District judges want return to old case-control system

Bill Gang

Monday, Oct. 18, 1999 | 9:57 a.m.

Clark County's District Court judges, chafing under a system that assigns them to specialize in criminal or civil cases for two years at a time, are trying to return to a system in which all judges juggle both civil and criminal cases.

But the state's high court may prevent the district judges from returning to their old ways. The Nevada Supreme Court will hold a public hearing to gather comment on the two alternatives Friday at 9 a.m. at the North Las Vegas City Hall.

The district judges voted late last year to make the specialization system permanent, but seven months later they voted to return to the old system that had given judges more direct control over how and when individual cases were handled.

Court officials say specialization has been resolving more cases more quickly.

And preliminary figures from an ongoing survey of attorneys on the issue show about 70 percent favor retaining judicial specialization.

Under the old system civil attorneys complained that their cases -- which comprise about two-thirds of the workload -- were shuffled to the bottom of the pile and courtroom resolutions were hard to achieve.

Chief District Judge Lee Gates said that because of specialization a third more civil cases are being resolved than before and "we're resolving more criminal cases than we are taking in."

"We're the most productive we've ever been," he said, noting, "It's not the lawyers or the public complaining. It's the judges complaining."

The judges on Friday aired their complaints to a majority of the state Supreme Court justices, who came to hear their comments. They said the specialization system is unfair to civil judges whose caseloads are more time consuming than those of criminal judges.

In addition, District Judge Michael Cherry said, judges with backgrounds in criminal law have been assigned to hear only civil cases.

District Judge Jeff Sobel argued the decision on the court structure should be left to the district judges and pleaded, "Let us go back to the system that was working fine."

"The old system wasn't working fine," responded Justice Bill Maupin, recalling that when he was a civil attorney before becoming a judge, "We couldn't do business over here."

If Friday's informal meeting was any indication, the rest of the Supreme Court justices aren't sympathetic to the judges' complaints either.

Justice Nancy Becker said flatly there is no way the high court is simply going to let the judges go back to the prior system because of abuses that required senior judges to be employed to hear old cases.

Becker recalled that trials had never been set in 500 civil cases.

Currently about half of the 18 District Court trial judges handle criminal cases while the others handle civil. As chief judge, Gates handles only a partial caseload.

Cherry said that if specialization is not abandoned, the number of civil judges should be increased to 12 and there should be no more than six criminal judges.

That would affect the way the district attorney's office and the public defender's office track their cases.

It appears more likely that the current split will be altered by the high court to 10 civil judges and eight criminal or 11 civil and seven criminal.

The specialization system is one part of sweeping reforms that have been instituted by the Supreme Court in the past couple of years. The high court this summer also installed a so-called strong chief judge system to provide strict rules over judges' conduct.