Jonathan MacArthur knew it was coming: a character assault. The 35-year-old criminal defense and civil-rights attorney figured running for North Las Vegas Justice of the Peace would open him up for public scrutiny and, worse, political dissection. As for who might engineer the attack, take your pick. Someone in the public defender’s office? He left in 2000 over a difference in philosophies. Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office? He’d won seven acquittals. Maybe DA David Roger himself? The two aren’t cordial. When an attorney who’s friends with his opponent (Chris Lee) appeared uncomfortable around him, MacArthur’s antennae went up.
Then, bam! Direct hit!
Set up in January 2006 to meet people and spark dialogue/debate on newsy topics, MacArthur’s MySpace page became a political hot tomato. Roger cherry-picked the most salacious-seeming tidbits: MacArthur’s stated interests in “breaking my foot off in a prosecutor’s ass, anything relating to the NFL, video games, sex and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor’s ass.” His explanation of his duties as a judge pro tem, or replacement judge (he served in Las Vegas Municipal Court and in North Las Vegas Justice Court): “Imagine a substitute teacher with a black choir robe and a disconcerting amount of authority.” A copy of a 1998 photo of him on a Florida beach. The cumulative effect, MacArthur says, “made it seem like I was unfit to sit in judgment of someone.”
Ya think?
Seven months after Roger engineered his removal as a North Las Vegas judge pro tem, MacArthur hasn’t been called to hear a single case. In two criminal trials since the MySpace controversy, he claims Roger has made his presence known. “[For the trial ending in a guilty verdict], his DAs prevailed. He stood next to me and didn’t say a word. [For the trial ending in a not guilty verdict], he sat behind me. He was the only person in the gallery.”
MacArthur says he’s not running to exact revenge. But his candidacy—ostensibly about fairness, he says—seems directly mounted against the prosecutor-to-judge pipeline. He estimates 20 or so former city and federal court prosecutors are now judges.
“How you start your inquiry controls a lot of what you come up with at the end,” he says. “Say you have a sex case. It’s a judge’s discretion whether a child victim can be psychologically evaluated. A defense attorney might start with questioning why this inquiry should not be conducted. A prosecutor might ask, is there anything stopping me from doing this? Too often judges here are seen as part of the criminal prosecution team, when they’re supposed to be unbiased finders of fact. It’d be just as bad if you had too many defense attorneys becoming judges.”
In declining comment to the Weekly, Roger declared himself above the political fray. But in August, he told the Review-Journal, “He [MacArthur] has displayed a bias against prosecutors. Therefore, I do not feel the state of Nevada would get a fair shake by him.”
In a Spartan, apartment-sized office with starch-colored walls on 302 E. Carson Ave., across from the Fitzgerald’s hotel-casino, MacArthur’s law clerk retrieves his MySpace file. The copy machine is buzzing. MacArthur produces copies of the MySpace page, which has since been removed. Underlined are key words. The NFL link, he says, would have taken you to the Denver Broncos’ home page; the sex link to a book on evolutionary biology; the video-game link to the Halo 3 website. And his quote about “breaking my foot off in a prosecutor’s ass” linked to a lengthy blog entry about a death-penalty case in a capital murder trial. He negotiated his client’s sentence down to 34 years to life. “But people don’t have time to read the explanation story,” he says.
MacArthur is proud of his advocacy: seven acquittals and three hung juries in 31 trials. The 1990 Clark High graduate is also unrepentant about his MySpace page and convinced that, yes, he’s fit to judge. “I’m frustrated that I can only guarantee fairness for two or three people a day. As a judge, I can do it for 20 to 30 people a day.”