District judge trailing challenger as ballot count continues

A longtime judge and incumbent in District Court Department 19 in Clark County could narrowly lose his seat, but thousands of ballots are still left to be counted.

The race between Judge William “Bill” Kephart and Crystal Eller had been neck-and-neck since Tuesday, but the election results released Friday first showed Kephart trailing by just over 2,000 votes.

As of 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Kephart was behind Eller by just 7,388 votes — a difference of about one percentage point.

“I’m extremely happy; this is what I was hoping would happen,” Eller said Friday about the results. “It’s not over yet, that’s for sure, but based on the last two days, I don’t see how it’s going to stop trending in my direction.”

Before Friday, early results showed Kephart with a slight lead.

Kephart declined to comment, but his campaign manager, Lisa Mayo, called the race “nerve-wracking.”

“This has been swinging different ways, so it could swing back,” Mayo said.

“We knew this was going to be a tough race, because of the onset of progressive women lawyers that were very open about the fact that they wanted to replace conservative judges.”

Also as of Sunday morning, two other incumbents appeared to be losing their seats on the bench. In Department 2, Judge Richard Scotti had only about 42 percent of the vote against public defender Carli Kierny. Department 32 Judge Rob Bare had only about 46 percent against public defender Christy Craig.

Clark County still had about 24,000 mail ballots left to count and about 60,000 provisional ballots.

The next update is expected Sunday afternoon.

Kephart is a former prosecutor who was elected to the Department 19 seat in 2015 after spending four years as a Las Vegas justice of the peace.

A topic of debate in the race was a 1992 murder case involving defendant Fred Steese, whom Kephart prosecuted.

Even though another judge found that no reasonable juror would have found Steese guilty based on new evidence that called into question the credibility of that used by Kephart, Kephart defended his handling of the case and the conviction of Steese during a Review-Journal judicial candidate debate earlier this year.

Steese was pardoned after serving 21 years in prison for the killing.

“I’m telling you right now, I have no regrets,” Kephart said at the debate.

Kephart also prosecuted Kirstin Blaise Lobato, who spent more than a decade behind bars for the killing of a homeless man before a judge ordered her released from prison in 2017.

Eller has been licensed to practice law in Nevada since 1993 and said in a Review-Journal debate that Kephart’s handling of the case was “absolutely prosecutorial misconduct.” She pointed to Kephart’s 55 percent retention rating last year in the newspaper’s survey of lawyers.

Kephart, meanwhile, questioned Eller’s courtroom qualifications and noted that the Nevada State Bar had reprimanded her as recently as April. According to the reprimand, Eller charged unreasonable legal fees and committed ethical violations that “could have caused potential injury to the public as well as the legal profession.”

Kephart referred to Eller’s actions as “professional misconduct.”

Eller, who argued that she had “done nothing wrong,” said she has worked as a criminal defense attorney in federal and state court.

On Friday, she pointed to the drastic differences in campaign dollars raised between her and her opponent. Kephart raised about $185,736, and Eller has raised about $26,172.

“The fact that he had to outspend me to keep his seat as a sitting judge speaks volumes as to who would be the better judge,” Eller said.

Contact Briana Erickson at berickson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5244. Follow @ByBrianaE on Twitter.