A defendant who was captured in courtroom video leaping over a judge’s bench and attacking her, touching off a bloody brawl, is scheduled to appear before her again Monday morning.
In his Jan. 3 appearance before Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, Deobra Redden, who was facing prison time for a felony battery charge stemming from a baseball bat attack last year, tried to convince the judge that he was turning around his violent past.
Redden asked for leniency while describing himself as “a person who never stops trying to do the right thing no matter how hard it is.”
But when it became clear Holthus was going to sentence him to prison time, and as the court marshal moved to handcuff and take him into custody, Redden yelled expletives and charged forward. People in the courtroom audience, including his foster mother, began to scream.
How can the judge who has been attached not be disqualified from ruling in that case?
She’s not ruling on her own assault, she’s finishing the original sentencing which was interrupted when he launched at her.
So her decision on sentencing was already decided, she just never got to announce what it was. His subsequent behavior proves that sentencing is the correct course of action.
Edit As expected:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/us/las-vegas-judge-attacker-sentenced.html
“sentenced the man on Monday to 19 to 48 months in prison on a previous battery charge, emphasizing that his actions last week did not affect her sentencing decision.”
and:
“On Monday, Mr. Redden returned to Judge Holthus’s courtroom to complete the sentencing hearing that his violent outburst had interrupted.”
and:
"Judge Holthus emphasized that Mr. Redden was being sentenced solely on an April 2023 battery charge, to which he had previously pleaded guilty. She said any charges related to his attack last week would be handled by a different judge.
“For purposes of the record,” Judge Holthus said, “I want to make it clear that I am not changing or modifying the sentence I was in the process of imposing last week before I was interrupted by defendant’s actions.”"
Ahh… I thought she would rule on his subsequent assault charge
Too soon, it just happened. He still needs to get through being charged with it.
Keep in mind, the assault he was about to be charged with was from last August or something. That’s how slow it moves.
Not necessarily. If they actually were reformed and the judge wasn’t hearing it, the sentencing wasn’t correct.
Dude leaped over the bench and beat her ass and you think he’s reformed lmao
You understand though, he was angry in that situation that he was going to face consequences, it’s totally different.
??? Being grumpy about something warrants physical assault, huh
The comment heavily reads like sarcasm.
Good thing we all decided we were too sensitive for the ol’ /s and that this kind of misunderstanding never happens
If you need a /s to realize that was sarcasm you don’t have the reading comprehension/social skills to be on the internet by yourself anyway.
From the article:
I’m not saying he can’t turn his life around, but I’d venture to say he hasn’t been reformed yet. Most functional citizens know by 30 that you can’t assault a judge.
Most nonfuctioning citizens do too
I mean I’ll say he can’t turn his life around. Multiple violent offenses is the entire point of jail. People like that should be permanently removed from society.
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No, not everyone can. Some people are irredeemable, and some crimes are unforgivable and should result in permanent removal from society regardless of reformation.
This is a dude that has multiple convictions for increasingly escalating violent assaults. This most recent one was for beating someone nearly to death with a baseball bat.
How many chances should he get to kill someone?
Fucking idiots will bend over backwards to defend violent scumbags before defending the innocent people these fucks prey on.
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You didn’t say change. You said turn their life around. Don’t change your words now, bud. To which I said, no not everyone can turn their life around. Some people are only capable of getting worse.
And sure that’s the point of the criminal justice system, ideally.
The point of jail/prison itself is to keep offenders segregated from society while that happens, with security levels matching the severity and risk of the offender. For those that cannot be reformed or have committed unforgivable crimes, the point is to permanently segregate them from society to prevent them from further harming it.
the only part i disagree with is “entire adult life”
at 30 dude hasn’t had an entire adult life yet so that seems prejudicial
The lengths some people go to defend criminals is worrying. Dude proved he hasn’t reformed by leaping across the bench and attacking the judge sentencing him, after pleading his case talking about how he is reformed, and you’re still trying to defend him.
