District judges open door slightly

Clark County's district judges have taken a step toward openness in their administrative meetings but left a loophole that allows virtually any controversial or politically sensitive issue to be handled behind closed doors.

By a slim majority the district judges voted Wednesday at their monthly meeting that "personnel" matters involving employee issues and compensation should always be considered in private session.

But other administrative issues generally should be addressed in a public forum, the judges decided.

However, an amendment allows the chief judge to put any sensitive issue on the personnel agenda to be considered outside the presence of the public and the media.

The state's open meeting law does not apply to judges because of the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine.

Several judges protested the amendment, saying it could be used to hide politically sensitive matters.

"Just because something is controversial doesn't mean it should be considered in a private session," said District Judge Mark Gibbons.

The amendment gave no guidelines about what items should be declared secret and a recent court rule prevents the public from even knowing they are being considered.

Under the court rule passed at a closed judges meeting in February, personnel agenda is no longer made public. The rule was passed, according to some judges who attended the meeting, because of media challenges to the propriety of some closed door meetings.

The judges will consider another issue affecting the public in June, when they reconsider whether to continue a system that requires them to specialize in civil or criminal cases.

The system is favored by lawyers and governmental entities and appears from statistics to be more efficient, but some judges don't like it, because those handling civil cases have considerably larger workloads than judges who deal with criminal cases.

Although the pilot program was made permanent in November by a vote of the judges, some have been lobbying to revert to the prior system. In that system judges handled both civil and criminal cases and each judge had an equal share of all cases.

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