Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JUDGING JUDGES: Panel debates electing, appointing

Failed candidate attacks Nevada's judicial system

UNLV Liberal Arts College Dean Jim Frey, left, listens Tuesday as Clark County Bar President Cam Ferenbach speaks at a Boyd Law School forum on whether judges should be elected. Photo by JERRY HENKEL / REVIEW-JOURNAL John Curtas, who failed to unseat incumbent District Judge Donald Mosley in November's election, says Nevada has "a supremely unqualified judiciary." Photo by JERRY HENKEL / REVIEW-JOURNAL

A failed judicial candidate blasted Nevada's judges and what he called "the corruption of our judicial system by money" during a Tuesday forum on whether judges should be elected or appointed.

John Curtas damned both methods of choosing judges before admitting he didn't have a solution to fix the system.

Curtas, who lost to incumbent District Judge Donald Mosley by 26 percentage points in November's election, said, "I think we have a supremely unqualified judiciary. ... There are a huge number of sitting judges at every level who have no business being there."

The judges who obtain their posts through gubernatorial appointments "are more atrocious than those elected," Curtas said without naming any names.

The deciding factor in judicial races is how much money can be raised for television ads, Curtas said during a daylong forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd Law School.

The panel included lawyers, judges, academics and a newspaper editor, who argued whether judges should be appointed or elected, whether public financing of judicial races would be a viable alternative, and whether the judicial surveys co-sponsored by the Clark County Bar Association and the Review-Journal are a public service or open to manipulation.

Curtas came down on the side of a Missouri plan started in 1940, where judges are appointed and then run for retention, giving voters a chance to oust them.

But District Judge-elect Jackie Glass, who unseated the only judicial incumbent to lose in the 2002 election, Judge Jeffrey Sobel, favored elections over appointments.

"I don't believe I'd have this opportunity through an appointment," she said. "I wasn't politically active. I didn't know people." She downplayed the role money played in her victory, crediting grass-roots campaigning and hard work.

However, she also used $150,000 of her own money to pay for a massive television ad campaign.

Law school professor Jeffrey Stempel argued that appointments are better, but said there are "too many entrenched folks who don't want to make it happen." He cited the political consultants and the television stations that benefit from the judicial ads as advocates for the status quo.

Public financing of judicial races will not happen in Nevada, UNLV political science professor Michael Bowers concluded. Wisconsin, the first state to use public financing to provide money for judges to campaign, has been a failure because people aren't checking a box on their state income tax forms to send $1 to judges, so the pot to finance the races is about half what is needed.

"Elections do little to hold judges accountable," Bowers said, outlining his reasoning to support appointments.

Nevada Supreme Court Justice Nancy Becker said one way to limit the fund-raising demands for judges is to have a three-week filing period for judges in the January before the election. By law, judges cannot start raising money until January, and if they don't draw opponents at the end of that filing, she said incumbent judges shouldn't be able to raise money afterward.

Currently, they begin raising money in January and don't find out until May whether they have an opponent, leading them to raise huge sums to be prepared in case they draw a challenger.

The forum panelists also discussed the judicial surveys that are released every two years and include anonymous evaluations of judges by attorneys who practice in their courts.

Family Court Judge Cynthia Dianne Steel blasted the surveys as unreliable because the evaluations are anonymous and "people know now how to maneuver it."

"Why is the Clark County Bar Association sanctioning them when in many cases it demeans judges?" Steel asked.

Bar Association President Cam Ferenbach said in the 20 years he's been practicing law, there is a "world of difference" in how judges treated attorneys in his first 10 years, when there were no surveys, and in the past 10 years, when there have been five surveys. Now there is some accountability and, Ferenbach said, "It's made a big difference in how judges treat attorneys."