Joy Ike’s current routine in her upstate New York home reads like a well-crafted algorithm for self-care. As soon as she wakes up, Ike heads to the bathroom. She opens the medicine cabinet as her eyes adjust to the dim light. A precise regimen of pills falls into her palm, and she carefully touches each one to ensure the correct count before swallowing them with a few swigs of water.
Following this, Ike dedicates at least an hour to journaling, filling an average of five pages in a three-subject notebook with a black ballpoint pen — a practice that serves as both reflection and preparation for a trial to come. It’s important for her to remember the minute details of the secrets her husband told her more than a decade ago.
Ike’s life is punctuated by creative outlets doubling as therapy. She makes art that she describes as “abstract maximalist with a hint of psychedelic and manic energy.” Her motto, “Fuck around and find out,” speaks to the armor of grit she’s constructing and that she hopes will one day become real enough to help her move past the trauma she says she endured with her indicted and estranged husband of many years, Robert Dunn.
On the surface, Ike’s life may seem impeccably managed, but her intricate daily program also underscores the fragility of a hard-won stability. It’s because of years of alleged abuse by Dunn, an accused murderer who she says threatened daily to kill her if she didn’t keep secret the horrific crimes he told her he’d committed. And her vulnerability has been perpetuated by a criminal justice system that at first failed to believe her, when she took a risk and told the truth, and has yet to deliver the justice that could help finally set her free.
THE TURNING POINT came in June 2010, two years into Ike and Dunn’s marriage after a brief courtship. Ike called 911 both in a desperate bid to shed guilt and out of a sense of duty to an elderly couple that she says she never met. Based on stories Dunn had told her, she believed he’d killed the pair.
But the 911 operator didn’t take her seriously, Ike says. She ended the call with a chilling statement, “Fine, but if I die, it’ll be on your heads.”
How authorities received Ike’s report would change six months later, in 2011, after a sexually explicit letter came to light. Dunn was facing harassment charges for offering himself as a sex slave to a neighbor of his and Ike’s. He fled their upstate New York home alone after forging his bail check and headed west, through Nevada to California. Ike hoped Dunn had vanished for good. She monitored his digital footprint, including the S&M dating site where they’d met a decade earlier.
One evening, hardened knuckles rapped on her door. Two agents dressed in suits showed her badges and told her she’d “cracked the case.” “I thought they were missionaries,” she says, with a mixture of disbelief and vindication.
In reality, they were Social Security Administration investigators. Dunn’s arrest for harassment and subsequent disappearance had set in motion an investigation into Ike’s earlier claims about Joaquin and Eleanor Sierra, an elderly couple missing since 2003.
As the investigation unfolded, mounting evidence implicated Dunn in the Sierras’ disappearance. By this time, Dunn was sitting in a California jail for other outstanding warrants. Investigators confronted him about the Sierras, alleging he’d killed them and hidden their bodies in a 5-foot-by-10-foot West Las Vegas storage unit while embezzling $200,000 in Social Security checks in their names. (Dunn’s current attorney didn’t respond to Desert Companion’s requests for an interview.)
In 2015, prosecutors indicted Dunn in Clark County on two counts of murder, two counts of robbery, and 11 counts of theft.
This should have been the end of the story: Dunn goes to trial, Ike testifies, the jury decides, and Ike goes on with her life. Instead, the wheels of justice have ground to a near halt. Nine years have passed since Dunn’s indictment. The Clark County District Attorney’s Office is seeking the death penalty, but the trial has yet to begin.
The prolonged wait has taken a toll on Ike, who finds herself trapped in limbo. “I feel he has manipulated the system, and this won’t ever go to trial,” she says. “I think about it constantly. I worry and check every so often just to make sure he is still in jail. There would be much more peace after this is done.”
Dunn’s case exposes a glaring issue in the local criminal justice system: Despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial, systemic issues with capital murder trials mean many cases languish in the courts for lengthy periods. Although a judge set Dunn’s trial for October 2016, continuances pile up, and Ike waits, unable to imagine a life truly free from Dunn. Until she gets the chance to confront him and to tell a judge and jury how he forced her to keep his secret, she says, his alleged crimes will continue to shadow her.
CLARK COUNTY HAS drawn national attention, not only for its frequent pursuit of the death penalty, but also because of the broader implications this has on the justice system and the lives it affects. From 1977 to 2017, Nevada imposed 186 death sentences. Clark County, the most populous region in the state, accounted for 139 of the total, or 75 percent.
