New Reality Stop Crime Show

This really is "reality" TV. Beau Maestas stuck a twelve-inch butcher knife into 2 helpless children after a drug sale gone bad with the girls' mother. The three-year-old was killed inside the blood-spilled family trailer; her ten-year-old sister was paralyzed when the knife severed her spinal cord.

Maestas is on trial facing the death penality.

Tonya Sue Baker sits in a lawyer's office, unable to understand why her adopted son would rather face the death penality than snitch on his fellow gang members in the murder of a nine-year-old girl caught in a crossfire.

"What's this honor shit?" she asks. "Ain't no honor in getting a death penalty for somebody else."

These horrific cases are happening in Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas and forty million annual tourists, seventy thousand criminal offenses, thousands of crystal meth-fueled crimes and almost three hundred gang-related shootings.

"Sin City Law," premiering Sept. 10, covers 4 cases; each gets a 2-part documentary treatment, with the episodes airing back to back on Mondays at nine pm and ten pm.

"Sin City Law" is another triumph for producers Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier De Lestrade, winners of a 2005 Peabody Award for the 8-part Sundance Channel documentary "The Staircase" and an Oscar for the 2001 documentary "Murder on a Sunday Morning."

Poncet and De Lestrade, with director Remy Burkel, serve up a horrific tour of the Clark County legal system, introducing some of its darkest denizens along the way.

And it's compelling TV, here only through the first of October. Be aware that, thanks to "Sin City Law," what happens in Las Vegas no longer stays in Las Vegas. This is a great stop crime show.