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
archive purposes, but it could be out of date. Upon request,
the webmaster will
continue to correct significant errors and will consider
removing information that is destructively obsolete.
(Email: FamilyCourtGuy (at) gmail.com) Glenn Campbell's other websites
remain active:
KilroyCafe.com,
RoamingPhotos.com
and
Facebook
Clark County judges have approved sweeping changes to a decades-old system of assigning private attorneys to criminal defendants.
The reforms will impact how thousands of accused criminals are represented.
A Review-Journal investigation in March revealed that the existing system's lack of rules and oversight led to uneven justice and questionable county spending.
District Judge Stewart Bell, who headed a committee of court officers that recommended fixes to the so-called contract attorney method, called the newspaper's series "a fulcrum for re-looking at how we do business."
The system in its current form violates most American Bar Association guidelines for indigent defense delivery, most significantly by letting judges hand-pick defense lawyers who regularly appear before them.
Contract attorneys, also known as conflict or track attorneys, represent indigent defendants who cannot be represented by a full-time public defender because of a conflict of interest. This occurs most often in cases with co-defendants who might implicate each other. Some kind of conflict arises in roughly one out of every seven indigent cases.
Since the 1980s, it has been left to individual judges to inform court administrators if contract defenders were mistreating clients or overbilling the county. The Review-Journal series revealed that some judges ignored such problems. As a result, attorneys with a pattern of questionable behavior contracted with the county year after year.
In a rare move, local judges at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday agreed to take authority away from themselves to eliminate the appearance of cronyism.
Comments from the Webmaster
Resistance is futile!
This is a great step forward for both the court system and the
Rebuke-Urinal™. The series of articles that lead to this change was the
newspaper's first serious investigation in years. (Usually, we have
to wait for some "real" newspaper like the L.A. Times or
the New York Times to
report on the larger issues in Las Vegas.)
This change to the contract system
is a classic example of the power of the press.
Absolutely nothing would have happened without the newspaper
reporting on the problem.
We don't mean to give credit to the entire Rebuke-Urinal™, however.
They're still a bunch of zombies for the most part, but this
Alan Maimon is pretty bright. He is still new in town and
hasn't yet been absorbed into the Borg collective. Hopefully,
he'll get some more useful reporting done before the zombies get him
and suck his brain.
If the system eventually is changed, the role of the Commission on Judicial Selection will grow. Currently, when unexpected vacancies come open among District Court and Supreme Court judgeships, the commission recommends three names to the governor, who chooses a replacement to serve until the next election.
Under the modified " Missouri Plan " proposal sponsored by Sen. Bill Raggio, R-Reno, however, the commission would be responsible for the initial selection of all state judges and justices.
Glenn Campbell, an independent web journalist at Clark County Family Court, is told by a court administrator that he has been permanently banned from
all future proposals to the court
due to the objectionable content of his website. Campbell conducts an investigation and finds that juvenile hearing master Stephen Compan is responsible for the complaint against him. Compan was seeking retribution for Campbell's earlier criticism of Compan's courtroom behavior. Compan was apparently appointed to his job only because he was a friend of Judge Steven Jones. Campbell defends the allegedly objectionable content of his website and says the conflict with Compan is the real reason for his "blacklisting."
The Family Court hearing master appears to be more shocked by the teen's physical condition than by the crimes of which he stands accused, including robbery with a deadly weapon.
"He needs to be treated by a doctor immediately," says
Stephen Compan, the juvenile hearing master.
He then chastises Scott's mother for not providing her son with any medication since April 2005.
"How dare you?" he asks her.
"I almost want to put you in jail."
Roberto Flores had left for work about 5:15 a.m. on Jan. 28, 2001, leaving Zoraida in the care of Martha Flores. Martha Flores' three children were also at the home.
Doctors determined that about 20 minutes after her father had left, Zoraida received a fatal blow to the head that killed her within an hour, prosecutor Pam Weckerly said.
