All rise with 7:56 AM. 👏👏👏

Concur with 7:56 AM. Judge Tobiasson was a decent and popular J.P.. What we don't know is what we don't know. These Judicial Discipline proceedings are extremely stressful. They wanted wanted her gone and succeeded. What was going on behind the scenes. Their have been Judges who were accussed of far more and who challenged the charges and beat them.

I've been admitted to practice in three states – a very small state, a very big state, and Nevada. The difference between swearing-in ceremonies in each was eye-opening for me.

The other two states structured their ceremonies were modest and inclusive. But Nevada? Our swearing-in featured a local attorney who offered little more than a recitation of her own accomplishments, followed by a few speeches which seemed to focus exclusively on how severely we would be punished if we didn’t comply with the rules.

At the time, I was astonished by how impersonal and borderline antagonistic the “ceremony” in Vegas felt; it seemed less as though I was entering a community of professionals as much as I was being told I was an uninvited guest who would be thrown out as soon as the Powers That Be found an excuse to do so. It made more sense to me after I realized that this community enacted laws making it illegal to feed the homeless. It made even more sense after a private landowner attempted to build homeless shelters on his own North Las Vegas land with his own money, and the city used taxpayer dollars to raze those shelters so that the homeless could later be arrested for vagrancy and sent to jail. Empathy and kindness aren’t merely in short supply in the Vegas legal community; we have actually chosen to make empathy and kindness towards our most needy residents unlawful.

So now, the professional tribe who wrote the laws outlawing empathy takes a collective moment of silence after our self-designed ethical oversight machinery allegedly caught one of our own between its thresher-blades and ground her up. Can we seriously assume we can fix the problem by importing our big-box concepts of empathy and kindness from their places of origin and consume them here whenever it suits us, the same way we imported the machinery of life into a deep desert through global supply chains and buy it off the shelf whenever we want? I don’t think so. Lawyers are in the service business, and we reflect the ambitions of the community we serve. Our local economy centers on taking strangers’ money in exchange for magic beans, and showing them the door immediately after they’ve spent it all. Lake Mead water levels keep getting lower, and communities in larger neighboring states are already starting to fight each other over dwindling water supplies. Despite unsustainable population growth, more people keep moving to Vegas.

A transient community like Vegas, which will be obligated to cull its own residents without having first developed any sustainable sense of collective purpose, will rely on the raw text of the law to justify their choices of who gets to stay here, and who gets evicted. That means attacks against each other will become more vicious as fewer resources exist to distribute, those attacks will be more strictly legal in nature, and they will feel more arbitrary in application because they lack any moral underpinning. OP correctly points out that our professional tribe is in charge of maintaining order, so we will be the ones who draft and justify and enforce those future eviction laws against our anonymous neighbors, the same way we already did when we chose to make empathy and kindness for the homeless unlawful.

The concept of shelter is one even animals understand. After we’ve compartmentalized whatever residual guilt and shame we may feel when enforcing those future laws and evicting our neighbors, will we be more empathetic and kind towards each other, or less? I think less. So while I very much want to agree with OP and believe that change is possible if we just change our attitude towards each other, I think it’s more likely that the realities of our community, and our role in it, will result in repetition of this tragedy.

I have a relative who works at the jail and she tells me many of the married metro officers are having affairs with nurses or clerks so it's not surprising to me to hear the accusations on here of metro being corrupt.

Agree that the Commission is very overzealous and needs a housecleaning, but I don't really know what can be done about it. And that's the problem: These folks are unelected and there is zero accountability.

Well said 9:51. This was grossly mischaracterized by the Commission as a situation in which she was using her office for personal gain. That would be true if she was flashing her ID to try and get out of a DUI, or pulling rank to get a family member out of jail, or something like that. That isn't what happened here. I believe that some of her activities did cross the line, but you have to consider the extremely unique circumstances. She should not have been hounded out of office.

Agree with 9:51 and 10:02. The part about "using the prestige of her office for personal gain or to obtain preferential treatment" would have been supportable if she took the type of self-serving actions, to avoid responsibility, that 10:02 mentions.

But what this amounted to was that when she believed that she had compelling evidence that such clothing store was used as a front to recruit teens into prostitution, and she took the info. to some fairly high-ranking Metro official who is tasked with dealing with such matters.

The argument against her is that the average person, whose teen daughter might be in immediate and serious peril, would NOT have been permitted to reach out directly to such higher ranking official, but would only be afforded access to someone much lower in the METRO food chain.

So, by chastising the judge for making direct connection to someone who had far more direct authority to intervene and help, that supports a very ill-advised and arrogant narrative that the Discipline Commission and METRO should be ashamed of, rather than assertively advancing: that average citizens, no matter how much their child and other children may be in real harm's way, better slavishly adhere to administrative protocol, and better never attempt to leap frog their complaint and concerns to someone higher up in administration.

I have always been stunned that such remains one of the main themes they hammer her with–how dare, she, or any other concerned parent, take an issue(even an immediate danger to children issue) to someone higher up without exhausting all their lower remedies and steps.

In the time it takes to work one's way up the METRO totem pole with their concerns, children in danger have a much greater chance of being harmed. Time is of the absolute essence.

If they want to get after her for threatening people and kicking in doors, well fine. But this part about how dare she directly reach out to a higher ranking official, who could actually potentially take some immediate action, is mind-boggling.