As a judge becomes victim, attitudes might change — a little

By Abigail Goldman

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Will they applaud when she scoots through security? A so-sad-for-you smattering? A golf clap that — smack ... smack ... smack — swells into a standing ovation? A cheer for the villain come back as victim?

Probably not. But if you drink what court gossips are spilling at the water cooler this week, suspended District Judge Elizabeth Halverson’s return to the Regional Justice Center will have a much friendlier audience than her departure from the courthouse had. Feelings are softer than they were at the end of the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline hearings. The courthouse is awaiting the commission’s decision on whether her misconduct warrants a lifetime banishment from the bench.

The attorneys and officials who make up the scrappy courthouse society admit that if Halverson’s husband weren’t suspected of attempting to beat her to death after that last hearing, they’d still be annoyed with the woman whose yearlong suspension and highly publicized hearings for highly strange behaviors on the bench brought on a blitzkrieg of media.

Now, it seems, people feel they ought to at least flash her a sympathetic smile, even if it’s through clenched teeth.

Halverson is supposed to leave her hospital bed today to testify before the grand jury. She is to give her version of what happened Sept. 4, when her husband, Ed, reportedly came at her with a frying pan, swung it at her face and smacked part of her scalp off.

It’s this image of Halverson — whose size and sickness have confined her to an electric scooter with an oxygen tank, whose injuries caused her head to swell so much that she couldn’t see — that has softened harsh popular opinion of the judge into almost an apology.

Sure, they say, she wasn’t a great judge. And yes, we dried out our eyeballs watching that telenovela of a misconduct hearing. But nobody, they whisper, deserves to be bludgeoned to the brink of death with a cooking utensil. Elizabeth — Lizzie, if we might — has become a lot more sympathetic now that she’s a victim of crime. And this newfound sympathy is a fact of human nature as obvious and depressing as the reason the media became obsessed with Halverson in the first place — the way she looks. Spanish-language media dropped all pretense and referred to her as the “jurista gigante,” the giant judge.

The fact that she’s accused of ordering a bailiff to massage her feet was just icing on the cake.

Ever since her hospitalization for critical injuries, Halverson has become a lot more quiet. And so here’s the second stratum of gossip: Halverson could blow all her “injury equity” if she slips back into the combative tyrant colleagues learned to loathe. Some courthouse observers think Halverson’s stock is high enough to protect her from permanent removal from the bench — if she plays her cards right.

Most, however, think that’s a laughable notion — Halverson could be beaten with five frying pans and a meat tenderizer and she’d still be short the sympathy it would require to convince the Commission on Judicial Discipline she should ever be allowed near a jurist’s robe again. Chief Judge Kathy Hardcastle, who had Halverson locked out of her chambers and barred from the courthouse last year, would not comment on whether Halverson’s victim status will win her some kind of sympathy.

Luke Ciciliano, the attorney representing Halverson in a federal case to halt her disciplinary hearing, as well as a case involving the suspended judge and a former employee, said he hoped Halverson’s injuries would at least help the world remember she’s a human being.

“I sincerely hope that her current situation helps everyone step back and look at her complete situation,” he said.

So now for the third, and nastiest, bit of courthouse gossip: She’s not sympathetic at all, because she was asking for it.

Naturally, nobody who said as much wants his name printed, but the logic goes like this: Halverson was heinous to her husband, who tended to her every need. It’s common knowledge she was cruel to him, that she berated him in public, called him an idiot and worse. One court filing reveals she had a court clerk swear in Ed Halverson “to answer questions about matters related to certain duties she expected him to perform in the course of their marital relationship.” Her former bailiff has alleged the judge told him to shoot her husband. Other court transcripts indicate she called him names that aren’t fit to print. And when the TV news crews showed up outside the Halverson home on the night of the attack, just in time to catch shots of Ed being escorted, shirtless and dazed, to the back of a police car, neighbors who were interviewed gave the guy credit for putting up with her as long as he did.

One neighbor said Halverson could “be a nasty.” Who knows what she’ll be now.

Abigail Goldman can be reached at 259-8806 or at [email protected].