Here’s what error rates can say about a judge’s performance

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Judicial Performance Evaluation has long relied on anonymous attorney ratings as a metric to rank judges in Clark County.

This year, the Review-Journal is partnering with the nonprofit Our Nevada Judges to provide another data point to the public: error rates that measure how frequently a higher court decides that a judge made an erroneous ruling.

These errors frequently result in reversals — when an appellate court overturns a judge’s previous decision.

The Nevada Supreme Court or the state Court of Appeals also can consider writ petitions, which are like appeals for cases that are ongoing. A high court granting such a petition is ruling in favor of the litigant challenging a judicial decision and would be counted as a judicial error.

Error rates for each judge can be found online in the RJ’s “Judging the Judges” database at lvrj.com/judges.

Alex Falconi, who founded Our Nevada Judges and has been publishing data on judicial error rates for about 10 years, said he believes the metric is the most objective measure of judicial performance.

“It’s not my personal opinion, the personal opinion of lawyers or the personal opinion of litigants,” he said. “It’s the professional opinions of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.”

Our Nevada Judges reports these error rates as a percentage of total cases where an appellate court made a decision. So when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, for example, that is not factored into the error rate.

“It just means there was no analysis,” Falconi said. “So we can’t assume that the judge was correct, just like we can’t assume that the judge was incorrect.”

Mixed results, where an appellate court decides that only some decisions in a case should be reversed, are also counted as an erroneous case.

Our Nevada Judges, which is funded through donations and grants from the State Bar of Nevada, also publishes videos of court hearings online, with a focus on Family Court.

Its website breaks down error rates into separate statistics for criminal and civil cases, since different types of cases are appealed at varying rates. The Review-Journal is reporting on a combined error rate for each judge that accounts for all types of cases.

Only data for district judges is being reported, since those judges’ cases are most frequently sent to the Nevada Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. The data includes judges who work in District Court’s family division, also known as Family Court.

Appellate lawyers said error rates are useful information for the public, but they should be understood in context.

“I think voters should remember that oftentimes judges are called upon to make complex and difficult decisions on the fly,” said Jordan Smith, an appellate attorney and former Nevada deputy solicitor general. “Just because somebody was reversed down the line doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad judge.”

Some judges have particularly high or low error rates that can be explained by appellate courts only issuing decisions in a handful of that judge’s cases, meaning each case can drastically sway the data.

Family Court Judge Mary Perry had the highest error rate, 73.3 percent, with the Supreme Court ruling that she had erred in 11 of the 15 cases they evaluated from her. Perry, who has been on the bench since 2021, said some of her reversals had involved decisions made by senior judges standing in for her.

She also pointed out that she had several cases with mixed results. The Our Nevada Judges data showed that four of Perry’s 11 erroneous cases were reversed in part.

“So that kind of skews the numbers a little bit,” she said.

Family Court Judge Charles Hoskin had one of the higher error rates among the judges, and he had a significant number of cases evaluated by appellate courts. The Supreme Court evaluated 76 of his cases, leading to an error rate of about 51.3 percent.

Hoskin said the error rates are “incredibly nuanced,” and he does not believe all reversals indicate that a judge committed an error in a case. He said the appellate courts could have a difference in legal opinion or access to more evidence than the lower court judges.

He emphasized that he believes the Supreme Court justices do a good job, but he said none has served as a Family Court judge. The judges with the highest error rates are all on the bench in Family Court.

“I don’t know why my error rate is high,” Hoskin said. “I don’t have any doubts about the decisions that I make. I’ve come to understand that the job that the appellate courts do is a different job from what I do.”

Error rates for Family Court Judges Adriana Rincon White and Kerri Maxey were not reported because the Supreme Court has not issued decisions in any of their cases. Others, such as District Judges Anna Albertson, Erika Mendoza, Gregory Gordon and Maria Parlade, had an error rate of zero percent but only received evaluations in a handful of cases.

Reasons for reversals

Appellate attorneys said not all reversals should be weighed the same. Sometimes the Supreme Court only reverses one aspect of the case, while finding the judge did not err in other aspects. Other times, the case hinges on different interpretations of the law.

Appellate attorney Dan Polsenberg said judges who handle difficult cases could be appealed more often or face more mixed results because of the cases’ complexity.

“And the Nevada Supreme Court may change the law and pull the rug out from under the judge,” Polsenberg said. “So the statistics by themselves don’t give you the whole picture.”

But reversals also can hinge on judge’s decisions.

In August 2022, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed a conclusion made by District Judge Erika Ballou, who ruled that a criminal defendant received ineffective counsel in a robbery case. Ballou had granted a post-conviction petition, and the defendant, Mia Christman, was released from prison.

Following the high court’s reversal, Ballou did not order Christman to be taken back into custody. The controversy surrounding the reversal and Ballou’s orders led to a disciplinary case, and Ballou was suspended from the bench for six months without pay in September.

Ballou otherwise had a relatively low error rate of about 14.2 percent with 21 erroneous cases. She did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court also can issue reversals due to procedural errors, such as a litigant’s lack of standing, without ruling on other arguments.

In October 2022, District Judge Joe Hardy Jr. ruled that the Nevada Board of Pharmacy’s classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, on par with heroin, was unconstitutional after the Nevada Legislature created the Cannabis Compliance Board to regulate the drug in 2019. But the state Supreme Court reversed the decision in August 2024, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the Board of Pharmacy’s classifications.

One of the plaintiffs showed that he received a possession-of-marijuana conviction after medical marijuana was legalized, but the Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiff could not challenge the Schedule 1 drug classification outside of a criminal case. Therefore, the court did not consider whether the classification was constitutional.

Reversals involving the press

Judges who have a high number of reversals don’t always end up with higher error rates, because of the sheer number of cases they have issued rulings in. District Judge Michelle Leavitt, who has been on the bench since 2002, had the highest number of erroneous cases in the Our Nevada Judges data. But she also had the highest number of evaluated cases, at 871, and received an overall error rate of about 17.3 percent, which is relatively low compared with other judges.

The reversals Leavitt received included an October 2023 decision from the state Supreme Court that affected the murder case of Robert Telles, a former elected county official later convicted of killing Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German.

Las Vegas police seized German’s personal devices after his murder, and Leavitt ruled that officials could search through the devices for information related to the criminal case. The Supreme Court reversed that decision and ruled that the state’s shield law, which protects reporters from forcibly disclosing sources, continued to apply after German’s death.

The Review-Journal was involved in another reversal in February 2025, when the Supreme Court overturned a ruling from District Judge Mark Denton. The judge had denied a motion from the newspaper to dismiss a lawsuit from the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers, which had argued that the news organization violated the law by publishing images from inside the Henderson Detention Center that depicted corrections officers.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Review-Journal anti-SLAAP motion to dismiss the lawsuit should not have been dismissed, and that state law prevented the publication of officers’ images by law enforcement agencies, not media outlets.

Attorneys agreed that in general, it’s rare for a higher court to reverse a case. But the public can still be informed about which judges have higher error rates than others.

“It’s one data point,” Smith said. “I think it’s something worth considering.”

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240.