Left: Clark County District Court Judge Erika Ballou appears in an image with two public defenders (Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline). Right: Ballou appears in a selfie (Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline).
A Las Vegas judge who came under fire for posing for photos in a hot tub with public defenders has now been suspended for at least six months for ignoring two court orders to send a woman convicted of armed robbery back to prison.
The Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline released its findings Monday into the actions of Judge Erika Ballou, who twice declined to send Mia Christman, now 31, back to prison to finish out her sentence for armed robbery despite being ordered to do so by the Nevada Supreme Court.
The case centers on a 2013 armed robbery in which Christman and her co-defendant pistol-whipped a senior citizen before leading cops on a chase that injured one person. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade behind bars. In 2021, after serving six years, she filed a Writ of Habeas Corpus petition, claiming she received ineffective counsel during the sentencing phase of her case.
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Her attorneys stressed that her actions as a young adult were largely the byproduct of the intense trauma and abuse she endured from being sex trafficked as a young woman. That abuse continued at the hands of her alleged pimp, Michael Saunders, who, according to Las Vegas ABC affiliate KLAS, was 34 when she was just 18 and the duo committed the armed robbery.
Saunders ended up being her co-defendant in that case, and at trial, prosecutors regularly worked to cast doubt on whether the two were in a pimp-and-prostitute arrangement or something else. Christman”s attorneys, however, said there was no question: Saunders abused her.
Ballou granted the petition and ordered her released. The judge highlighted Christman’s long history of extreme psychological and physical abuse from the time she was a child. Christman had miscarried twins as a young woman, her attorney told the court, and when she was trafficked as a teenager in California, one of her pimps put her in a dog cage.
All of this had a far-reaching impact on her overall mental health and well-being, the attorney said.
But the state appealed, and in August 2022, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the decision, determining that “the record did not support a finding that counsel performed ineffectively.” Instead of going along with the order, Ballou scheduled another hearing to allow the defendant to present additional evidence, the commission noted.
In her defense, Ballou claimed the order “could mean a lot of things.” However, the commission found the argument “unpersuasive,” noting that Ballou was a “seasoned criminal defense attorney” before taking the bench and “understood criminal procedure.”
Prosecutors continued to press the Supreme Court to return Christman to prison, and in an October 2023 order, the high court did just that. But Ballou again ignored the order, the commission found. She claimed that while the order was clear, it did not say when she had to follow it. Again, the commission didn’t buy her argument, saying she should have followed the order immediately upon receiving it.
The commission also found that Ballou showed “clear bias” in the Christman case. Among the judge’s reasons to keep the defendant out of prison was that while Christman was free, she became pregnant and delivered a baby.
“To this charge, Respondent attests she was not biased but rather showed compassion in her rulings and in not wanting Christman’s baby to be placed in the custody of Child Protective Services if it were avoidable,” the discipline board wrote.
But Ballou acted beyond her scope as a judge.
“That said, while compassion may be a virtue to a judicial officer, it should never be used as a license or an excuse to violate the law,” commissioners wrote.
Christman’s case was reassigned to another judge who honored the order and sent her back to prison.
The commission ruled that Ballou will be suspended six months without pay starting today. She will also be on probation for two years and must complete a remedial training program at her own expense.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Ballou was hit with two charges by the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline in January 2024. She was found to have violated multiple ethical rules, including posting inappropriate social media posts. One such post was a photo uploaded to Instagram by the judge, where she appeared in a hot tub with two public defenders. She and the other woman in the hot tub wore bikinis. The man was bare-chested. Ballou said the man was “surrounded by great t—.”
Ballou was censured and ordered to take the online course, “Judicial Ethics and Social Media: A Lightning Course,” and to familiarize herself with sections on social media and judicial ethics in the “Judicial Conduct Reporter,” a publication of the National Center for State Courts Center for Judicial Ethics.
Brandi Buchman contributed to this report
