Vegas Justice Court may be violating the Constitution with its redactions

Las Vegas Justice Court staff routinely redact public information in criminal files such as the suspect’s name, location of the crime and murder victim names — a policy that experts say may be unconstitutional.

And when the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked for the rule or law that justifies the redactions, court officials couldn’t immediately cite any authority to withhold the information. Hours later, court administrator Jessica Gurley cited a Supreme Court rule that says documents filed electronically must not contain personal information and that if they do, the information must be redacted.

Unlike District Court, where most documents are online, Justice Court also requires requests for documents to be made in writing. The information is then released with gray boxes hiding key details.

“Courts are, in fact, public forums and public places where information should be readily accessible to members of the general public,” said Athar Hasebullah, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. “We don’t have proper understanding and oversight of what our court system looks like if all those records are redacted.”

Justice Court officials have maintained that redactions are necessary to protect people’s privacy rights, telling the Review-Journal that the court wants to safeguard people from financial crimes. Gurley said the court wants to be transparent and is planning to institute a system that would allow the public to read non-confidential documents online.

Not covered by public records laws

Court records in Nevada are not governed by the Nevada Public Records Act. The First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, the Nevada Constitution and state court rules create the presumption that court records are public.

Benjamin Lipman, chief legal officer at the Review-Journal, said a court cannot redact a single word of a document without engaging in a complicated process. There must be a compelling government reason to withhold the information that overcomes the right to access. There also must be no alternative to the redaction. And there needs to be a justification that withholding a record would accomplish the government’s asserted goal.

It’s supposed to be difficult to do because without following the process, federal and state constitutional rights may be violated, Lipman said.

“We’re talking about whether governments can overcome our personal liberties,” he said.

Gurley said that if the court followed the kind of process Lipman described, it would slow things down for the media and take longer to get information out.

“It’s judicially efficient,” she said of the current policy.

Redactions official policy

The Justice Court’s redactions are not just the actions of court staff, but also the court’s official policy.

“All records made available for inspection or copying are subject to the redaction of personal identifying information before any inspection or copying may take place” and requests must be made in writing, according to an access policy on the court’s website.

“If access to original Court Records would result in disclosure of information which is confidential, jeopardizes the security of the records, or is otherwise impractical, copies, redacted copies, or other appropriate formats may be produced for inspection,” the policy said.

But the Review-Journal found that the court sometimes redacted key information about a crime.

Some suspects’ last names were redacted by the court for one arrest report, about a $250,000 jewel theft, despite the fact that all of them were facing charges in publicly filed court cases.

For another case, in which a man was accused of a series of burglaries, the court redacted the city and state where he lived in an arrest report, as well as large blocks of what appear to have been evidence photos.

When a woman named Kiera McCall was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder in her baby’s fentanyl-related death, the court redacted the location of her apartment and the name of her son. The Metropolitan Police Department provided that information a day later.

Gurley declined to comment on specific examples.

“Privacy rights of the litigants”

Court officials have offered justifications of their current policy, but the court administrator couldn’t find a law that supported it.

Gurley said the court operates under an administrative order from former Chief Judge Melissa Saragosa, who recently retired. The policy directs the court to conceal “personal identifying information,” which is defined under a statute as a category that includes names, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth.

Saragosa said she thinks the order follows laws that prevent the court from releasing identifying information. She pointed to Marsy’s Law, which gives crime victims the right not to have confidential information released that a defendant could use to find them or their family.

“I don’t think the court’s trying to hide anything,” she said.

Instead, the intent is to protect people from further harm, she said.

Arrest reports are provided to the court by the Metropolitan Police Department without redactions. Gurley said the redactions are made by attorneys who work for the court.

If someone is unhappy with the redactions, they can ask the chief judge to reconsider them. And the press can file a motion to ask a judge to make a decision about them, she said.

Las Vegas is not the only city where the Justice Court makes redactions about criminal cases.

In North Las Vegas, court administrator Stormi Decker said the court redacts a suspect’s address, but not the location of the incident, and almost all victim information, even pronouns. To get a record, the requester needs to file a motion for disclosure, she said. Judges sign off on the release of documents, but she’s never had a judge object to a redaction.

Decker said she didn’t know where the court’s authority to redact records comes from. There’s a statute, she said. She could research it, but she wasn’t able to cite it during the interview.

Henderson Justice Court administrator Derek Boyle said they also redact personal information from documents before releasing them.

Brendan Healey, a media lawyer, said he can’t think of other courts that just redact information they believe shouldn’t be public.

“I’m hard-pressed to think of a time in my experience where a court just does it on its own,” he said.

Chicago-based First Amendment attorney Matt Topic, whose practice is mostly devoted to public records, also saw problems with the Justice Court’s actions, which he said may be unconstitutional.

“We have an open court system,” he said. “We don’t have secret courts.”

He said Justice Court seems to be delegating decisions that are supposed to be reserved for judges in rare cases to administrative employees who make them frequently. There’s no legal basis to remove names from records just because they are names, he said, and victim names should only be concealed in extreme circumstances.

Gurley said in an email before an interview that “the Court has the responsibility to balance the needs of the public seeking court information and the privacy rights of the litigants. The Court strives to be as transparent as possible while shielding information from data mining that can lead to identity theft.”

Topic was skeptical of her reasoning.

“I don’t see how you’re going to steal someone’s identity simply because of their name,” he said. “That seems pretty far-fetched to me.”

Justice Court is not the only Nevada court with access issues.

A Nevada Coalition for Open Government report, released recently and co-sponsored by the Review-Journal, found that 15 out of 17 District Courts do not provide online access to case records. Only Clark County allows the public to read documents online.

The “What Are They Hiding?” column was created to educate Nevadans about transparency laws, inform readers about Review-Journal coverage being stymied by bureaucracies and shame public officials into being open with the hardworking people who pay all of government’s bills. Were you wrongly denied access to public records? Share your story with us at whataretheyhiding@reviewjournal.com

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.