Comments from the Webmaster
This sort of scenario implies a momentary loss of control, not deliberate
intent. For this, the perpetrator gets a minimum 20 years in prison,
pretty much regardless of the circumstances. This sentence is nothing
more than dumb retribution. It certainly has no deterrent
effect on others, because these acts by definition are impulsive and
include no analysis of consequences. It's also not going to
teach the defendant much, because by the time she gets out, she
won't have much time to practice those lessons. In the meantime,
her three children will grow up without a mother.
We agree that there are crimes that deserve long prison sentences.
Chaz Higgs, if he is found guilty of deliberately killing Kathy Augustine,
needs to go to prison for life, even be sentenced to death, both to
protect society from him and as a public deterrent to other sociopaths
(who do respond to harsh penalties).
What we object to is long mandatory sentences given to an entire
class of crime, like child murder or sex crimes, regardless of the
intent or circumstances. These insensitive
sentences are often crimes in themselves,
with more damaging societal effects than the original crime.
"Is this justice? Is this rational? No, it's Nevada."
Child welfare officials left the last legislative session with significant funding for new programs and staffing. According to state officials, $131 million was approved for Clark County's child welfare integration budget for the 2008-09 biennium. That represents a 67 percent increase over the previous budget, said Steve George, spokesman for the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services.
Willden said the new funding includes $20 million over the next two years to reduce caseloads to about 22 cases per worker in Clark County. Currently, the ratio is as high as 40 cases per worker.
Clark County will receive $8.6 million to increase foster parent daily pay rates, which Willden said will go from $21.50 to $24 on July 1, and from $24 to $28 in 2008.
Willden's department also now has $5.2 million to create a child welfare training center that will serve both new and continuing workers across Nevada...
Child Haven, Clark County's emergency shelter for abused and neglected children, is preparing to meet some of the new requirements, which includes licensing by the state. Child Haven now operates as an unlicensed facility.
"The first thing I'm concerned about is capacity," said Lou Palma, manager of shelter services for Clark County Family Services.
For instance, the population at Child Haven last week hovered at 119. Under day-care licensing standards, the capacity would have been capped at about 96, Palma said.
The debate continues over the future of Child Haven.
The publication this week of UNLV School of Social Work professor Leroy Pelton's examination of the child and family service network in Southern Nevada is generating strong opinions on both sides of his argument that the children would be better served by the system if Child Haven were shut down and its budget redistributed.
(Read the study at reviewjournal.com/news/childwelfarereport.)
With daunting worker caseloads and far more children than beds, the department and Child Haven have played the patsy for a broken system. The death of a 17-month-old at Child Haven and the disappearance of a 2-year-old placed in foster care provided fodder for critics but also point to the very real potential for tragedy when a system is overwhelmed and under-managed.
Is closing Child Haven and redistributing its budget the answer?
UNLV School of Social Work professor Leroy Pelton thinks so. Pelton identifies the dire problems at DFS in a report released Tuesday, "An Examination of the Reasons for Child Removal in Clark County, Nevada." It's a report every citizen should read.
His conclusions are sure to upset some of those who have devoted their lives to keeping children safe in a boomtown addled by drugs and alcohol. Although it will be difficult, and perhaps impossible, for Child Haven's dedicated staffers not to take Pelton's report personally, he assured me Tuesday he understood that those on the front lines of the war on the young aren't to blame for the system's failure....
But there aren't many places as inundated with need, and I think this is where Pelton's philosophy figures to run smack into a terrible reality. His thought-provoking report, with its heart-wrenching anecdotes of children taken from homes ruined by drug and alcohol addiction, surely will defeat its own argument for change by relating some of the complex cases.
ATLANTA — For Genarlow Wilson's mother, it was a "miracle" — a judge had voided her son's 10-year prison sentence for receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. She jumped up and down. She told reporters she couldn't wait to fuss over him, looked forward to cooking soul food for him.
Barely an hour later, Juannessa Bennett was fighting tears as the news grew more complicated: Georgia's attorney general had appealed the ruling that had been Wilson's ticket to freedom....
