A year and four months ago we submitted our petition summon a grand jury on public corruption at the University of Nevada, Reno, to the District Court.  NRS 6.130 says that this shall be decided by a District Court judge in five days.  So we've been 16 months.  Why is that?

First of all, six of eight state judges in this Second Judicial District Court recused themselves because of conflicts of interest.  This means that many of them have some sort of involvement or connection or friendship with people at UNR.

What took so long, then, was the fact that we had to go through a large number of judges in the State Court.  One of those judges (Janet Berry) actually threw our petition out.  We had to appeal it to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court gave us a writ of mandamus referring it back to the District Court for an evidentiary hearing.


Here is what the Supreme Court had to say about Judge Janet Berry's order dismissing the original petition:

"In footnote 4 to the district court's order denying the petition, the district court cites to NRS 172.175, but assigns language to that provision that is not found in the statute.  We are at a loss as to the source of the language the district court assigns to NRS 172.175."

"Therefore, we conclude that the district court manifestly abused its discretion by denying the petition based on the erroneous reasoning that NRS 172.175 applies only to alleged misconduct of county public officials."

Upon remand back to her court, Judge Berry informed Petitioners that her husband is a very large donor to Nevada Athletics.  We subsequently asked her to recuse herself from the case...to which she obliged.