O’Farrell exits as judge
From the first day O’Farrell held court, he eschewed formalities he felt stood as a barrier between the justice system and the people it served.
This is part two of a two-part story about Judge Edward O’Farrell.
Back in Ohio, newly divorced and with two young daughters, O’Farrell was now licensed to practice law and interviewed to join the two-person staff of Legal Aid attorneys in New Philadelphia in 1976.
“One handled New Philadelphia, and (I) handled cases in Carroll and Harrison counties. I became the lead attorney for the office in 1977, representing consumer cases,” O’Farrell said. “I did that until 1981, and I was fortunate enough to win cases in the Ohio Supreme Court and argue before the U.S. Supreme Court during that time.”
When New Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Musgrave was forced to retire, O’Farrell set his sights on the seat, quickly realizing he would have a greater battle than the two other candidates for the job. “As a Legal Aid lawyer,” he said, “I was prohibited from participating in partisan politics, so I could not run as a Republican or Democrat but had to run as an Independent.”
Digging into the campaign, O’Farrell walked as much of Tuscarawas County as he possibly could. “I knocked on a very substantial number of doors, explaining who I was, why I felt I was qualified to be Municipal Court judge and that I felt there needed to be an infusion of young, fresh ideas injected into court processes,” he said.
O’Farrell won by a wide margin and took his seat at the bench in January 1982. He held the job for the next nine years, a period marked by controversy, major changes in the court and a tough sentencing practice that brought him national recognition and helped draw attention to the problem of drivers getting behind the wheel while under the influence of intoxicants.
From the first day O’Farrell held court, he eschewed formalities he felt stood as a barrier between the justice system and the people it served. He did away with the use of bailiffs in the courtroom, interacting with juries directly. He refused to wear a black judge’s robe, overseeing the courtroom in well-tailored but more casual clothes.
“I wanted to treat people fairly and give them the respect I felt they deserved,” O’Farrell said. “I had seen plenty of courtrooms around Ohio where the judge was, I felt, disrespectful or peremptory to the lawyers and others in their courtrooms. I felt that, at the bench and at the tables, we were all lawyers equally. I just had a different role to play in the process. I wanted to do things differently.”
DUI was the right issue at the right moment. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was gaining steady ground in its efforts to curb the practice of driving after imbibing. O’Farrell began handing down harsh penalties: First-time offenders got 15 days of jail time, $750 fines and six-month license suspensions.
Insisting no plea bargains for reduced charges would be accepted, every DUI case brought before O’Farrell went to trial. “I wanted any reasonable person to stop and think about facing the certainty of that kind of punishment and decide it wasn’t worth the risk. And we treated everyone equally, no matter who they were or what position in the community they held,” he said.
Such harsh DUI penalties were unheard of anywhere in the United States, and the legal challenges and public backlash were immediate. O’Farrell was an ambitious young lawyer, it was said, an attention-getter trying to make a mark with an eye toward a larger career, in what was perhaps the kindest of circulating public whispers. He remained undaunted.
“It was an issue I felt very strongly about,” O’Farrell said. “I thought I could make a difference and reduce the number of accidents and fatalities. This was a very serious thing. People were losing their lives because of it, and I felt I could make a positive change. At the time DUI cases were reduced to reckless operation almost out of hand. I thought, as a member of the community, as a husband, as a father, that this was something the criminal justice system could change, could affect, and reduce the number of people who drove under the influence.”
The caseload was exhausting with trials held six days of every week and the city obligated to hire additional staff to handle it. The round-the-clock trials continued for more than two years until appellate court challenges made their way through the system and his decisions were largely upheld. Once lawyers realized challenges to DUI charges before O’Farrell were a pointless exercise, frequent guilty pleas reduced the number of trials in his courtroom to a more manageable level.
The crackdown on drunk driving worked. Gaining national attention, O’Farrell’s tough stance began to be adopted by courts elsewhere in the country. According to the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility, between 1982 and 2018 alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the United States fell by 65%.
As far as greater ambitions go, O’Farrell sought a position outside Tuscarawas County only once, running for an appellate court seat unsuccessfully in 1990 just before being elected to the Common Pleas Court bench.
“Having argued appeals around Ohio and in other states as a Legal Aid lawyer,” O’Farrell said, “I came to realize that the minutiae of reviewing cases was really not something I wanted to do.”
O’Farrell is very much an attorney at heart and relishes the legal process as it unfolds, a direct contrast to the academic side of the profession.