A high school football star and honor student, Wilson received oral sex from a 15-year-old girl at a 2003 New Year's Eve party. Under Georgia law at the time, the encounter, although consensual, constituted "aggravated child molestation". The charge was "aggravated" because Georgia law mandated a more severe penalty for oral sex than for intercourse.
In 2005, Wilson was sentenced to prison and a lifetime on Georgia's sex offender registry.
The next year, Georgia legislators revised the law to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor rather than a felony. They rejected a bid to make the new law retroactive, though, and later that year the state Supreme Court rejected Wilson's motion for an appeal of that decision. This year, a bill that would have allowed judges to review sentences meted out under the old law stalled in the Georgia Senate.
The federal agency that oversees Nevada's child welfare system is praising the state for its reform efforts. The Eyewitness News I-Team has chronicled those efforts for the last two years.
The state has been waiting for this letter since the end of February. In it, the federal agency that oversees Nevada's child welfare system approves of the state's progress.
Dr. Susan Orr of the Children's Bureau writes Nevada can take pride in the actions it has taken to improve its services to children and families.
A federal review team visited Nevada in early May to determine whether the state had met its goals. Reviewers found it had, though they did note four areas of on-going concern:
The timeliness of investigations
too much lag time between the report of abuse to the opening of a case.
Repeat maltreatment
kids aren't being protected from further abuse.
Risk of harm
whether children are staying safely in their own homes.
And permanency
kids have a permanent and living situation.
The state has until February of next year to improve in those areas.
A mother and her boyfriend have pleaded guilty to charges of sexual assault with a child in a case that was cracked by police after someone found a journal the couple wrote documenting the abuse, authorities said.
Jackie Williams, 37, and Michael Jones, 31, pleaded guilty Friday to showing Williams' two daughters, ages 11 and 12, how to perform sex acts in a room at the Ponderosa Motel in Reno.
Williams and Jones face a maximum of 40 years
in prison before they are eligible for parole on two counts of sexual assault with a child. They also will have to register as sex offenders.
Comments from the Webmaster
What is most disturbing in this article is the sentence: Under
Nevada law, that's a
minimum of 40 years, not a maximum as stated.
Sexual assault on a child is certainly a serious crime, but is
is worth more prison time than murder? Very rarely does a
murderer get that much time.
If a 16-year-old conducts improper "sexual experimentation"
on his 13-year old sister and
his case is "certified" to adult court, he is going to get that
same mandatory 40-year sentence. Essentially, it's the death
penalty for him, regardless of the circumstances.
If you give sex crimes essentially the same sentence as murder,
it brings up a practical consideration: After someone commits a
rape, what is to prevent them from just killing the victim?
When you are facing a mandatory 40 years anyway, there's not
much more risk in just neutralizing the witness.
Is this justice? Is this rational? No, it's Nevada.
A Family Services supervisor, he said he makes about $90,000 a year. But as his home life suggests, Fitzgerald's job is more than just work to him; his life and home are consumed by the plight of Clark County's abused and neglected children, who face a severe shortage of foster families....
Washington partisanship and campaign buzzwords were far off, for example, when Fitzgerald described the succession of foster children he's cared for, including an infant he had for more than a year and a half before returning him to the rehabilitated mother last year.
He saw the boy twice after that, but then the mother cut off contact.
That child's photos and drawings still adorn the house, and Fitzgerald's eyes were watery as he explained how he keeps telling himself the children he cares for are not his to keep.
Comments from the Webmaster
Molly Ball, the author of this story, is an asshole who happens
to be the best reporter at the Rebuke-Urinal™. If she were reporting on
Family Services instead of the dimwit we have now, things would
majorly change.
The measure that eventually passed - based on the "Missouri Plan" to select judges but with some important tweaks added by Raggio - would end the system of open elections for Nevada judges and justices.
In its place would be a process in which the state's Judicial Selection Commission would choose three candidates for vacant judgeships. The governor would select one and the judge would then face the voters in an uncontested "retention election" two years later.
Raggio's plan is different from the Missouri Plan in two respects. First, retention election candidates would need 55 percent of the vote to stay in office, as opposed to a simple majority.
