THE FAMILY COURT PROJECT HAS COME TO A CLOSE.
Effective 6/1/08, Family Court Chronicles has become inactive (announcement), and
no new information will be added. The page below is retained for
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the webmaster will
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removing information that is destructively obsolete.
(Email: FamilyCourtGuy (at) gmail.com) See
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A few judges have announced intentions to retire at the close of 2008 -- the end of all judicial terms in the county. All 41 judicial seats, plus two state Supreme Court seats, will be open -- and some are expected to be hotly contested. Six seats are being added to ease the mounting caseload -- of which five will be based at the county's Family Court.
"No matter whether you come from an inner city school or a private school, people get involved in crimes. I think it's important for our youth to see that there are consequences," said Judge Villani.
Consequences for split second decisions that can change a life forever. Judge Villani regularly hosts students from around the valley.
Comments from the Webmaster
The gist of this story is that four students from a private school
sat in on a routine criminal court calendar (not juvenile court).
Since someone must have
alerted the media to this non-event, it strikes us as a publicity stunt.
INTERNAL ERROR: Cannot open /2007/dec/26children.txt
An important aspect of the Nevada judicial system that has long been kept secret is being opened to public scrutiny.
The group that interviews and nominates lawyers to fill vacant District Court judgeships and Supreme Court justice positions will now hold open hearings so the public can monitor how and why a candidate is selected.
The seven-member Nevada Commission on Judicial Selection chose to make the hearings public to bolster public confidence in judicial appointments, said Bill Gang, spokesman for the Nevada Supreme Court.
Citing skyrocketing caseloads, public defender offices in Clark and Washoe counties may begin withdrawing from cases on ethical grounds, which would force counties to increase staffing at the agencies or find and fund alternatives.
At a second Nevada Supreme Court public hearing on indigent defense, Chief Justice William Maupin asked county managers whether they are prepared to deal with this possible mass exodus by public defenders.
Clark County Assistant County Manager Jeff Wells said the county was looking at hiring more lawyers for Public Defender Phil Kohn's office, despite the county's projected $42 million budget shortfall.
Kohn, whose deputies each handle about 400 felony cases a year, said he would hold off on a decision to withdraw from cases until he sees how the county responds to the Supreme Court's possible adoption of caseload and performance standards.
Mariah's grandmother had given Henderson police the information they needed to focus their investigation on Naranjo at the end of August.
She told police that on Feb. 7, 2006, as she and other family members waited for Mariah, who had been taken off life support to die at St. Rose Dominican Hospital's Sienna Campus, Naranjo told them he hadn't meant for "that to happen," a warrant for his arrest notes.
He "was fake crying" that night and he had been aggressive with the children before, the grandmother told police. One time a "visibly mad" Naranjo "violently grabbed" a car seat the infant was in, the warrant says.
It started out as a fatal car accident in the desert off the 215 near Losee. A 4-year-old boy was found dead after the driver of a small white car claimed he lost control. Now police believe their original suspicions on this death were right.
Sean Walker, of North Las Vegas police department said, "We believe the driver of that car, Trevor Carter, actually staged that accident in an effort to cover up abuse that was suffered by the deceased."
A car crash in the desert Tuesday morning was staged to try to cover up the slaying of a 4-year-old boy, North Las Vegas police said Wednesday. ...
North Las Vegas police spokesman Sean Walker said the girl, along with another sibling who Walker said he believes is 5 or 6, were in the custody of Child Protective Services on Wednesday.
"The Best is Yet to Come" is the theme for the Las Vegas New Year's Eve party along the Las Vegas Strip and at the Fremont Street Experience.
As many as 400,000 people will gather in Las Vegas to celebrate ringing in the New Year. America's Party, as it is called, will include live entertainment in downtown Las Vegas featuring the Bangles and the Doobie Brothers. There will also be a fireworks display on the Las Vegas Strip. Fireworks will be launched from the rooftops of MGM Grand, Planet Hollywood, Flamingo Las Vegas, Venetian, Treasure Island (TI), Circus Circus and Stratosphere.
Comments from the Webmaster
The choice of the theme "The Best is Yet to Come" is confirmation of
the pessimistic mood in the city. Why would you have to say that
if you weren't trying to put a spin on a bad situation?