“I love what I do. It must be understood that I don’t love much of what happens here. Much of what happens here is very unhappy and reflects the worst of society. When I say I love what I do, my ‘quest,’ if you will, is to bring a sense of justice that people, no matter the outcome and even if they are sent to jail, that they feel that number one it wasn’t personal and that they would leave here knowing they had been treated with respect and had been treated fairly,” O’Farrell said.
Was O’Farrell ambitious for higher office? “I think all lawyers dream of one day sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said, “and I think that’s a pipe dream for most of us. I certainly wasn’t that naive. I entertained, at least silently, that I might one day sit on the Ohio Supreme Court, but once I came to work at the Common Pleas Court, I realized I’d found my final place as a trial court judge. I realized I didn’t want to be a judicial academic. That’s just not the kind of judge I wanted to be.”
O’Farrell is not one to second guess himself, his decisions, choices or processes. Such an approach has perhaps spared him from being overwhelmed by the workload and the horrors that load can represent in individual cases.
In 39 years of adjudicating both civil and criminal cases, O’Farrell said some have been especially difficult for him to hear, and he felt empathy for jurors required to sit through the details. There have been brutal murders, negligent deaths, rape cases, cases involving the physical and sexual abuse of children, drug cases and others reflective of society and its ills.
“The one happy kind of case that sees smiles in the waiting area are those in which child adoption cases are coming to a positive conclusion,” O’Farrell said. “Those are good days for everyone concerned. But that’s about the extent of the pleasant cases we see.”
O’Farrell appears to manage his own well-being through a personal insistence on getting things right, on doing the job properly, on delivering fair, reasonable and careful justice, on protecting the rights of all concerned and on treating people with dignity and respect.
O’Farrell may lose occasional sleep while mentally parsing out a case in progress but never because of a decision he has made or a sentence imposed — save once. It was a case in which a man he had sent to prison for six months was proved innocent several years later. “That one really bothered me greatly for a long time,” he said.
Rather than being tired out by the difficult duties of his office each day, O’Farrell is recharged by the legal process. He is a man of the law and its intricacies and is sustained by the work.
“The justice system is made up of people, and people are imperfect,” O’Farrell said. “That means that the system, because people are imperfect, is also imperfect. I’ve always instructed jurors that it is far better that a person who is existentially guilty of a crime go free by mistake than for a single innocent person to be punished by mistake. If I’m going to err, I’d much rather err on the side of innocence.”
O’Farrell’s family, he said, gets all the credit for supporting him and being understanding of the often long hours required of his work, especially in the beginning. “My children appreciate that I was doing important work. Well, they didn’t when they were small, but they do now. I always tried to make sure that time with my family was quality time and my private life was held sacrosanct. I also have an excellent staff who have made the work possible for me,” he said.
The next several months will be an adjustment. “Do I want to retire?” O’Farrell said. “Everyone around here knows I don’t want to stop. I’ve made no secret of that.”
O’Farrell feels somewhat cheated of the last year of his term with court time necessarily curtailed due to the pandemic and the resulting reduced personal contact on which he thrives.
O’Farrell plans to read more, to do the therapeutic house cleaning he enjoys and to continue running marathons when possible. In mid-2021 he can begin to hear cases again as a substitute judge in Ohio courtrooms in which the presiding judge has recused him or herself.
O’Farrell has been reviewing files, clearing space for incoming Judge Mike Ernest and tidying up a few loose ends, all while continuing to hear cases. There is still no robe, and he still skips lunches to keep working.
Having seen so much of humanity and human drama, one might expect O’Farrell might have some insight into how so much of it might be prevented. What, if anything, in American society might be changed to keep people from finding themselves on the wrong side of a judge’s bench?
“I think the answer to that is obvious,” O’Farrell said. “No one really knows. But I do think that a strong, constant and supportive family gives people a good start. I think back to when I was a young boy, one of six children in our family. It wasn’t religious principles but moral principles that were handed down. I was taught the concept of equality and to uphold the dignity of all human beings. I became aware of injustice at an early age. I saw the abject poverty of Native Americans firsthand as a young man and understood that that poverty was the result of injustice. Those things stuck with me.
“I don’t have any special knowledge, but from what I’ve seen as a judge, I can say that most people who enter this room as a defendant have suffered some disfunction in their family life at an early age. They’ve been abused or neglected or they’ve had missing parents, and those things have impacted their lives in such a way that they’ve lost motivation and can’t appreciate what is possible or might be possible for them or what they can actually accomplish.”
O’Farrell’s own upbringing made him seek, he said, to be always fair, inclusive, forgiving and to make sure people are treated fairly with dignity and with justice. “That is what I have tried hard to do in the courtroom, and I think we have accomplished that. I am proud of what we have been able to do here,” he said.