Presiding officers appointed for police fatality reviews

Clark County commissioners on Tuesday chose 10 people to serve as presiding officers in the upcoming police fatality reviews, including two former judges and a lawyer under investigation by the State Bar of Nevada.

The candidates to oversee the new hearings are the following:

■ Stewart Bell, a former Clark County district attorney and District Court judge.

■ William Jansen, a 27-year justice of the peace who lost his re-election bid last year.

■ Carlos Blumberg, a lawyer who has twice run for state Assembly seats and lost.

■ Lizzie Hatcher, a longtime lawyer who is under investigation by the State Bar about whether she was truthful to authorities about her professional dealings with the convicted owner of an unlicensed process serving company. She has been under investigation since 2010. Bar officials have yet to send her a complaint and follow up with a formal disciplinary hearing.

■ Attorneys Tom Pitaro, Craig Drummond, Osvaldo Fumo, Joel Mann, Linda Norvell Marquis and Chip Siegel.

Presiding officers are required to have practiced law for at least 10 years and must agree not to represent anybody involved in the police-involved death, among other restrictions.

They could be chosen by the county manager to preside over the new fact-finding hearings into police-involved deaths. The longtime inquest process was scrapped this month for the reviews, which probably would not include the officers involved in the deaths. A panel of citizens who rule the death justified, excusable and criminal has been scrapped.

The first review under the new process - the controversial 2011 shooting of Stanley Gibson, the disabled Gulf War veteran who was shot seven times by a Las Vegas police officer - could be as soon as next month.

Fifteen people applied to be presiding officers.