Jackie Glass, the retired Clark County district judge who handed former football star O.J. Simpson a decades-long prison term in 2008 and later fronted the syndicated courtroom series “Swift Justice,” died August 28, 2026, in Las Vegas. She was 70.
Her daughter Rachel Wolfson, a comedian and stuntwoman, announced the death on Facebook alongside a photograph of the two of them. “Rip my rock, I don’t know how I’ll do this life without you,” Wolfson wrote, posting several more pictures of herself with her mother in the hours that followed.
Glass died Friday afternoon after suffering heart failure during a mediation, her husband, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He survives her, as do two daughters: Rachel, who was the first woman in the main cast of the “Jackass” franchise and appeared in “Jackass Forever,” and Rebecca Wolfson, who sits as a Las Vegas Municipal Court judge. The family held a private funeral on Monday, August 31; word spread anyway, and about 250 people came.
The Sentencing That Defined Her Public Image
Across the country, Glass was best known as the judge who put Simpson behind bars. She imposed a term of up to 33 years, with parole possible after nine, at a December 5, 2008, hearing inside the Clark County Regional Justice Center. The armed robbery and kidnapping counts grew out of a September 2007 confrontation at the Palace Station casino, where Simpson and five other men had burst into a hotel room in an attempt to take sports memorabilia he said was his.
From the bench, Glass brushed aside the defense argument that the episode amounted to no more than poor judgment. “I have to tell you now, it was much more than stupidity,” she said. She then returned to a question she had put to Simpson at his bail hearing months earlier — whether he was “arrogant or ignorant or both” — and answered it: “And during the trial and through this proceeding, I got this answer, and it was both.” He left the courtroom in shackles.
That was where the phrase came from. Simpson breached the terms of his release in January 2008 by mentioning a co-defendant in a message to his bail bondsman, and Glass doubled his bail to $250,000 and rebuked him in open court. “I don’t know if it’s just arrogance. I don’t know if it’s ignorance,” she told him. “But you’ve been locked up at the Clark County Detention Center since Friday because of arrogance or ignorance — or both.” She added that there was “no get-out-of-jail-free card today.”
Simpson won parole in 2017 and died of prostate cancer in April 2024 at 76.
From the Newsroom to the Bench
Born in New York, Glass arrived in Las Vegas in 1978, carrying a journalism degree from the University of Georgia and a reporting job at KORK-AM, 920. Crime coverage and anchor duties came next when KTNV-TV, Channel 13, hired her, and that beat pointed her toward the law.
She finished her law degree at the University of San Diego School of Law in 1984 and gained admission to the State Bar of Nevada that same year. Eighteen years in private practice followed, built on personal injury and criminal defense work; 12 of those years came at Wolfson & Glass, the firm she launched with her husband in 1990 and stayed with until 2002.
Voters elected her to Nevada’s Eighth Judicial District Court in 2002. Seated in 2003, she worked civil and criminal dockets for eight years before stepping down in 2011. Her most lasting mark may have been institutional. Glass helped establish the Clark County Mental Health Court in December 2003 and pulled together a task force on competency to stand trial, work that created the Clark County Competency Court on November 16, 2005. The National Association of Counties gave that court a 2007 Achievement Award for its effectiveness and innovation. In her final year on the bench she also oversaw the district’s drug and alcohol treatment courts. Among the cases on her docket was the prosecution of the bodybuilder Craig Titus and his wife, the fitness competitor Kelly Ryan, over the death of their personal assistant, Melissa James, whose body was found in a burned car in December 2005. Both pleaded guilty rather than stand trial, and Glass sentenced them in August 2008 — Titus to 21 to 55 years, Ryan to six to 26.
A Second Act in Syndication
Glass traded the courtroom for a television studio in 2011, succeeding former Georgia prosecutor Nancy Grace as host of “Swift Justice,” the show syndicated by CBS Television Distribution that resolved real small-claims disputes through arbitration. Grace had fronted Season 1, and Season 2 relocated the production from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Executive producer John Terenzio told reporters at the time that he was eager to introduce audiences to another original voice, and he predicted viewers would take to her. The series began its run in 2010 and ended in April 2012.
Tributes Pour in Across Nevada
Her husband, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, spoke publicly about her death for the first time during an interview at his office on Tuesday, September 1, 2026. He described Glass as a wife, mother and mediator who, he said, “loved helping people.”
A legal career that touched five decades drew tributes from around Nevada over the weekend. Former Clark County District Attorney David Roger, who prosecuted the Simpson case in Glass’ courtroom, said in a statement that she was a respected jurist and, more meaningfully, a warm and friendly person.
On X, Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley described herself as heartbroken and said she felt as though she had lost a sister. She and Glass had entered the legal profession around the same time, Berkley noted, and she had marveled at everything Glass achieved. The mayor extended the city’s condolences to Steve Wolfson and to her municipal court colleague, Rebecca Wolfson.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., called Glass an inspiring role model who spent her life fighting for justice for others, in remarks reported by the Las Vegas Sun.
A statement from Clark County described Glass as a pillar of the legal community who helped shape southern Nevada’s justice system, but said that above all she was a beloved wife and mother. The Nevada Broadcasters Association and Foundation, also quoted by the Sun, described her legacy as an extraordinary one reaching across broadcasting, journalism, law and public service.