Audio recording clip from the second interview with Senator Joe Neal by Claytee D. White, February 7, 2006

Could you tell me about some of the early ones in the early 70s? Well, the issues that I dealt with in the early 70s, first of all, were issues on capital punishment. I took a position against capital punishment and will always take a position against capital punishment. Up until I retired, I never did support capital punishment. I was always opposed to it. The other issue that I dealt with was to restore rights to ex-felons. That was one of the first bills that I actually passed in the legislature. That was in 1973. That bill was something else. I introduced a bill. It came to me through a guy that I met. His name was Butler. And Butler was from Tallulah. He had come here and he had become a felon. He was shining shoes, and I was getting my shoes shined one day. And he said to me, "What needs to be done is to get these ex-felons some rights. We can't get a job. We can't do nothing." So I said, "Well, okay." So when I got elected, the first thing I introduced was this bill in '73 to restore the rights of a felon. Well, as it turned out, we had reapportionment in the legislature. One of the guys who had served prior to me, a guy by the name of James Slattery, came to me and looked at the bill. He told me, "That bill that you've got is a good bill. Can I help you with it?" I said, "Yeah, of course." Ex-senator, white. Why not? See what he can do. He took the bill, ran with it, got it out of the senate. He follow it down to the assembly, came back. And it had a ten-year requirement. If you 25 served ten years and you had no offense greater than a traffic ticket, you can get your rights restored. Beautiful. Joe Neal got his first bill passed in the first session. Having an impact on somebody's life. Come back. And I'm down in our personnel section. And somebody says, "Have you seen this article in the paper about you? It's about you and this bill that you passed." I said, "Who is it by?" They said, "It's by Paul Price." So I picked up the paper. Paul Price slam-blasted me. The only bill that Joe Neal passed in the 1993 legislature was a bill to help a whoremonger in Northern Nevada. And I'm saying, "Wait a minute. What's this?" You see, I didn't know that James Slattery was working for Joe Conforte. So the bill that he passed helped Joe Conforte, okay. But I did know that everybody in the legislature voted for the bill with the exception of Raggio. Raggio and Joe Conforte were at odds with one another. He didn't vote for the bill. I'm saying to myself, okay, maybe he just didn't like it. You know, he's a district attorney. That was my take on it because he was a former district attorney. He served 20 years as a district attorney before he got elected to the state senate. So I looked at the bill and I read the article. Then I had to write a rebuttal. And the rebuttal, you can find it somewhere in the Sun now. I wrote a rebuttal to that and said, in essence, that once a law is passed, I'm not responsible for anyone who takes advantage of it. That's the way I left it, like that. Greenspun loved those types of rebuttals, you know. He would always put things in the paper. When I wrote a rebuttal against something, he would always put it in that section of the paper that it was dealing with. If it was his column, he would do that. So the next bill that I had to deal with — the Supreme Court had ruled capital punishment illegal under Furman v Georgia. The legislature was looking for some means to reinstate the death penalty. In Nevada? In Nevada, yes. And I came in on that. I remember testifying against that. I was at my best on that. That was the first time that my legalism showed, in that discussion. And I guess it made people a little bit nervous about me because I talked about capital punishment in terms of the legal ramifications, you know, the Constitution and all of that stuff. Give me some of your arguments against it. My argument was that capital punishment was not a deterrent and that it was used by district attorneys and the community to either get them elected or to make them look strong on crime. And they were actually putting people to death. One of the major arguments is that once you put a person to death and happen to find out that person is innocent, you cannot bring him back. And mistakes are made. Those were the type of arguments. Of course, I did a lot of other things. But I kept that one up. That argument kept going and going and going year after year until the churches started getting involved. I had to get on the Catholic Church because I came out for a woman's right to choose. Then they got on me. Then I said, "Okay, if you're so concerned about this, why are you not concerned about the death penalty?" You see, then all of a sudden, they said, "Okay, you've got a good argument." Then they began to move into it. So by the time I left — even about two terms before I left, the church actually got actively involved in trying to eliminate the death penalty.