Keep your eye on court slots in November

Ohioans’ most significant decisions may be November after-thoughts for some voters: Electing two Supreme Court justices and some Court of Appeals judges.

Governors order thusand-such, and the General Assembly, when it isn’t recycling hot air, tries to stick its nose into everything it can. But the people voters elect to appellate courts can have as much to say about Ohioans’ lives as a governor or the legislature.

That’s especially so when an injured Ohioan files a personal-injury lawsuit or appeals the denial of an insurance or workers’ compensation claim. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court referees Ohio utility rates, it disciplines lawyers and judges, and the court’s chief justice (Greater Cleveland Republican Maureen O’Connor) picks visiting judges when one’s needed in a given case.

Two of the Supreme Court’s seven seats are on November’s ballot. One pair of competitors: Republican Judge Craig Baldwin of Newark, of the Court of Appeals (5th District), vs. Democratic Judge Michael Donnelly of Cleveland Heights, of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.

Baldwin earned his law degree at Capital University’s Law School; Donnelly earned his at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

The other pair of competitors: Republican Supreme Court Justice Mary DeGenaro of suburban Youngstown, vs. Democratic Judge Melody Stewart of Cleveland, of the Court of Appeals (8th District). Each judge earned her law degree at Cleveland-Marshall.

Republican Gov. John R. Kasich appointed DeGenaro, then on the Court of Appeals (7th District), to the Supreme Court on Jan. 25. She succeeded Democratic Justice William O’Neill of Chagrin Falls. O’Neill resigned to run unsuccessfully for this year’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination. DeGenaro’s appointment made the Supreme Court 7-0 Republican.

Ohio’s all-Republican Supreme Court gets more attention (from non-lawyers, anyway) than the Court of Appeals. But as an appeals court candidate recently said, the appeals court may be an Ohioan’s court of last resort because the Supreme Court rules on a limited number of cases.

In the Miami Valley, the Court of Appeals (2nd District) encompasses Montgomery, Greene, Clark, Miami, Champaign and Dark counties. Unopposed for re-election is Republican Judge Jeffery Welbaum of Troy. He earned his law degree at Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law.

For the Court of Appeals (12th District), which includes Butler and Warren counties, Republican Judge Stephen Powell of West Chester Twp., is also running unopposed for re-election. He earned his law degree at the University of Dayton’s School of Law.

Officially, Ohio courts and judges are nonpartisan. But the title of a celebrated 1971 study by the late Kathleen L. Barber, a distinguished scholar on the faculty of John Carroll University, and Barber’s study itself, published in the Ohio State Law Journal, told the real story: “Ohio Judicial Elections: Nonpartisan Premises With Partisan Results.”

For a time, Ohio Democrats and labor allies laser-focused on the state’s judiciary, especially the Ohio Supreme Court. So, in November 1976, Democrats finally gained a 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court, Democrats’ first such majority in eons, by electing Justices Ralph S. Locher, once Cleveland’s mayor, and A. William Sweeney, a Cincinnatian with roots in Mahoning County.

Ten years later, in 1986, Democrats lost that Supreme Court majority when Columbus Republican Thomas J. Moyer unseated Chief Justice Frank D. Celebrezze, a Cleveland-area Democrat. Republicans have run the place ever since.

Maybe the Republican recapture of an Ohio Supreme Court majority, 32 years ago, was just a reversion to the ways things usually had been. Or maybe it was because Democrats and their labor allies took their eyes off the ball. If so, they might want to reconsider — given the stakes.

The people voters elect to appellate courts can have as much to say about Ohioans’ lives as a governor or the legislature.