Nevada Judiciary

A public meeting of the Nevada Supreme Court’s Article 6 Commission is scheduled for Monday, Feb. 22, 2010, to continue its work on the creation of a statewide system to evaluate the performances of Nevada’s judges.

Public comment will be taken by the Commission about the supplemental to the final report on the Nevada Judicial Evaluation project.  (For the meeting agenda, CLICK HERE)  (To access the supplemental report, CLICK HERE)

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 public may comment from either location.

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

The “supplement to the final report,” prepared in September by the Grant Sawyer Center for Judicial Studies, refines those steps and estimates the costs that would be associated with the evaluations.

Once the full Commission accepts the subcommittee’s reports or modifies them, it will make a recommendation to the Nevada Supreme Court concerning the next steps.

“Voters frequently complain that they have insufficient information to determine if a sitting judge is worthy of being returned to the bench,” said Chief 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.  The final report is posted on the Supreme Court’s website, http://www.nevadajudiciary.us/index.php/viewdocumentsandforms/func-startdown/1813/. 

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:

The supplemental report recommends that the Supreme Court:

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.

The report states that “Judicial performance evaluation programs are a proven approach to promoting accountability without necessarily restricting judicial independence.”