CARSON CITY -- The agency that provides assistance to Nevada's most vulnerable populations, from poor families to the elderly and the mentally ill, should be able to avoid cutting back on current client programs while implementing nearly $80 million in required budget cuts, an official told lawmakers on Tuesday. ...
Layoffs of state employees are also not anticipated at the lower cut levels, he said.
"The last thing I want to do is harm the existing level of client services," Willden said. "We try to take the things that are the least harmful."
Two program areas, child welfare and juvenile justice, are exempted from any cuts.
Comments from the Webmaster
We think it is rediculous to say there will be budget cuts without
any affect on services. This implies that the agency was inefficient
to begin with and will suddenly get more efficient when the cuts
are made.
More tense moments at a school near near where six people were shot at a school bus stop last week. A Mojave High School student was arrested at an elementary school with what was thought to be a loaded gun.
It turned out the gun was a toy, but it still made a lot of people nervous.
Comments from the Webmaster
A kid got arrested with a toy gun...
and Newschopper 8 was there!
CARSON CITY - While Gov. Jim Gibbons is preparing to reduce the state's spending, his wife is pushing plans to raise the next biennium's budget by millions of dollars to curb methamphetamine use.
Dawn Gibbons is a member of the Governor's Working Group on Methamphetamine Use, which has tentatively proposed new programs to treat methamphetamine users and to restore some lost federal funds.
...
The group also has called for the establishment of a Drug Endangered Children program to support and fund community-based early identification programs for first-time juvenile and adult offenders. It recommends establishing minimum requirements for a comprehensive prevention education in grades K-12, increasing the salaries of prevention specialists, raising money for a media campaign and providing expanded training for judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Nevada laid claim to the nation's highest foreclosure rate for the 11th month in a row, according to the report. The Nevada rate of one filing for every 152 households was more than four times the national average. Florida, with a rate of one filing for every 282 households, ranked second, while Ohio was third.
Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani took $40,000 last year, after she virtually locked up her seat by winning the Democratic primary. Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins, who has also been a state Democratic Party chairman, took $10,000 from Adelson's companies in December 2004.
Democrats' accepting money from Adelson's companies "is unheard of in this century," political consultant Jim Ferrence said. Historically, money from Adelson would turn off Democratic activists and, more important, sour relationships with the Culinary Union.
"It would be like Harry Reid taking money from Rush Limbaugh," Ferrence said.
Superintendent Walt Rulffes said he believes "there are dozens and dozens of things that are headed off through the vigilance of school staff and campus police." At the same time, the schools alone cannot be responsible for preventing incidents like Tuesday's shootings at an off-campus bus stop.
"The deeper message here is that this isn't a school safety issue," Rulffes said. "It is a communitywide issue and it is going to take all of us to solve it."
The Clark County School District tells Eyewitness News it is doing everything in its power to keep students safe -- including expelling students. ...
Dr. Edward Goldman oversees the school district's expulsion process. He says more than 5,000 Clark County problem students were removed from their campuses last year and placed in alternative school settings -- and that number will likely be even higher this year.
"There are just more violent students out there today and more offenses are being committed on campuses. I think it's a reflection of the society we live in," said Goldman.
Comments from the Webmaster
The school district is doing everything in its power to address
school violence. Unfortunately, the only thing in its power
is ever harsher punishments. Our school district has no resources
for counseling, where someone tries to figure out and address the
child's underlying problems.
Instead, the standard solution to every problem is to expell kids and
send them to gulags called (with no sense of irony) "Opportunity Schools."
These schools, located outside the kids neighborhood, are often an
ordeal just to get to.
The real effect is to so isolate the kid and make education so difficult
that it virtually dares him to drop out.
The parents of missing three-year-old Everlyse Cabrera have surrendered their rights to her siblings.
The state had moved to have the parental rights of Marlena Alivas and Ernesto Cabrera terminated. Prosecutors claim the two are unfit parents.
Rather than let the court decide whether Olivas and Cabrera would ever get their kids back, the couple agreed to an open adoption with a foster family.
Police say at about 12:40 p.m. a brawl broke out between two groups of students. The fight was broken up by school officials. Police and school personnel were monitoring the lunch periods.
Police used pepper spray to break up the fight and three students were taken into custody.
They all laughed at our headline a
year ago, "REPENT NOW! THE CRASH
IS NEAR" (Opinion #11).
Well, they're not laughing now.
