Justice court still like a ‘ghost town’ after lunch

By Brian Eckhouse (contact)

Friday, April 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In the bustling county courthouse where the wait for an elevator can last 20 minutes, the public hallways and courtrooms on the seventh and eighth floors remain eerily quiet in the afternoons, often empty. Those floors are home to eight of the 10 Las Vegas justices of the peace.

“It’s a ghost town,” acknowledges Justice of the Peace Tony Abbatangelo.

No, this isn’t an accidental rerun of a Sun article that tracked the use of those 10 courtrooms over a four-day period in late January. The pattern has recurred over months, possibly years, and was documented again by the Sun last week.

Justices of the peace say court proceedings are front-loaded early in the day, generally beginning by 8 a.m. to satisfy the calendars of private attorneys, public defenders and deputies who transport inmates. But they frequently end by the lunch hour.

“We have to have time to visit with our clients during the day,” Public Defender Phil Kohn says. That time has been in the afternoons.

Arraignments are generally first on the daily docket, followed by criminal and civil trials. The justice courts handle misdemeanors, civil disputes involving less than $10,000 and the preliminary stages of felonies.

District Attorney David Roger is among those who contend the scheduling arrangement has numerous flaws.

Police officers who work graveyard shifts must wait until the conclusion of sometimes dozens of arraignments before being asked to testify in trials, for example, and trials scheduled in the afternoon commonly are postponed if prior hearings drag on, sometimes discouraging witnesses from returning.

The existing schedule is an inefficient use of precious courtroom space, especially as legal officials mount a campaign to add a tower to the Regional Justice Center, which is 2 1/2 years old.

The justices acknowledge these issues, and say they’ve been brainstorming about scheduling and how to best use space.

Still, on three days last week, all 10 courtrooms sat vacant at 3 p.m. The best occupancy rate that week was on Tuesday, when three justices were handling cases.

That does not trouble court administrators, who note most clerks start their workdays so early they’re heading home by 3 p.m.

“Only so much can be done without the staff,” Abbatangelo adds. If each justice of the peace had two or three more staffers, the justices could preside over more cases in the afternoons.

Abbatangelo and other Las Vegas justices of the peace, including Deborah Lippis, say they attend to much of their paperwork in the afternoons.

“Empty courtrooms, yes, but you’re still at work,” Lippis says.

Since mid-February, court and legal officials have discussed how to maximize use of the courtrooms, but a few of the justices failed to attend the first big summit or made only a brief appearance.

Members of the Clark County Commission initially advanced the idea of maximizing use of existing court space by starting a night court, which the justices had resisted until Chief Justice of the Peace Douglas Smith suggested in January that it might be time for the court to look into it. The idea is still in the conceptual phase.

That prompted Roger, in a letter to Smith, to note the locked courtrooms in the afternoon. “While our deputies welcome the idea of having additional court time to prosecute our cases, we suggest that the court modify the scheduling of cases before asking the county to fund additional staff,” the district attorney wrote. He prefers that trials be held in the morning, with arraignments moved to the afternoon.

Three months later, Roger sees little hope that the schedule will change. “I’m done ... I guess ‘case closed,’ ” he said.

But some improvement could be on the way. Abbatangelo and two of his fellow justices of the peace, Melissa Saragosa and Ann Zimmerman, are considering a plan to add an initial appearance court to ease the backlog of arraignments.

Under that plan, a justice could handle arraignments at the Clark County Detention Center or remotely from a courtroom via video conferencing, possibly at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.

“It benefits us, but it mostly benefits the jail,” Abbatangelo says.

If such a court could be launched this year, four justices of the peace probably would rotate handling it. But next year, when two additional justices join the team, one could be assigned to that proposed court full time.

Two new justices of the peace probably won’t require much juggling of court space. One of them may be assigned to a civil-only docket, and there’s a courtroom on the 10th floor that could handle such an assignment, officials say. A courtroom on the lower level of the Justice Center could be used for arraignments.

Court officials probably will have a major headache on their hands if they’re unable to overhaul the schedules because in a few years two or three justices of the peace will be added.

“How can we service these courts with less resources and a growing population?” Kohn says. With the economy continuing to slow, a plan to add a $200 million tower to the courthouse seems unlikely to proceed.

“We may have to go to courtroom sharing,” acknowledges LaDeana Gamble, an assistant court administrator. Before the court relocated to the Regional Justice Center, one justice of the peace had to bounce from one room to the next. Officials say that was problematic.

Abbatangelo and Saragosa have proposed that four justices of the peace share three courtrooms for criminal proceedings, leaving a fourth room designated for civil cases only.

But Saragosa, a former member of the district attorney’s office, says she found little support for that specific plan.

“Change is scary and nobody wants to change something and have it be worse than now,” she says.