LVMPD attorney seeks to unseat judge in Clark County District Court race

Martina Bauhaus, an attorney for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. for almost two decades, is challenging Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells, who is wrapping up her first term on the bench. 

District Court Dept. 23 hears both criminal and civil cases, a docket that Lilly-Spells, a former public defender, acknowledges proved challenging at first. 

“The law is very vast. No matter what you do before you take the bench, it would be impossible to have practiced every type,” she said. “It did take some additional study and some time, but I’ve done well. I’ve done a number of civil trials. I am intimately familiar with the procedures and my appellate record for civil cases has gone well.” 

In civil appeals, Lilly-Spells has been affirmed in ten cases and reversed twice. In 33 criminal appeals, she’s been affirmed 27 times, according to Our Nevada Judges.

While Lilly-Spells’ error rate is low, so was her retention rate in the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Judging the Judges 2025 evaluation, in which 57.3% of the roughly 200 attorneys responding said she should be retained. She calls the participant turnout “very low.” 

“I think that we should all be reflective and at all times. Constructive criticism is amazing because we should be aiming to get better and not be a stagnant judiciary,” she said, adding that shortly after taking the bench she put a locked “bright blue suggestion box” outside her courtroom.  

The solicitation, she says, has proved underwhelming. “We get maybe one comment every six months to a year.”

“When I have engaged with attorneys we’ve gotten feedback complimenting the things we’re doing in the courtroom,” Lilly-Spells notes. “So the scores didn’t add up with what I was hearing and seeing. Nonetheless, I think that they are important. They are to be considered.”

Lilly-Spells says she’s been most surprised during her first term by the volume of cases.  

“When I first ran, I promised to read every single page, and it’s not something that I have stopped doing,” she says, adding “I now rephrase that.”  She says reading exhibits, which can exceed 100 pages per motion, is not a valuable use of her time.

“People also said the job would be very isolating, and that wasn’t something that I really understood until I came into the role,” she observes. 

Lilly-Spells’ opponent, Bauhaus, “immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1994 after marrying an American soldier,” her website says.  

Bauhaus has an undergraduate degree in Political Science, which she says she found “to be pretty useless so I got a Masters Degree in Public Administration.”

She says she worked as a cocktail waitress to put herself through UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, where she anticipated practicing transactional law. “I never thought I’d be a litigator.” 

Bauhaus says the last time she engaged in trials was when she worked for the Nevada Attorney General’s office under Brian Sandoval, who served in that capacity from 2003 to 2005. She subsequently worked for AGs George Chanos and Catherine Cortez-Masto. 

Bauhaus says she began her career as a law clerk at Alverson and Taylor. “When I passed the bar I got handed 20 case files, and it was sink or swim.” 

During her 18 years at Metro, she served as litigation manager, assistant general counsel over litigation, and recently, over forfeitures. For the last five years she’s represented the jail. 

“A quarter of the inmates are mentally ill, and often refuse to take their medications,” Bauhaus asserts. “The jail cannot force them to take their medications. However, when they’d become a danger to themselves or others, I would go into court or and ask the judge to order they be medicated so they don’t harm themselves or others.” 

Bauhaus says she’s running because decisions she received from a local judge she declined to name “were not so much based in the law, but more in what the judge thought was right, and it became very frustrating.”

She says she initially intended to run against another judge but was persuaded to challenge Lilly-Spells, who was arrested in 2022 after an argument with her husband, whose video game console she allegedly attacked with a screwdriver. 

The judge entered a no contest plea to one misdemeanor count of domestic battery.

The two have since divorced, a decision Lilly-Spells says she made in the best interest of her four children. “I have accepted responsibility, and I am accountable.”

Bauhaus says her opponent’s arrest “erodes confidence in the bench. Judges should be held to a higher standard.” 

Lilly-Spells says the incident “illustrates that all of us are human” and has made her a better judge. 

“My judicial philosophy centers on four key components – compassion with an eye towards public safety, integrity, and accountability. Part of that is being accountable for who I am as a person, who I am as a judge,” she says. “It was a very private experience. The media portrayal lacks a lot of context, a lot of things that people will never know.” 

Lilly-Spells notes she and her husband shared 15 years of marriage and four children. She says that like their relationship, which was “not characterized by that one incident on Mothers Day,” neither should her work on the bench be “characterized by a snapshot that lacks context.”

As of July, Lilly-Spells had raised $209,000 and had roughly $163,000 in the bank. 

Her website and other sources indicate she is endorsed by dozens of unions and civic groups, including the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers, SEIU Nevada, AFL-CIO, Professional Firefighters of Nevada,  National Organization for Women (NOW), Veterans in Politics, Nevada Veterans Council, Independent Black Voters, PLAN Action NV, Asian Chamber, Women’s Democratic Club, and Hispanics in Politics. 

Bauhaus is endorsed by Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, District Attorney Steve Wolfson,  a variety of police officer associations throughout the state, and Teamsters Nevada. 

She had raised about $21,000 as of July and had about $13,000 on hand.