Sun Editorial:

Apology late in coming

Judge in 2003 court detainment incident just recently told victim he is sorry

Friday, Sept. 11, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

A Las Vegas municipal judge has finally apologized to a woman whom he had ordered detained in 2003 as a way of getting her boyfriend to appear in court.

Judge George Assad, however, did not apologize on his own. He was ordered to do so in June 2008 by the Nevada Supreme Court. Even then he delayed, requesting that the court rehear his case. The court did so and in November reaffirmed its original decision.

It wasn’t until this summer, eight months after the Supreme Court’s final order, that Assad apologized in a letter to the woman, Anne Chrzanowski.

The case began when Chrzanowski spoke up in court, relaying her boyfriend’s request that he be allowed more time to pay unpaid parking tickets.

Assad alleged that her boyfriend had threatened a court employee in a phone call the previous week, an improper remark because that was not the issue before him. According to transcripts filed by the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline, Assad said her boyfriend had to be in court and said to Chrzanowski:

“Unless you want to get him down here real quick, we’re going to have to lock you up until he gets here ... You’re going to have to go with my marshal in the back and make a phone call ... Tell (your boyfriend) you’re going to jail if he doesn’t get his butt down here.”

The woman was escorted by a court marshal to a confinement area outside the courtroom, handcuffed and ordered to call her boyfriend. She was detained nearly three hours.

The Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline found in 2007 that Assad had violated the Nevada Code of Judicial Conduct and issued him a public reprimand. The Supreme Court dismissed the reprimand but ordered the judge to enroll in an ethics course and apologize to Chrzanowski.

Assad’s actions were inexcusable, and he should have apologized on his own, within days of the incident. That he waited so long even after the Supreme Court’s order does not reflect well on Municipal Court.

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By KillerB

Sept. 11, 2009

10:44 a.m.

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Too many judges let the authority we give them go to their heads. The result is as we see here, when they run "their" courtrooms like private kingdoms. They sign their names and the process of overcoming wrong decisions is a long, highly technical, byzantine appellate process that favors the court and judges.

Nice to see the system worked for someone -- but, as the Sun pointed out, it took a long time.

Quite obviously the process of judging judges is far, far more lenient than what judges like this give the average defendant.

Not a new problem. 2,400 years ago Plato wrote about what a waste of time it is to spend one's day in court trying to convince "dozing judges" of the righteousness of our cases.