In that newsletter, we accurately
predicted the current Las Vegas housing
slump. Of course, we didn't predict the
whole nation's housing would tank, but
that's a fine point. The residential real
estate crisis in Las Vegas—foreclosures, falling prices and unsold
homes—is arguably the worst in the
country because our economic fundamentals
are so weak.
What is Las Vegas selling to the
world except illusion? It's an illusion the
world can do without. As the rest of the
country loses much its discretionary
income due to falling housing values,
what's the very first expense people are
going to cut? Their Vegas vacation!
Now we're predicting that the worst
is yet to come. Housing is only the first
domino in an unstoppable series of
catastrophic economic events. The
Great Collapse has already begun—the
bursting of the Vegas bubble. On a scale
we have never seen before, unemployment
will explode, investment will
slow, visitor growth will turn negative,
housing will further deteriorate, new
commercial construction will retreat and
Wayne Newton will lose his singing
voice.
It's a bleakness born from a radical shift in American prison policy, a shift that has multiplied the number of people behind bars as much as sevenfold in the past quarter-century. This explosive growth is the result of an increasingly punitive approach toward criminals, one that has replaced promises of rehabilitation with incarceration for all.
But this shift in attitude is colliding with an uncomfortable fact: We're running out of room, and critics say the swollen prison system is bankrupting its own best intentions. It is creating an incarceration mill that releases 650,000 felons annually - spitting them onto the streets worse than when they arrived, with records that prevent them from becoming anything else.
If the pattern holds, more than half will be back behind bars within three years.
...
In the 1960s many politicians and other people agreed that the best way to deal with crime was by targeting its root causes - poverty, lack of access to education, drug abuse and joblessness, among others. Those were bipartisan beliefs and the politicians who talked up government programs to address such issues (such as Lyndon Johnson declaring a "war on poverty") were preaching what the public wanted to hear, says Elliott Currie, a professor in the department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine.
...
Only all those promised programs, those vows to address root causes of crime, never amounted to more than lip service. This is in part thanks to the Vietnam War, which cost so much to fight that there wasn't enough money left to spend on social programs. In this way, Vietnam inadvertently shaped the prison policy we know today.
By the 1970s, the crime problem got out of hand and people started clamoring for change. In response, politicians served up new "get tough" policies. Sentences were extended and imposed on criminals for lesser offenses than ever before. The number of people behind bars grew exponentially and accelerated anew in the 1980s, when the war on drugs was fought in inner-city trenches.
"We went out aggressively trying to put people behind bars for even minor drug offenses," Currie said. "We chose to use incarceration as almost our sole tool for taking care of (drug problems) and the result is what we see - the vast increase of the incarcerated population."
One of the key tourism pipelines to Las Vegas is reducing expansion plans nationwide in response to the weakening U.S. economy.
Southwest Airlines, which flies more than 1.2 million passengers a month to and from McCarran International Airport, will add only five to 10 jets to its fleet in 2008, about half of what it had planned. At one time, Southwest was projecting adding 35 jets to its fleet in 2008.
...
"But this is a reaction to reduced demand nationally, not locally," he said. "Southwest is in the business of placing supply where there is demand and based on our 90 percent occupancy rate, I'd say there is considerable demand."
Aguero bolsters his case by noting that McCarran passenger counts continue to be at record levels, with the 4.07 million passengers arriving in October taking the 2007 total to more than 40 million. Roughly half the visitors to Las Vegas arrive by air.
Comments from the Webmaster
In a newsletter released today, we contend that
"The Great Vegas Crash Has Begun," but this article points
out that hotel occupancy and airport passenger counts are still
strong. Does this mean that tourism remains resilient?
Not necessarily. Due to the housing slump, discretionary
income is falling nationwide, but at this point people don't
yet know they have no money. As we see it,
there is a delay effect between
lost income and reduced spending. Call it the denial factor.
Give it a few months. We predict a substantial drop in
occupancy and airport traffic in 2008.
Clark County is the only entity in Nevada that offers such coverage to foster parents, Dolian said. United National has provided coverage for county foster parents since 2004. The premium cost about $100,000 a year and covered between 800 to 900 foster parents.
"The one settlement equaled about three years of premiums," Dolian said.
Dolian said Family Services staff is concerned that the loss of insurance might prompt people to withdraw from foster parenting. That will be tracked through the number of children surrendered by foster parents back to Family Services and the number of foster parents who decline to renew their licenses.
