By Mark Waite

Fifth District Judge Robert Lane swore in the first 11 volunteers for the Court Appointed Special Advocate CASA program on April 22. They will act as advocates for children in foster care.

The volunteers underwent 33 hours of training, before they were able to be assigned to children in crisis. The program is seen as a much needed addition to family court, with more than 100 Pahrump children in the foster care system.

Nye County District Attorney Brian Kunzi believes the advocates could help to the point attorneys won’t be needed to represent all the parties.

“Our child welfare system is real badly broken and part of it is because I think we’ve taken an approach the court appoints an attorney for both parents and the child of course,” Kunzi told the Pahrump Valley Rotary Club last week. “We have all these attorneys and it’s not hard to figure out it’s going to get messed up because it gets very adversarial.”

The CASA volunteers will be able to appear in court as the voice of the child in the child welfare system and tell the judge what is happening with the child. “We’re going to go to a mediation type of model. We’re going to try to mediate everything up front without wasting the time of going through really more adversarial type court proceedings,” Kunzi told Rotarians.

But the DA spoke about another program that will assist children that make allegations of sexual abuse, the Child Advocacy Center.

Instead of making those children go through the pain of interrogations numerous times by various law enforcement officials, Kunzi said there will be a facility designated where the Nevada Division of Child and Family Services, Nye County Sheriff’s Department, the DA’s office and abuse counselors, will work together.

“We now have certified forensic interviewers and we will conduct one interview with the child instead of all these different agencies picking and prodding. So now we’re bringing them in, we’re going to have one facility, one interview. We are present while the interview is going on with cameras, ear bugs so we can actually tell them different areas we need explored. But the child only has to go through it one time,” Kunzi said.

“We have qualified interviewers because the worst thing that can happen if you have a child sex abuse case, it takes one bad interview and we’re done. Too suggestive, we really can’t criminally prosecute those cases. This is really going to help tremendously,” he said.

The county conducted its first interviews for the program two weeks ago, Kunzi said. In an update this week, he said two officials from No to Abuse will serve as interviewers at their facility on Blagg Road.

A doctor in Reno will supervise medical examinations by video, with the help of a pediatric nurse, he said.

Complaints of sex abuse by children may be more common than thought in Pahrump. Kunzi said there are about 40 children who are waiting to be interviewed under the program.

The DA touched on a number of other subjects. He said most people think of the district attorney for criminal work, but the civil side of his job is far more complicated. Kunzi inherited an office with one less attorney, so he shifted a deputy DA from Tonopah to Pahrump, allowing a deputy DA doing criminal work to pick up more of the civil caseload.

While resident Louis DeCanio complains repeatedly about the hiring of attorneys from outside the county, there sometimes isn’t a choice, Kunzi said.

“In one respect he’s right, in one respect there’s not much we can do about it because a lot of what he’s complaining about are insurance attorneys we have absolutely no control over. Just like if you were to get involved in an automobile accident. You don’t pick who your attorney is, your insurance company is. It’s the same thing with the county,” he said.

But Kunzi said he’s trying to cut back on giving work to outside attorneys, by handling labor negotiations and personnel issues in-house, he said labor negotiations alone cost the county $175,000 last year. He thinks the county could save $400,000 in reducing the outsourcing of legal cases.

“I like to practice preventive law. I like to deal with the issue beforehand, not try to fix the problem after they happened and I really believe in a short term we’ve created a very good environment where we’re getting inundated with calls almost daily with requests for us to review things and I think in the long run it’s really going to pay off. We’re going to make sure things are being done right,” Kunzi said.

The DA said Nye County isn’t a sleepy little jurisdiction, Kunzi said, with 415 new criminal cases every month and deputies that handle the same number of cases as their counterparts in Clark County.

“That really creates some major issues when you consider that really on average we have two judges here. We would be lucky to do 80 criminal trials in a year and that’s assuming no civil trials are going on. It’s one of those things that you start looking at this: How do you jam 415 cases per month into a system where you get so few cases out at the end if you have to go to trial?” Kunzi asked.

The DA said he’s pushing for more community service instead of jail time.

“Forty-eight hours of community service is a lot harder than two days in jail because what they’ll do, they’ll let them come in on Friday, check out on Sunday night and they’re sleeping away three-quarters of their two days instead of having to do 48 hours of community service,” Kunzi said.

Non-violent, low risk offenders should have to work picking up cigarette butts at Petrack Park, painting the senior center or perhaps do yard work for seniors, he said.

“I think if we really stick with this and up the amount of community service we make these people do, I think our recidivism rate will go way down because maybe the people will start thinking I don’t really want to be doing some of this community service,” Kunzi said. Recidivism is a tendency to relapse into criminal behavior.

The DA said his office should partner with a non-profit organization in Pahrump to coordinate community service. He mentioned communicating with the Nye Community Coalition which is excited about the idea.

Speaking in general, Kunzi said, “We take the position, well this is in Nye County so therefore we should be able to do it differently here. I think sometimes that’s why we get into trouble. There’s a right way to do it and you try to do it that way. That’s really been my goal.”

“I’ve never had more fun doing a job. The problem is you’re a master juggler. It’s not just three or four balls, it’s probably 100 balls that have to be kept in the air.”