Nevada Judiciary

Public Meeting Set for June 5 on Plan

For Evaluations of Nevada Judges

A public meeting of the Nevada Supreme Court’s Article 6 Commission is scheduled for June 5 to consider a recommended plan for creation of a statewide system to evaluate the performances of Nevada’s judges.

The meeting will be videoconferenced between the Supreme Court’s courtroom in Carson City and its southern courtroom at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas.

The judicial evaluation plan is the result of work by a subcommittee of the Article 6 Commission.  The report, released publicly in early May, recommends five steps to implement the evaluation system as a way to assist voters in determining how well judges are doing their jobs.

“Voters frequently complain that they have insufficient information to determine if a sitting judge is worthy of being returned to the bench,” said Justice Ron Parraguirre, who represents the Supreme Court on the Article 6 Commission.  “The Article 6 Commission wanted to determine if broad based evaluations could paint a more complete picture of a judge’s performance.  It is clear from this study that such evaluations can be very useful for the voting public and the judges themselves.”

In developing the Nevada Judicial Evaluation Pilot Project, the Article 6 subcommittee worked with the Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.  (For the final report, CLICK HERE ).

Currently, attorneys in Clark, Washoe, and Douglas Counties are polled biennially about the performance of judges in their counties and the Nevada Supreme Court.  The Article 6 Commission’s study recommends that jurors, court staff, litigants, and other judges also participate in evaluations.

The five recommendations in the report are:

• Develop a program design and conduct a cost analysis.
• Create a Judicial Evaluation Program Commission to implement and oversee the design of the program.
• Develop exit surveys for jurors and litigants to complete at the end of trials.
• Create a data collection process and system to analyze and utilize the information.
• Ensure that data exists so all persons in the court system can be contacted to provide needed input on judicial evaluations.

The current judicial evaluation systems in Nevada are not funded or conducted by the judiciary.  In Clark County, the Review Journal newspaper conducts the surveys of lawyers.  In Washoe County, the evaluations are conducted by the Washoe County Bar Association.

Currently about 20 states use some form of judicial evaluations.