Second, his bill would create the Judicial Performance Commission, which would review the judge's record and issue a public report before the election that would include a recommendation on whether the judge should be retained....
This is just the beginning for Raggio's plan. For the Constitution to be amended, the bill needs to be passed by the Legislature again in two years, and then by the voters in a referendum. In the 1970s and '80s, voters twice rejected similar proposals. But proponents believe that the mood may have changed, and that reform might now stand a better chance.
Construction employment -- a major contributor to Southern Nevada's job growth over the past few years -- dipped into negative territory in 2007. The growth rate of construction jobs as a share of all new jobs in Nevada fell 2 percent from 2006 and the percentage of construction jobs as a share of all new jobs fell 8.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Construction makes up nearly 11 percent of Nevada's total employment....
Frank Nason of Residential Resources said Schwer's assessment of the local economy validates his own research and "it's not good news we're hearing."
One thing nobody touched upon, Nason said, is that about half of the 28,000 homes for sale in Las Vegas are vacant. "There can't be 14,000 people that can hold onto that indefinitely," he said....
"I'm really pessimistic about Las Vegas housing," he said. "I've been in the appraisal industry for a decade, and I think fraud is just pervasive."
The budget was tight this year in Carson City. But much to their relief, Nevada judges and court administrators ended up getting most of what they had asked for.
In short, that meant a half-dozen new judges for Clark County's Eighth Judicial District, and more money for judicial salaries and for the county's innovative Mental Health Court....
Legislators granted the Eighth District six new judges, five of whom will be designated for Family Court. The sixth will preside over civil cases.
An agency that evaluates the operational practices of health care organizations has noted "serious" concerns at the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas.
The Joint Commission, which visited the hospital in April, raised concerns about medical oversight of patients by staff, proper health evaluation of patients and how medical records are kept and maintained, said Mike Wilden, director of the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services.
A Clark County Juvenile Detention Center supervisor was arrested after an investigation revealed he had broken the wrist of a mentally disabled 16-year-old in his custody, authorities said.
Thomas Steven Gallia was arrested in May and charged with felony child abuse and neglect with substantial bodily harm, according to his arrest report....
Gallia has been employed by Clark County for more than 11 years. He's been a supervisor at the detention center for less than a year, said Clark County spokeswoman Jennifer Knight.
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Resistance is futile!
6/25/07:
Newsletter #25: BLACKLISTED... but not broken!
(Family Court Chronicles/Glenn Campbell)
The "Mother of All Newsletters" from Family Court Chronicles. Entities:
Steven Compan (subject),
John Jensen (mentioned),
Steven Jones (past trials discussed),
Glenn Campbell (author),
Amy Mcnair (mentioned but not named) 
6/18/07:
CHILD WELFARE: Lawmaker mandates raise bar: Legislature provides more funding for system overhaul
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Lisa Kim Bach)
Entities:
Michael Willden (quoted),
DCFS (mentioned),
DFS (mentioned),
Williams Family Training Complex (possibly referring to),
Lou Palma (quoted),
Child Haven (mentioned),
Tom Morton (quoted),
Youth Law Center (briefly mentioned),
Youth Law Center (briefly mentioned) 
6/15/07:
JOHN L. SMITH: Study increases scrutiny of Child Haven's role in social service system
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/John L. Smith)
Entities:
Child Haven (subject) 
.)
6/8/07:
Candidate sees child welfare up close: Family Services supervisor lets Democratic presidential hopeful walk in his shoes
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Molly Ball)
Entities:
Molly Ball (author),
Mark Fitzgerald (subject),
Child Haven (mentioned) 
6/5/07:
Agency reviews LV mental facility
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Annette Wells)
Entities:
Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital (subject) 
6/1/07:
Juvenile center staffer arrested: Incident resulted in broken wrist for teen
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/Francis McCabe)
Entities:
Thomas Gallia (accused of injuring inmate),
Cheryln Townsend (quoted),
Jennifer Knight (quoted),
Clark County Juvenile Detention Center (supervisor at) 
