By Noble Brigham
Las Vegas Review-Journal
LAS VEGAS — State prison officials on Monday released a man who was the youngest person in modern Nevada history to be sentenced to death at the time jurors imposed capital punishment for him in 1994.
The release of Michael Domingues, 49, occurred despite the dismay and anger of his victims’ family, who have said Nevada’s parole board failed to notify them that it was planning to consider his release. He was granted parole late last year.
Domingues was 16 when he strangled Arjin Pechpho to death and fatally stabbed her four-year-old son Jonathan Smith in 1993. At the time, the victims lived next door to his girlfriend in Sunrise Manor.
Evidence presented at his trial indicated that he tried unsuccessfully to electrocute Jonathan with a hair dryer in a bathtub before stabbing him, according to prior Las Vegas Review-Journal coverage.
Prosecutors argued at trial that he wanted to steal Pechpho’s car, laid in wait for her, and killed her and her son to ensure there would be no witnesses.
Domingues won the ability to be released over years of post-conviction litigation. The U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the death penalty for defendants under 18 in a 2005 decision.
Following that decision, Nevada legislation resulted in his sentence being commuted to life without parole.
But because there was no hearing to consider Domingues’ youth before the life without parole sentence was imposed, a requirement under another case, District Judge Michelle Leavitt ordered a new penalty hearing for him in 2019, filings show.
Domingues and prosecutors agreed to a life with the possibility of parole sentence, court records indicate.
Leavitt resentenced him to 30 years to life in prison in 2020 for the murders, with credit for the decades he had already spent behind bars. Court records show his original 40-year sentence for additional counts of robbery and burglary remained intact and that Leavitt ordered that term and the new sentence to be consecutive.
“I think he knows what he needs to do to reintegrate,” attorney Lisa Rasmussen, who represented Domingues, said previously. “I think he’s smart enough to know that it will be hard.”
During his November parole hearing, Domingues presented himself as a changed man.
“I don’t know how to ask for my freedom because what happened was really horrible,” he said. “The person that did that does not exist no more.”
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