Sunday, June 11, 2006 | 7:34 a.m.
In the space of three days and a few thousand words, the Los Angeles Times has pulled back the sheen that civic leaders have spent years earnestly putting over Las Vegas, removing the beautiful illusion of a glistening, evolving city and replacing it with the ugly reality of an incestuous, corrupt backwater.
The newspaper's investigative series - "Juice vs. Justice" - is the product of years of research and interviews, replete with telling vignettes and documentary evidence of how relationships and money pollute the valley's judicial system.
Las Vegas, in the words of the series, is a "juice town," which may generate Louis Renault-like sarcastic exclamations but still reinforces an image of the city and state as a Third World country, ruled by sin and sordid behavior, unfit for inclusion in respectable society.
Like many others who call Southern Nevada home, I recoil at the prospect of the snickering that the story will generate across the country, where any attempt to be taken seriously will be impaired and where ne'er do wells who didn't do well here will leap to rationalize their lack of success because of the soiled system. But unlike many others, I won't insist the story is exaggerated, twisted, distorted.
For I come here not to bury Las Vegas nor to praise its honest lawyers and judges. I come to exploit this unfortunate expose to once again make the case for reform of the one of the three branches of government that can least afford to be tarnished by allegations of influence-buying.
You cannot take the money out of elective politics for the executive and legislative branches. But for the judicial branch, where those in robes frequently must rule on the actions of the other two, the process must be purified - or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
And such a method exists and has been pushed for years by myself and many others, especially judges, lawyers and politicians such as state Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio. It is called the Missouri Plan, or some variant, whereby judges are appointed rather than elected.
This makes sense for so many reasons and would erase any pay-to-play arrangement that, so the Times alleges, exists now in the court system. By erecting a proper vetting mechanism, you could be better assured of getting qualified jurists with integrity on the bench as opposed to campaigns in which who has the biggest war chest and best-connected consultants often wins.
What's more, voters know little about judges unless they have appeared in his or her court, as opposed to what they might know of legislators or local elected officials who cast myriad votes that affect people's lives.
There are real pitfalls in enacting an appointive system. The most obvious is that you create a smaller universe of possible judges and perhaps create a greater of two evils - an even juicier system whereby those doing the appointing salivate over the chance to pay back their cronies and, alas, campaign contributors.
Others say that a Missouri Plan would reduce the ability of minorities and women to gain appointment because of the inevitable cronyism. But I see it differently: Those making the appointments would be ultra-sensitive to the less juiced because they do have to face voters.
The most salient problem in enacting a Missouri Plan or a modified alternative, though, is that critics have such a compelling, albeit political counter-argument: Don't let the powers that be take power away from the people.
The late Mike O'Callaghan, the former governor and Sun executive editor, used to argue with me about my position, brandishing the voters-should-have-their-say club. His position was at least principled, as opposed to the state's most influential media outlet, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which flip-flopped on a Missouri Plan ballot question almost 20 years ago and whose "paper of record" version of reporting on the legal system is to send out surveys to lawyers and ask them to be unbiased judges of judges - and anonymously to boot.
If the L.A. Times series can reawaken the debate over taking judges off the ballot, maybe it can, ironically, be a catalyst for evolution from small-town backwater to big city.
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