A three-judge panel led by Justice James Hardesty ruled last month in favor of Rigoberto Inzuna, arrested in 2017 on 16 charges of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl when he lived with the girl’s mother in 2008.

In an order issued Friday, the seven-member court granted a stay blocking implementation of Carson City District Court Judge James Russell’s order preventing the Legislative Counsel Bureau from representing individual lawmakers in a payroll tax lawsuit — filed by Republican state senators challenging a 2019 bill that removed a scheduled decrease in the state’s payroll tax rate without a two-thirds majority usually required for any change in taxes.

The lawsuit also alleged that Jimenez Arms knowingly supplied firearms to former Kansas City firefighter and alleged gun trafficker James Samuels even though he did not have a license, and, in doing so, aided a gun trafficking ring that ran from 2013-2018.

In a unanimous order issued in late November, the seven-member court ruled in favor of a Reno woman who appealed a lower court’s decision to not credit her more than three months of time served during sentencing, thus keeping in place a 23-year-old precedent to credit inmates for time served prior to sentencing.

The Legislature passed a bill earlier this year, AB81, that created the new Board on Indigent Defense Services (BIDS) to uphold statewide standards of public legal defense. BIDS will have oversight of the State Public Defender’s Office, which is located in Carson City, and all other local and county public defenders.

The work that the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) is doing to prepare veterans for life after incarceration will be used as a model for other groups of inmates. With the additional resources available in the community that are veteran-specific, the jail can offer services in a concentrated manner to the veteran population and see if that resource-intensive approach works for inmates at large.

“Right now we have more people sitting in that queue for longer than we want, and that just comes down to affordable units that we can get folks into,” Clark County Administrator of Human Services Tim Burch said.

The Las Vegas City Council has postponed a vote on a proposed ordinance that would allow city officials to set hours for “sidewalk cleaning” during which it would be a misdemeanor to sit or lie down on public rights-of-way, punishable by a $1,000 fine or arrest. The vote on the ordinance, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been delayed until Jan. 15.

Sisolak announced Wednesday that he selected former Legislative Counsel Bureau lawyer Victoria Gonzalez for the role. The new department is a product of AB80, a bill passed in 2019 that called for a stand-alone, nonpartisan staff to coordinate and exchange data between criminal justice agencies and advise volunteer members of the state’s Sentencing Commission.

The Nevada Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Thursday in an appeal brought by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), stemming from a lawsuit filed by the group in September 2018 to obtain Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department body camera footage involving an incident with Ford in November 2017. A District Court judge denied the group’s request in October 2018, leading to the appeal to the state’s Supreme Court.

The five-year contract involves running the state’s Day Reporting Centers — facilities offering more intensive supervision for people on parole and probation that can be used as an “intermediate sanction” in place of going to jail for people with minor violations of their parole terms.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Carson City District Court by NevadansCAN, a self-described “non-profit citizens action network” based in Henderson and led by Mary Rooney, a former Republican state Assembly candidate and a conservative activist. Attornies representing the group are Alan Lefebvre and William Schuller of the Kolesar & Leatham law firm.

According to the Nevada Judiciary’s 2019 annual report, which was released Thursday, the state’s two highest courts had 2,042 appealed cases pending at the end of the 2019 fiscal year — a slight decrease from last year’s record-high backlog of 2,201 pending cases.

More recently, he held a senior role at the New York City Department of Corrections, and earlier this year he was named deputy commissioner of operations for the Alabama Department of Corrections — a prison system recognized by the Department of Justice as one of the worst in the country for homicide, suicide and rape.

Some of the strengths highlighted in the report include strong judicial leadership in both jurisdictions, being able to manage extremely heavy caseloads, and the use of technology to meet their operating goals. Authors noted that Nevada’s system for judicial records was ranked near the bottom in the country in 1999 and is now sixth from the top in rankings from the National Center for State Courts.

The state’s Department of Public Safety in late October sent a letter to inform all federally licensed firearm sellers in the state that individuals with a CCW license will not be allowed to avoid undergoing a background check for a private sale or transfer of a firearm — even though CCW permit holders typically don’t have to undergo a background check when buying a gun from a retail store.

There has never been a formal proclamation from the Bar or Supreme Court giving a clear blessing to investment in the industry. But neither has a feared crackdown materialized, and lawyers are increasingly public about their participation.

Those findings and other potential improvements on mental health services in the state prison system were released publicly on Thursday as part of an audit report presented to the Executive Branch Audit Committee (composed of the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and controller).