- Quickdraw McLaw
- 4 Comments
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Welcome back, folks. We’re done with the Judicial Primary Primer for now. Feel free to keep making comments in those threads if you have more to add to those conversations. Otherwise, here are some current iterations of seemingly old news items in Las Vegas: a bad judge, Eglet asking a jury for big money, and the Constable’s office having done something to irk somebody.
- Uh-oh. North Las Vegas Municipal Court Judge Catherine Ramsey unilaterally put some $12,000 in attorney’s fees on a city credit card. [RJ]
- The Robert Eglet/David Wall Actos diabetes drug trial wen to the jury yesterday afternoon, potentially setting up a scenario where Eglet asks for $2 Billion in punitive damages. [RJ]
- The Las Vegas Township Constable’s office is getting negative press again after a woman sued them saying they tried to shake her down for $100 over not having registered her car in Nevada after being here 30 days. [RJ]
I can't begin to express what a headache it is to open the paper and see, once again, that the Las Vegas Constable's office has tarred the rest of us again with their brush of incompetence. As the Constable of Laughlin, I have an enforcement team that conducts very vigorous enforcement of the Fair Share laws. Unlike Las Vegas however, we have thoroughly vetted our procedures with the County Counsel's office. We never issue a citation, under any circumstances, without personally meeting the operator of the vehicle and directly handing them a citation. We also make it clear that they do not have to pay the assessment fee if they go to court and are found not guilty. Additionally we are careful, in the course of the due diligence investigation (which is what the officer is supposed to do before issuing the citation) to determine if the operator of the vehicle falls under any of the approved exemptions, i.e., full time student, active duty military, etc. My deputies do not do this sort of hit and run issuance of a citation; the statute is pretty clear about the need for due diligence. A citation for a criminal misdemeanor cannot be written as though it's a parking ticket. I most recently had a two man team doing Fair Share Enforcement for two days. They wrote a total of 30 tickets, which doesn't seem like much to most people, but we actually considered it to be pretty good productivity. The citations take TIME to do right. I can't speak for Las Vegas, but in my township, there is constant (and understandable) pressure from constituents who object to those of their neighbors who don't pay the registration tax and who want to see heavy enforcement against them. I do everything I can to do so, but I nonetheless have to remind them that we have a number of constraints on us, due diligence being one of them. From just the initial impression I get from the news report, the defendant seems clearly guilty to me, and the assessment fee is not a violation of the law. But she has every right to object to the lack of due process in the issuance of the citation and the court should throw it out and caution the Las Vegas Constable not to engage in this sort of slipshod activity. No law enforcement agency should engage in this sort of sloppy work.
I was issued a citation like this a year ago. I am an out of state student. We got the citation in the mail. I called the Constable's office and explained that, and they told me they would take care of it and if I registered my car they would take off the citation. The DMV said they couldn't register my car because there was a citation hold and I had to pay the Constable's office the $100 to remove the hold. I called them again and they told me my court date was for December 26. We were going to be home for Christmas, not spending it in Vegas. The only practical way for us to make this go away was to pay the fine and register my car, even though I am an out of state student with no ties to Nevada. I hope the Constables office gets shut down.
I sincerely regret how you were treated. Assuming you were a full time not part time out of state student, as a constable myself I can assure you that you would not have been treated this way in any other township in Clark County. Regrettably, too often the public thinks of "Las Vegas" and "Clark County " as being synonymous, which they are not. There are eleven different constables in Clark County. I would suggest retaining an attorney and demanding your money back.
Is Nicole McMillan the same person as Nicole Ethel McMillen?