Collins Passes Law to Block the Public's Right to Know
Assume the worst: someone in your family is fatally gunned down by police officers (which occurs all too often in District B). A tragedy for sure and you’d want honest answers: what happened? Who’s at fault? Was lethal force truly justified?
You or your lawyer would want to question police and witnesses about the tragedy under oath, to ensure the truth is revealed to the public and put onto the public record.
Forget about that, says County Commissioner Tom Collins — in fact, he’d pass a law (and did!) so you have to accept at face value whatever the police choose to disclose (“If lawyers can't represent families, inquests appear rigged, ACLU says”; Las Vegas Review-Journal Nov. 21, 2007, reporter: Lisa Kim Bach).
When a policeman shoots a citizen in the line of duty, a jury is empanelled as part of the inquest process investigating the event. Family members may submit questions to the jury in writing but the inquest's presiding official can discard the questions altogether or edit them. Either way, no jurors would have to help provide answers to a family’s questions.
It was an incident near District B that brought the County’s inquest procedures under scrutiny. The public rightfully raised a ruckus last year when a jury ruled Metropolitan Police Department officers were justified when they shot 17-year-old murder suspect Swauve Lopez in the back as he tried to escape custody. Lopez was in handcuffs when he was killed, a fact that enraged the public.
Some County Commissioners thought it reasonable that attorneys for the Lopez family and for the families of others gunned down by police to be able to question witnesses during an inquest, in front of jurors.
Question police in public? No way, said Tom Collins. He convinced two other cover-up-is-good commissioners to gun down true reform of the inquest process at the County Commission meeting on November 20, 2007. Big deal, now the inquest process allows a family’s questions to be read coldly into an inquest’s record. True reform would have allowed questions from the family of the deceased to be heard in the presence of a jury.
But thanks to Collins, that’s never going to happen. So the inquest process remains inherently unfair and fatally-flawed. Lucky for Collins, no inquest will be held for his killing real reform!
Gary Peck, executive director of the Nevada American Civil Liberties Union, hit the nail on the head when he derided Collins and others who blindly protect the police from a family’s truth-seeking questions at an inquest. "The core reform that needs to take place is allowing questions by representatives of the families," Peck told the R-J. "What they did today was completely meaningless. I think it feeds the impression, whether fairly or unfairly, that the whole system is rigged."
It’s a sad day when the citizens of District B and others in Clark County are ignored when trying to reform the inquest process. "At the end of the day, the community groups were ignored and the commission accepted what the cops wanted," Peck lamented.
Chalk up another one up for Commissioner Collins and his belief that the public does NOT have the right to know. Apparently it’s best for Commissioner Collins to be in the back pocket of Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie and his business-as-usual politicos, even when it means leaving you in the dark in the darkest days of your life.