Ex-boyfriend of attorney sentenced
Arevalo gets up to eight years for drug, weapons possession crimes
The ex-boyfriend of a suspended Las Vegas defense attorney was sentenced Wednesday to up to eight years in prison for drug and weapons possession offenses.
Andrew Arevalo, 28, told District Judge Jacqueline Bluth that he was committed to turning his life around and keeping young people from making the same mistakes.
“I’m not the same man I was then,” Arevalo said, referring to a criminal history that includes convictions for battery, burglary and attempted murder. “My history does not have to be my future.”
Arevalo first entered headlines with a 2014 lawsuit against the Nevada Department of Corrections after he was injured in a shooting that left another inmate dead. Arevalo was blinded in one eye when he was struck by buckshot fired by a prison guard.
He began dating his attorney, Alexis Plunkett, who in March pleaded guilty to a felony for allowing clients to use cellphones in jail.
Plunkett has said she was in a relationship with Arevalo, who also faces charges relating to phone use, and that she used the cellphone to make calls regarding bail, which she believed she was authorized to do.
In January, after the couple split, a judge refused to send Plunkett to jail for an obscenity-laced group message to friends from law school claiming that she had arranged to have Arevalo killed in prison.
Arevalo completed the Hope for Prisoners program last year. At his graduation, he said he planned to return
school choice nationwide, argues that the legislation that enacted the cap constituted a tax increase.
Since eliminating tax credits ultimately increases revenue, the legislation imposing the cap — Assembly Bill 458 — was a revenue-raising bill that required a two-thirds supermajority of votes in each house of the Legislature, the institute argues.
Joshua House, an Institute for Justice attorney, said the cap also means some organizations aren’t going to have enough money to sustain current students over the long term, said.
Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the AAA Scholarship Foundation and businesses who use the tax incentive as plaintiffs. A draft of the complaint names the Department of Education and the Department of Taxation as defendants.
In a memo to scholarship organizations in July, the state Department of Education clarified that funding is limited to current students only — unless the organization “reasonably expects” to have enough money to fund new students until they graduate from high school.
The Departments of Education and Taxation declined to comment due to pending litigation.
Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson, D-las Vegas, declined to comment and directed questions to the Legislative Counsel Bureau. The bureau also declined to comment.
In a previous interview with the Review-journal, Frierson said that legislators worked with the office overseeing the program to ensure that enough money was appropriated to allow current recipients to continue receiving the scholarship.
But the Education Fund of Northern Nevada, one of the three nonprofits that administer the program, sent a memo in July to parents saying that it only had enough money to fund high school students already enrolled.
But the AAA Scholarship Foundation, which apportioned its money out over a period of years, is still awarding scholarships to current students. It has even accepted applications for those on a wait list who were awarded scholarships through different organizations last year and siblings of current recipients.
It’s unclear whether the third scholarship organization, Dinosaurs and Roses, has enough funding to provide scholarships to past recipients.
Future growth at stake?
The program has grown significantly since the 2015-16 school year, when 541 students were awarded $3.2 million in scholarships, compared with the 2,306 students awarded over $11 million in 2018-19, according to a November 2018 Review-journal analysis. The program got an additional $20 million in
2017 — the result of another political deadlock over school choice. This year, the maximum amount a child can receive is $8,262.
The extra $9.5 million appropriated this year for the Opportunity Scholarship program also is in question due to a lawsuit brought by Senate Republicans over Senate Bill 551.
The bill, which eliminated a scheduled decrease in the state’s modified business tax, included the one-time funding boost for the program.
That lawsuit also claims that the Legislature needed to pass that bill on a two-thirds vote.