Lawyers speak up on judges

Almost 800 lawyers took the opportunity to rate the judges before whom they appear, in the 10th biennial Judicial Evaluation Survey conducted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Stories about the grades they gave those judges will appear in the Review-Journal beginning today, and continue through Friday. Complete results will be posted at www.lvrj.com/judges2010.

Results from the past decade's surveys also are available.

"We started this survey in 1992 because with a rapidly growing judiciary, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the public to get enough information about the sitting judges' performance and qualifications," said Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal.

"We asked lawyers and judges to help us devise a list of the criteria on which a judge's performance could fairly be judged, and we asked the attorneys who appeared in their courts to evaluate judges according to those criteria. Then we started providing those evaluations to voters a few weeks ahead of the primary election."

The primary election will be June 8. Voters may register in person at the Clark County Election Department through May 18. Early voting is May 22 through June 4.

Although judicial races are nonpartisan in Nevada, the races with more than two candidates appear on the primary ballot.

All registered voters, including independents, may cast ballots in the primary for the nonpartisan races.

Only lawyers practicing in Clark County are surveyed. They rated 79 jurists in all, including the justices of the Nevada Supreme Court, and judges of Clark County District Court, Family Court, and the Justice Courts and Municipal Courts of Las Vegas, Henderson, and North Las Vegas. The survey was conducted by Downey Research Associates, a social research consulting firm operated by Nancy L. Downey.

Every lawyer who listed a Clark County office address with the State Bar of Nevada was sent a letter containing a web address and a password with which to access an online rating form.

The website system let each lawyer rate a judge only once. Lawyers were asked to rate only judges with whom they had recent and relevant courtroom experience.

Judges with sufficient recent experience in the courts of others, such as judges newly elected to the bench, were invited to rate other judges, but not themselves.

The 796 who rated judges represented about 17 percent of the 4,677 who were sent letters.

"Although this percentage of return may appear to be only average for a survey of this type, it actually reflects a much better rate of return when the criteria for qualifying participants are considered," Downey said.

"Qualified participants were in effect self-selected. ... There are no accurate records of how many attorneys on the selected mailing list were actually qualified to participate according to these subjective criteria; therefore it is difficult to calculate a response rate that is based on the true population."

The number of responses varied widely between judges, according to how many attorneys have been in their courtrooms.

The identity of lawyers rating judges is kept confidential.

Lawyers rated judges more than adequate, adequate, or less than adequate on 12 criteria identified as characteristics of good judges, such as, "The judge clearly explains the basis for his or her decisions," and, "The judge is courteous."

Lawyers were asked whether the judge should or should not be retained on the bench.

In addition, lawyers were invited to comment on why they rated a judge as they did.

The comments range from the diplomatically helpful, such as, "Excellent judge. Only problem is that she is often too kind and allows extensive argument and discussion which delays her calendar," to the savage: "A tyrant with little concern for the law."

The Review-Journal prints a few of the comments if they are relevant to a judge's statistical ratings.

All the comments are provided verbatim to the judge about whom they are made.

Ron Parraguirre, chief justice of the Nevada Supreme Court, noted the usefulness of the more relevant comments in February, when he urged all qualified lawyers to evaluate judges.

"The information allows individual judges and justices to gauge the perception of their performance and make appropriate adjustments," Parraguirre said.

A new state law may have affected the survey results.

The Nevada Legislature moved the candidate filing deadline to January for judicial races.

The idea was to limit the perceived influence of campaign contributors, by identifying five months before the primary election which judges would have opponents and would have to campaign.

Only those would have any legitimate reason to accept campaign funds.

But the January filing deadline, before the survey was conducted, undercut one of the survey's former uses of identifying poorly performing judges for potential opponents.

Mitchell said the Review-Journal considered conducting the survey earlier.

"Between publishing when it would be more useful to candidates and when it would be more useful to ordinary people who have to vote for or against judges they don't personally know, we thought we should favor the voters," Mitchell said.

Contact A.D. Hopkins at adhopkins
@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0270.