After a contest that roiled both local legal and political circles while placing the personal life of an incumbent judge on full public view, four sitting Circuit Court judges were elected Tuesday to 15 year terms on the bench.
With more than 90 percent of the vote reporting early today, the fifth candidate in the contest – attorney Daniel Patrick Connell – trailed his nearest competitor by more than 11,000 votes in an unsuccessful effort to win a judgeship in the non-partisan election.
There was little question that three of the judges on the ballot – Gary Bair, Joan Ryon and Nelson Rupp – would win voter approval. Rupp, first appointed to the Circuit Court in 1997, was up for a second 15-year term Tuesday; Bair and Ryon were initially appointed in 2012 and 2013, respectively.
But Connell had sharply questioned the fitness and qualifications of the remaining judge on the ballot: Audrey Creighton, appointed to the Circuit Court in February after a four-year stint as a District Court judge. While Creighton has now won voter approval to remain on the Circuit Court bench, her long-term future may lie in the hands of the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities – an independent entity established to look into allegations lodged against judges.
Meanwhile, Connell’s candidacy may reignite a legislative debate over whether judges should be forced to stand for election in the manner of those seeking political office.
Normally, when a vacancy occurs at the Circuit Court level in Maryland, a 13-member nominating commission – comprised of both attorneys and non-attorneys appointed by the governor – vets potential candidates, and comes up with a list of finalists. The governor then makes an appointment, with the appointed Circuit Court judge facing the voters at the next scheduled election.
The four incumbent judges up for election this year – Bair, Creighton, Ryon and Rupp – had gone through this process. Connell, a former State Department legal adviser who jumped into the race just hours before the filing deadline, had not – prompting complaints in local legal circles that he was seeking to circumvent a judicial vetting process that has been in place in Maryland for nearly a half century.
For his part, Connell sought to make an issue of that current vetting process, deriding the nominating commission as a “13-member secret panel” with little accountability to the voting public. However, also fueling the controversy surrounding Connell was the extent to which he had practiced law in Montgomery County, even though he is a county native and current resident of Poolesville.
The Committee To Retain The Sitting Judges, the campaign arm of the four incumbents, charged that Connell had “never appeared as an attorney in Montgomery County.” Connell contended that he had tried cases here, even though much of his legal practice had been in Baltimore.
But the judicial contest took a sensational turn in mid-May – five weeks before the June 24 primary – when Creighton lodged kidnapping and assault charges against Rickley Senning, an ex-felon who Creighton had represented while a defense attorney before being named to the bench, Subsequent court filings disclosed that Creighton, 54, had been having an intimate relationship with Senning, 25, who had been living with her since his release from prison last year.
Senning is awaiting trial on the charges, with the proceedings tentatively scheduled for Nov. 17.
In the meantime, Creighton has been excused from trying cases pending a resolution of the charges against Senning, and has declined to comment publicly, with her attorney saying she is prevented from doing so by rules of judicial conduct.
Despite the controversy surrounding her personal life, Creighton – only the second Hispanic-American to be appointed to a judgeship in Montgomery County – finished second in the contest for four judicial nominations in the June 24 Democratic primary. But Connell finished first – and Creighton last – in the Republican primary. Because the four incumbents and Connell were cross-filed in both primaries, all five candidates ended up on Tuesday’s general election ballot.
In an open letter to Creighton’s three fellow judges–dated two weeks before the primary–Connell voiced several allegations about Creighton’s behavior, including that she had initially misled the police about the nature of her relationship with Senning and that she had improperly assisted him in defending himself when he was charged with marijuana possession last year. Creighton’s defenders responded by saying that Connell’s assertions were no more than allegations, and it should be left to the Judicial Disabilities Commission to investigate and determine whether there had been improper conduct on Creighton’s part. While it appears that the matter has been referred to the Judicial Disabilities Commission, the status of the investigation is unclear.
But it clearly put Creighton’s supporters in the legal community in the awkward position of asking voters to re-elect her while trusting the process to work. Given Tuesday’s results, it appears that a majority of voters had agreed to do so, while rejecting the idea of electing a judge who had not gone through the usual judicial vetting process.
In another courthouse-related contest Tuesday, State’s Attorney John McCarthy was overwhelmingly elected to a third term by a margin of 69-31 percent.