Contrary to popular belief, the death penalty is not widely practiced across the country; it’s concentrated in a small percentage of counties within a handful of states. Clark County stands out as one of these outliers, a concept explored in a 2016 report by Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project, “Too Broken to Fix: An In-Depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties.” The report identified Clark County as disproportionately contributing to the state’s death penalty statistics and raised serious concerns about the quality of justice being administered.
Notably, the report uncovered alarming rates of prosecutorial misconduct. While at least six percent of death penalty cases involved a finding of prosecutorial misconduct nationwide, the rate in Clark County is 47 percent — nearly half. This staggering statistic calls into question the legal process’s integrity in these high-stakes cases, the report’s authors argued.
Dayvid Figler, a Las Vegas area defense attorney, Desert Companion contributor, and death penalty abolition proponent, argues that the pursuit of death penalty cases is part of a broader societal struggle.
“Not all first-degree murder cases can be death-penalty eligible,” Figler says. “Clark County is unique in its approach, and there is really no rhyme or reason.”
Here, the decision to seek the death penalty is made by a single district attorney, answerable only to voters. But the focus on assigning murder cases as death penalty cases has significant implications for the entire judicial system.
For one thing, Figler says, the approach can cause system backlogs, because death penalty cases require specialized judges and, by constitutional mandate, two defense attorneys. The requirement stretches the system’s resources thin, potentially leading to delays in other cases and prolonged waiting periods for trials.
Dunn’s case is an example of this. “Clark County has only four judges handling murder trials,” Figler says. Dunn has “already shuffled among four different judges. This is partly indicative of the strain death penalty cases cause.”
Kent S. Scheidegger, whom The Atlantic called “Mr. Death Penalty” (though he notes this moniker hasn’t caught on beyond that article), stresses that COVID-19 was an unusual factor, adding that the volume of death penalty cases contributes to their length.
“When everything in the defendant’s life is potentially (a) mitigating (factor), that imposes a duty on defense counsel to investigate the person’s entire life. That produces a lot of work for trial counsel and a lot of work for all the reviews of the case that happen from that point onward.”
And, of course, the sheer volume of death penalty cases in Clark County exacerbates these issues. “I’m aware of a few murder cases, under very rare factors, going five years or more to reach their final disposition, but nine years to get to the first trial is definitely an outlier,” Figler says.
More generally, he questions the point of seeking the death penalty at all when no one has been executed in Nevada since 2006. The only authorized method of capital punishment in the state is lethal injection. The drugs necessary have been hard to obtain, as manufacturers are increasingly unwilling to sell them because of ethical and regulatory concerns, adding another layer of complexity and delay.
Clark County District Attorney Steven Wolfson, a Democrat who took office in 2012, maintains that seeking the death penalty is reserved for the “worst of the worst” cases. However, since 2012, his office has filed 91 notices of intent to seek a death sentence.
The D.A.’s office did not respond to Desert Companion’s requests for an interview. During Wolfson’s March 2021 testimony before the Nevada Legislature, he defended his office’s practices, arguing that they differ from those of his predecessors. “I have filed far fewer death notices than other Clark County district attorneys,” he said.
Mark Bettencourt, executive director of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, says, “Clark pursues death sentences more vigorously than nearly anywhere in the country, filing seven notices to seek the death penalty in 2023.”
The rationale the county uses to determine which cases merit capital punishment matters. As Dunn’s case demonstrates, the tension between aggressive prosecution and lack of resources can result in systemic paralysis.
THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE on death row across the United States has decreased over the last two decades. According to a 2019 report by UNLV’s Center for Crime and Justice Policy, 3,625 people were awaiting execution in 1999 compared to 2,673 individuals in 2019. Nevada currently has 49 prisoners on death row. Since 1977, which marks the beginning of the contemporary era of the death penalty, 12 prisoners have been executed in Nevada.
Despite the overall decline in death penalty cases, proponents such as Scheidegger argue, there are cases where execution is “the only just penalty,” where “anything less would be a miscarriage of justice.”
Scheidegger says there are specific scenarios that warrant the death penalty: multiple murders committed on separate occasions, cases involving torture, and acts of mass violence like the Oklahoma City bombing or the Boston Marathon bombing. When applied appropriately and carried out regularly, he argues, capital punishment can have a deterrent effect and save lives. This view may help explain why some district attorneys, including Clark County’s, continue to pursue death sentences despite the national trend toward fewer executions.
