Judge sued by Spoor

Ileen Spoor is taking Halverson to court to try to recover what she says is her personal property and to clear her name.

"The woman has defamed me and lied about me on the radio and on TV," Spoor said Thursday after filing her lawsuit.

Halverson has accused her of illegal ticket fixing and said she helped get people off jury duty, which Spoor has denied.

Spoor said she referred recipients of traffic citations to attorneys to handle in traffic court and had done so in front of Halverson.

"There’s nothing illegal. You still have to pay. I certainly got nothing," Spoor said.

In the wake of Halverson’s allegations, court officials are reviewing all of Spoor’s e-mails since she was hired by Halverson in January, and court administrator Chuck Short said that as of Tuesday they had found no evidence of illegal activity.

In some of the e-mails, Spoor asks various attorneys to help her with friends’ citations. In other e-mails, she explains the fine the violator has to pay. Her own son owed $90 to the court.

To fix a ticket and eliminate it from the system, Spoor would have had to get the tickets dismissed, court officials said. To do that, it would take collaboration with someone in traffic court with high-level access to its computer system such as a judge, said traffic Referee Robert Kelley.

"Who is going to risk that for a traffic ticket? They’re not big deals. I certainly wouldn’t risk it," Kelley said.

Justice Douglas Smith said, "District court judges can’t even pull them" from the system.

Spoor’s lawsuit asks for damages of more than $10,000, but she said she just wants the truth out.

Halverson fired Spoor on May 8. Spoor is now employed by the county as a roving judicial executive assistant at the courthouse.

After sacking Spoor, the judge had a temporary assistant, Bobbi Tackett, box Spoor’s personal items.

But Tackett found, and kept for Halverson, a large file of Spoor’s that contained the traffic tickets.

"It was a manila folder. It said ‘Quick Fix,’ and it was filled with tickets," Tackett said.

Halverson and her attorneys declined to make public the Quick Fix file or comment on the ticket fixing allegations for this article, except to say they intend to give the file to an investigating authority.

Spoor’s lawyer, James Adams, said he plans to file an emergency injunction to force the return of that file and Spoor’s Rolodex, both of which Halverson has said belong to the county.

Tackett said she thought Spoor’s actions were unethical. "If I have a ticket, I go through proper channels. I have to go downtown … or I have to hire an attorney. Evidently, she was helping people skip those steps," Tackett said.

Halverson’s attorney, Bill Gamage, said he had not reviewed the lawsuit Thursday and didn’t want to comment specifically on it.

He emphasized that in general, defamation lawsuits are difficult to win because U.S. citizens have the right of free speech.

In an interview with the Review-Journal last week, Gamage urged the judge not to speak about her beliefs that Spoor was conducting illegal activities from her office.

Spoor said she decided to take legal action after she heard a radio interview last week in which Halverson, after naming Spoor, said, "You’ll see a whole lot of evidence about behavior that should not have been happening."

Halverson also told a TV reporter, "My former secretary was out letting friends of the clerk .. off of jury duty without my knowledge."

Spoor said she helped friends and strangers postpone jury duty because of scheduling conflicts by calling the jury commissioner.

"I made arrangements with the judge (Halverson): ‘If people call with a legitimate excuse, how do you want me to handle it?’ She said, ‘Get them excused, but they have to have a legitimate excuse,’ " Spoor said.

Attorneys who have taken Spoor’s tickets have called Halverson’s allegations a "red herring" meant to divert public attention from the accusations against the judge. Most of the attorneys said they handled the tickets for free.

"I helped her because she was a friend, as I would for any friend, with the understanding they’re going to have to pay the fine just as any other person that goes to court, and yes, some of those friends include Las Vegas Metro," police, said Las Vegas attorney Amy Chelini.

She said she has never had a case in front of Halverson, and bristled at the idea she would handle a ticket expecting preferential treatment in return.

Craig Walton, president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics, did see a possible problem regarding what Spoor said she was doing.

Using her connections to help friends raises the perception of impropriety that the friends of judges’ staff receive better treatment in the judicial system than the rest of the public, Walton said.

"If it’s good enough for friends and family of the judicial system’s staff members, then it’s good enough for you and I," Walton said.

Spoor said she has been giving tickets to attorneys for years. There are services, such as Ticket Busters, that provide the same service for a fee, she said. Other attorneys have offered free ticket services in order to attract clients.

Spoor said that she also kept a record of the tickets she received, to which attorneys she gave them and when the fines were due.

"I follow up because I’m the one they’re giving their tickets to," Spoor said.

"It sounds more like the idea of ‘remember me in your will,’ " Walton said, "meaning, ‘remember me when it comes time for campaign contributions,’ and that would be plumb wrong."

Before her stint with Halverson, Spoor was a judicial executive assistant for then-District Judge Michael Cherry.

The Review-Journal could find no names on Cherry’s 2004 and 2006 campaign finance reports that match any of the names the newspaper saw from Spoor’s e-mails.

Cherry, who is now a Nevada Supreme Court justice, declined to comment.

UNLV law professor Jeffrey Stempel said the "Quick Fix" label on Spoor’s file "is troubling and can be read as contradicting the explanation."

Stempel said there is nothing inherently wrong with a judicial assistant steering friends to lawyers who can help them, but he said he wondered why Spoor took possession of the tickets and kept them in a file.

"It seems odd to me that someone would try to help a friend in this way if all you wanted to do was get them legal assistance," he said.

Spoor said she lives in Henderson, as do most of her friends, and most of the lawyers’ offices are downtown, where she works. She said she simply took the tickets from her friends to save them a trip.

Stempel said he would prefer that neither judges nor their employees have direct contact with lawyers in such situations.

He said lawyers often accept cases to simply build up good will, but "the question here is: Are you really trying to build up good will with the court?"

He said he doubted any lawyers would "reasonably expect" to receive favorable treatment from a judge by handling a traffic ticket in that way.

Review-Journal writer Carri Geer Thevenot contributed to this report.