Welcome to the bench, here are a bunch of problems

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas’ Municipal Court is setting off alarm bells in City Hall, where officials are struggling to grasp the realities, economic and legal, of sweeping changes on the way.

This week, the City Council is expected to appoint a new judge to the court, which has an enormous case load of more than 100 cases per judge per day, primarily low-profile cases that seldom attract headlines.

Moving onto the bench is almost always a challenge, but seldom more so than in this instance, because the new judge will be entering an environment of potential chaos and a funding mess due to an early-January ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court.

That judge, sources say, might be asked to head up the court’s Mental Health Court, a body that a former Municipal Court appointee helped establish five years ago.

Municipal Court Chief Judge Bert Brown said the idea of shifting the responsibilities of Mental Health Court to the appointee has been suggested, but added that a decision is a long way off.

“We won’t be doing anything like that until we have a new judge in place and we can all sit at the table and talk about it,” he said.

Brown acknowledged, however, that the Supreme Court ruling is going to create some challenges, in funding and how the court is operated. He has set up a meeting Wednesday with representatives from the city, the public defender’s office, the Nevada State Bar and others to begin figuring out how to answer the court’s order.

In early January the Nevada Supreme Court, after a year of study, unveiled a far-reaching decision that directly attacked the manner in which lawyers are selected by judges to represent defendants who don’t have enough money to hire their own attorney.

To help the Municipal Court make that transition, it would be optimal, Brown said, if the City Council on Wednesday chose someone with lots of experience who could hit the ground running.

“But I hear only rumors” about who might be appointed, Brown added.

“I’ve heard people from the public defender’s office, from the district attorney’s office, from the city attorney’s office, an alternate judge and temporary appointees are all being considered.”

That’s more than most have heard because appointment to Municipal Court is a process shrouded in secrecy. Though a suggestion was made five years ago to create a panel to screen potential appointees, that never happened. Now, City Hall sources say, appointees are suggested entirely on the whim of individual council members.

Toy Gregory, whose death last month created the vacancy, was a longtime friend of Mayor Oscar Goodman. But he was never known to kowtow to the mayor or the City Council.

Whoever the new judge is, he or she will be thrown into a system facing significant change for the first time in decades.

Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the courts will have to put in place an alternative system that forbids judges from taking any part in the appointment of lawyers.

The high court also demanded that by July, all lower courts forward it reports on public defenders’ caseloads. The implication is, if the lawyer-to-defendant ratios are far beyond standards outlined by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the high court might order more changes — costly ones — to lower that ratio.

Currently, the caseloads in Clark and Washoe counties are more than double the association’s suggested ratio of 150 felony and gross misdemeanor cases per attorney — 364 per attorney in Clark County’s public defender’s office and 327 per attorney in Washoe County.

As the ad hoc committee noted repeatedly Monday at the Regional Justice Center, lowering that ratio and the other operational changes are going to cost money in Clark County, Las Vegas, Henderson and rural counties throughout the state.

“I know the rurals don’t have money, but I don’t think we can look at this from the point of view of, ‘They don’t have money so we can’t do anything,’ ” said Franny Forsman, Nevada’s federal public defender and head of the ad hoc committee.

Gary Peck, ACLU of Nevada executive director, called the Supreme Court’s ruling “a major moment of importance in this state with respect to the quality of justice.”

“We can’t be guided by, you know, ‘enough money,’ ” he said. “We have an obligation to consider it, but it can’t be the driving force.”