Sunday, November 16, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'I cannot justify it on any judicial basis'

In late August, I acquired a copy of the resignation letter of Carol L. Chaffee, a staff attorney in the civil division of the Nevada Supreme Court.

In that Aug. 2 letter, Ms. Chaffee said she had intended to work through the end of August since she had previously been "proud to work for the court," but that Aug. 18 would instead be her last day there. Why the sudden change? Ms. Chaffee wrote that she was clearing out because of something the court had done, something which could not be "justified on any judicial basis."

I called the court, trying to reach or get a message to Ms. Chaffee. Staff members there were not helpful. I tracked down Ms. Chaffee at her new home in an adjacent state. She declined to discuss the resignation letter, telling me to talk to her former employers about the reasons for her departure.

Still wanting to make absolutely sure we had a verbatim copy of Ms. Chaffee's actual resignation letter, the Review-Journal filed a Nevada Public Records Act request, asking the court to release to us all nonconfidential, nonpersonal material in Ms. Chaffee's personnel file -- including a copy of her resignation letter -- as allowed under state law.

If my copy of the letter had somehow been tampered with, this would give the court an opportunity to show us a true copy.

State court administrator Ron Titus wrote back on Oct. 7, contending the state Public Records Act doesn't apply to the Supreme Court. Mr. Titus said he would release the documents only if Ms. Chaffee agreed.

I wrote Ms. Chaffee. She sent back an Oct. 25 letter to the Review-Journal's in-house attorney, declining to authorize the court to release her personnel records.

We laid down Ms. Chaffee's Oct. 25 letter next to the Aug. 2 resignation letter. The two signatures are a perfect match. What's more, the format and typography of the letters are the same. They even appear to have been printed on the same printer.

Why is Ms. Chaffee's letter significant enough to merit all this attention -- and conceivably to explain the extraordinary efforts by the court and their henchmen to keep it under wraps? On Aug. 2, Carol L. Chaffee wrote to her employers, the "Honorable Justices of the Nevada Supreme Court":

"I had planned to stay as long as possible and certainly until I found a new job. I was proud to work for the court, and truly enjoyed my job there -- indeed, because I hated to leave, my job search has been somewhat desultory. Last month's proceedings, however, undermined my confidence in the court's integrity and convinced me that I should leave sooner rather than later. Although I have not always agreed with the court's decisions -- and never expected to -- I always trusted that they were untainted by political influence.

"I am no longer sure that that is true. I am sure, however, that this court's opinion in Guinn v. Legislature was not founded on a fair, measured and reasonable interpretation of law."

Guinn v. Legislature, of course, was the case in which the court ruled the Legislature could ignore the constitutional requirement for a two-thirds majority legislative vote to raise taxes, on the grounds that "full" funding of the government schools is more important.

And mind you, this is not the opinion of some courthouse janitor, or an obscure academic at some right-wing think tank. This is the resignation letter of a staff attorney of the Nevada Supreme Court.

Of the Guinn v. Legislature decision, Ms. Chaffee continued: "I do not understand it, and I cannot justify it on any judicial basis. That disturbs me deeply. I am also sure that the Education Associations and their counsel could not have so precisely tailored their amicus brief to address this court's specific concerns based only on the court's public announcement and its order directing an answer. And that disturbs me even more profoundly than the court's opinion."

For those not used to lawyer talk, what those last two sentences clearly imply is that Ms. Chaffee suspected some improper prior communication between the court and those filing the teachers' unions amicus briefs, to make sure those briefs included arguments that court was looking for -- providing the justices a fig leaf so they could reach out and dictate a bizarre, extreme solution which even Attorney General Brian Sandoval says he and Gov. Kenny Guinn never sought.

But how are we to check the truth of such an assertion? Fortunately, an attorney who has represented three of these very Supreme Court justices, Dominic P. Gentile, has given us our instructions in an op-ed piece published in the Aug. 10 Review-Journal.

In such a circumstance, Mr. Gentile wrote as the justices' legal representative, "Suprynowicz could have asked any of the named justices ... to affirm or deny that a meeting had occurred and an agreement (been) struck. ... The damage could have been avoided by simply asking them (the justices) if what the source said was true or false."

Well, then. Duly instructed by the justices' own counsel that we could expect straight and truthful answers to such a question, on Oct. 30 I faxed copies of the Aug. 2 Chaffee resignation letter to the seven Supreme Court justices, seeking their response. I was confident in Mr. Gentile's written word that they would tell me whether any ex parte communications had occurred to arrange the "precisely tailoring" of the teachers union briefs, and whether it's true the decision was "not founded on a fair, measured, and reasonable interpretation of the law," but rather had been "tainted by political influence," as Ms. Chaffee feared.

Next week: How the justices came clean.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."