Perhaps consider the impact this clearly unreformed criminal will have on the impact of society and perhaps his other future victims.
FWIW, I’m not defending him at all, I’m saying he hasn’t been reformed.
I’m saying he needs a lot more work to get there.
They weren’t reformed. Jumping the judge proves that.
You don’t want people to be able to ditch judges they don’t like through means of violence.
I think she deserves a rematch and the chance to teach this idiot a lesson.
Can’t imagine another judge being excited to deal with this guy, maybe she’s the only one with a score to settle
I score to settle means that she will most likely be unable to rule impartially. This increases the chances of her ruling being found cruel and unusual, thereby increasing the chances of a successful appeal.
Would it influence the judge? Maybe, but modern jurisprudence strongly disfavors anything that enables litigants to choose their own tribunal. The question of whether the American legal system does a good job of that notwithstanding, the problem is that if you enable a defendant to get another roll of the judge dice by assaulting the first assigned judge, you’ve created a perverse incentive to assault court personnel in a non-zero amount of cases. You don’t want to allow for the possibility of rewarding a defendant for bad behavior. Consider:
Capital defendant is on trial for murder. The first judge they draw is strongly in favor of the extreme penalty. The alternative with a different judge would be life–maybe even with the possibility of parole, depending on the jurisdiction. If convicted, the sentence for assaulting a judge is always going to be less than death. Ergo, if you’re the defendant in this case and have the opportunity to assault the judge, knowing that doing so gets you a new judge, then rationally you should assault the judge. Courts generally expect litigants to be rational. That is, if the penalty for x is less than the risk value of y, a reasonable litigant will do x, even if x is jumping over the bench to take a swing at the judge.
That’s no good, and it’s not a new phenomenon. Usually this kind of “forum selection legal game theory” applies in questions wherein a litigant has the choice to initiate an action before one of a number of courts, and forum (and judge) shopping is a major topic in legal academia. [It’s not an accident that Aileen Cannon is Trump’s judge of choice.]
All of that said, should this judge recuse herself? Personally I don’t think so, for the aforesaid reasons, but I also don’t want to give the impression that it’s cut and dry. Being pragmatic, many judges wouldn’t want the hassle of being personally invested in this kind of debate. Some might stand on the principle (and they would be right), but in my experience, most judges would rather take a punch in the face than be reversed on appeal.
That makes a lot of sense. I guess she should stay.
Because that’s not what impartial means. Impartial doesn’t mean dispassionate, hardly any judge sits a bench and not feel something about at least ten percent of their cases.
Impartial means not allowing that emotion to be the main driver. Judges and juries are not robots and the Court system takes this facet into account in appeals.
But, if some dude had jumped at you like a flying squirrel, attacking you and pulling out some of your hair, do you think that you’d be able to make any determinations about that individual without emotion?
She should recuse herself since she’s once of his assault victims.
She had already determined the sentencing, she just needs to deliver it without getting beaten up. If any defendant could get a new judge by assaulting the one assigned, it would bring in a new era of judge shopping.
I think he needs a good long stay in prison. He’s already a convicted felon and this just proved he’s not fit to be in society. The judge is well within her rights to sentence him to life if she chooses.
I think he deserves life in prison as well, but that should be sentenced by another judge.
Yeah. It comes with being a sociopath. Have you met lawyers?
Again you’re mistaking what impartial means. It does not mean zero emotion, it means that emotions cannot be the primary factor.
The judge is a human being, expecting zero emotion is not having a real world view of the court system. Human beings, that feel emotion dictate justice for other human beings. Justice is not an innate construct of the universe, it exists merely as an idea within our mind and nothing more.
There is no such thing as absolute objective justice nor is there absolute subjective justice. It is a balance and each step of the way in the system is to ensure that balance. But there’s no magic string of words that instruct how to keep that balance, it’s just up to the minds of those that preserve justice to do such.