Yet Scheidegger also acknowledges that the current state of the death penalty system falls short of ideal, highlighting the complex relationship between justice, deterrence, and practical implementation.
The issues present in Dunn’s case and many others have fueled efforts to reform or get rid of the death penalty in Nevada. In April 2021, the Nevada Assembly passed Assembly Bill 395 which would have abolished the state’s death penalty altogether. The bill died in the Senate.
Death penalty critics argue that prosecutors hold it over defendants’ heads to secure guilty pleas. Scheidegger disagrees with this practice. “I don’t approve of using it as a threat in a case where you don’t actually believe that death is the appropriate sentence and intend to go for it,” he says. “I think the death penalty should only be sought if it is one of those exceptionally heinous murders or a person with an exceptionally bad record such that death is the appropriate punishment.”
A January 2021 poll of Nevada voters found that 49 percent favored replacing the death penalty with life without parole, and 46 percent would keep capital punishment.
THE PROLONGED WAIT for trial in Robert Dunn’s case doesn’t just make Joy Ike’s life difficult; it also raises a concern about the fairness of the eventual proceedings. As time stretches on, the challenges of ensuring a fair trial multiply.
Eve Hanan, who teaches criminal procedure and criminal law at UNLV, says, “A defendant who’s been charged and has not yet gone to trial is subject to a lot of prejudice.” This prejudice manifests in various forms.
An especially pressing one is the impact on potential jurors. Over a decade of media coverage and public discussion, finding impartial jurors becomes increasingly difficult. The perception of guilt can solidify in the public consciousness simply because of the length of time the accused has been held, potentially tainting the jury pool.
In addition, Hanan points out, “pretrial incarceration” itself can be a form of punishment before any determination of guilt has been made. An extended period of detention not only infringes on the constitutional right to a speedy trial, but also can significantly affect the defendant’s ability to participate in their own defense.
The passage of time also poses substantial challenges to the defense’s ability to present its case effectively. Hanan says physical evidence can deteriorate or disappear over time. Witnesses may move away, or their memories fade, and crucial documents might be lost or destroyed.
“This right (to a speedy trial) exists for everyone, whether they committed the crime or not,” she says, underscoring the fundamental principle that individuals should be adjudicated before they are punished.
Add the 47 percent prosecutorial misconduct rate from the 2016 Harvard study, and you get a situation where fairness and integrity are at risk.
Robert Dunn’s prolonged pre-trial detention presents a troubling paradox, regardless of his guilt or innocence. If he did commit the alleged crimes, the extended delay may undermine the fairness of the judicial process, potentially resulting in a compromised trial that could leave him free and deny justice to his alleged victims and their families. Conversely, if Dunn is innocent, every day spent behind bars represents a grave injustice and a violation of his fundamental right to a speedy trial.
THE RUSH TO SEEK the death penalty comes with costs, both tangible and intangible. Death penalty trials can run up to a million dollars or more, a cost largely borne by taxpayers. Many defense attorneys come from the public defender’s office, which in a city such as Las Vegas is already stretched thin.
The financial implications of imprisonment are also significant. Over nine years, Dunn’s detention has cost taxpayers approximately $303,000, not including legal and administrative expenses.
While these are big numbers, the human toll of prolonged legal battles is immeasurable. Ike’s life and that of the Sierra family have been on hold for nearly a decade waiting for justice.
The issues surrounding Dunn’s case and Clark County’s approach to capital punishment highlight the need for systemic reform, Figler says. The strain on the judicial system, the financial burden on taxpayers, and the emotional toll on victims and their families all point to the need for a reevaluation of how death penalty cases are handled.
Figler suggests that opting for a prison sentence instead of pursuing the death penalty might have expedited a resolution to Dunn’s case. This approach could potentially alleviate some of the strain on the system while still ensuring that justice is served.
The allegations against Dunn are serious — double murder and long-term fraud against vulnerable elderly victims — but the nine-year delay in bringing his case to trial may be decreasing the likelihood that any justice at all is served.
Until there’s a resolution, Ike continues her daily rituals, texting the investigator for updates, refreshing the county’s website and asking reporters “to please go to the courthouse and ensure he’s there.” She waits for a resolution that seems perpetually out of reach. And she feels once again failed by a system that wouldn’t listen when she tried to alert it to the problem in the first place.