Marsha Simms, a foster parent and president of the Foster Care Association of Nevada, said she is unsure that the loss of liability insurance will be a substantial blow.
"A lot of foster parents don't even know they have insurance," Simms said.
Others, like herself, extended their homeowner's insurance policy when they became foster parents.
Gary Peck, executive director of Nevada's American Civil Liberties Union, has been working with county officials to reduce the population at Child Haven, the emergency shelter for abused and neglected children. This development might undo the progress that has been made in increasing foster care and phasing out group care, Peck said.
It's just one more obstacle to getting people signed up and in the foster parent program," Peck said.
Last week, local foster parents got a letter telling them the liability and property damage insurance provided by the county would end this Friday. The insurance company, United National dropped it, citing excessive losses as the reason. ...
In early October, United National deposited $300,000 with the court -- a settlement in the lawsuit regarding the disappearance of Everlyse Cabrera. Everlyse went missing from her foster home last July and has not been seen since. ...
Sources tell the I-Team, that settlement is one of several the insurance carrier expects to pay because of other on-going litigation involving the county's child welfare system. It currently faces at least 15 lawsuits.
Comments from the Webmaster
Without knowing anything more than is in the article, this news
sounds potentially disastrous to foster parent recruiting.
It is one thing to expect stable citizens to take a high-risk child
into their home; it is even harder to tell them, "And you have to bear
full liability for it on your own."
Without insurance, foster parents would seem at enormous risk.
There are a lot of things this child could do that might
be a financial risk to the foster parents.
What if the child were hurt or died? Of course, the natural
parents are going to want to sue the foster parents, as in the
Cabrera case.
If the child hurt someone else or their property while in the
foster parents' care, couldn't there be a liability there, too?
Certainly, any potential foster parent with property and stability
is going to want assurances that their own assets are protected
if they engage in this humanitarian effort.
That would leave only the foster parents without property or
stability -- the kind who are doing it only for the money.
A new contract with the state for the provision of child welfare services was approved Tuesday by Clark County commissioners.
Action on the contract was delayed in November, when it appeared that state funding for child welfare services was going to be reduced by 5 percent. Commissioners refused to act on the agreement because the potential budget cuts jeopardized the county's ability to hire additional staff and meet federal and state improvement goals. ...
The contract makes Clark County responsible for paying federal penalties if it's responsible for making the state fall below federal child welfare standards. It also frees the county to hire additional child welfare related staff. The Legislature approved 85 new child welfare positions earlier this year.
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12/26/07:
Clark County Judge Makes Difference With Valley School Kids
(KLAS-TV)
A story from criminal court, not juvenile court. 
12/20/07:
Man booked in 2006 death of infant: Tip from child's grandmother guides police
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Beth Walton)
Entities:
Death of Child (one) 
12/20/07:
2 Arrested in Death of 4-Year-Old
(KLAS-TV/Melissa Duran)
Entities:
Death of Child (one) 
12/20/07:
Mom, friend charged in 4-year-old's death: Police suspicious about accident in desert area
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Antonio Planas)
Entities:
Death of Child (one) 
12/19/07:
Student Arrested With Gun at Elementary School
(KLAS-TV)
12/18/07:
Sure, we'll take your money, Mr. Adelson: The rule is, Dems don't accept his donations, except that two of them did
(Las Vegas Sun/David McGrath Schwartz)
Entities:
Chris Giunchigliani (subject),
Tom Collins (subject) 
12/13/07:
CCSD Claims to Expel Problem Students, Keeps Others Safe
(KLAS-TV/Alyson McCarthy)
Entities:
Clark County School District (subject) 
12/12/07:
Day of Fights at Canyon Springs High Schools
(KLAS-TV)
12/10/07:
Fasten Your SeatBelts! The Great Vegas Crash has begun
(Family Court Chronicles/Glenn Campbell)
2-page printed flyer distributed at Family Court and the Clark County Government Center. Entities:
Glenn Campbell (author) 
12/5/07:
Clark County Will No Longer Provide Insurance to Foster Parents
(KLAS-TV/Colleen McCarty)
Entities:
Everlyse Cabrera (lawsuit mentioned),
Tom Morton (quoted),
stevens (mentioned),
foster (insurance for parents) 
