedly, at least one LVMPD detective at a Summerlin community gathering in early 2026) was still citing a ten-year maximum, a figure that reflects the bill’s original language rather than the law as enacted. Advocates are watching the Ayala case closely. Petitions are circulating demanding Wolfson pursue the maximum available sentence. The question is not whether the law permits it. The question is whether this DA’s office will actually fight for it.

For anyone who lives here with a dog, anyone who has ever worried about a car window left cracked in July, anyone who has had to explain to a child why some people hurt animals, there is something infuriating and specific about Las Vegas’s relationship with this problem. The city generates tens of billions of dollars annually in tourism revenue. Its animal shelters are taking in close to 90 animals a day and struggling to stay afloat. Its district attorney’s office can barely get a torturer into a cell.

The legal architecture to do better now exists. Nevada has a felony cruelty statute. Reba’s Law added real teeth, even if weaker ones than advocates wanted. Wolfson himself, seeking a fourth term, has publicly acknowledged the problem and called for exactly the kind of sentencing power he now has. The question that deserves an answer from every candidate who touches this office, and from every Las Vegas voter who cares about how this city treats its most vulnerable, is simple: if not now, when?

Reba didn’t need a new law. She needed a prosecutor who would use the one that already existed.