CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The public discussion about whether to build a new Justice Center in Cleveland has also raised a question that has been asked nearly every decade since the 1910s: How many judges does Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court need?
Cuyahoga County Councilman Mike Gallagher, a member of the committee of public officials debating the future of the Justice Center, questioned the number of robes on the bench during a committee meeting last month. He pointed out that Cuyahoga County has twice as many judges as the more populous Franklin County.
“We’re heavy on seats in Cuyahoga County as opposed to any other Ohio county,” said Gallagher, who also hinted at lobbying Columbus for a potential reduction of the bench. “ . . . I find it hard to believe that what we’ve got is what we’re stuck with.”
Whenever officials have questioned how many judges Cuyahoga County needs, the answer has almost always been “more,” according to a review of Plain Dealer archives dating back to 1894.
Court officials routinely sought more judges to help clear backlogs fueled by the flurry of civil and criminal cases that came with Cleveland’s population boom until the mid-1970s. But even after the county’s population began to decline in the 1980s, the court still sought -- and received from state lawmakers -- more judges.
The court had just six judges in 1894. That’s ballooned to 34 judges who are sitting on the bench today in the court’s general division alone. Another six judges are assigned to the court’s juvenile division, five sit on the domestic relations court bench and there are two probate court judges.
Only the state legislature can increase or decrease the number of judges assigned to a county common pleas court. The law also prohibits legislators from eliminating the seat of a sitting judge. The seat must become vacant -- such as when a judge ages off the bench, does not seek re-election or dies in office -- in order for lawmakers to eliminate it.
Still, Gallagher’s question ruffled the feathers of the court’s presiding judge Brendan Sheehan, who told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer last month that it was inappropriate for Gallagher to even ask if the court has too many judges.
How did we get here?
A scouring of Plain Dealer archives dating back to the 19th century shows that judges have long struggled to handle the court’s caseload, and frequently raised concerns over a backlog of cases.
The Cuyahoga County bar association penned an 1894 letter to the county’s delegation of state lawmakers, calling on them to immediately pass a bill to raise the number of judges from six to 10.
The letter pointed to a backlog of cases built up on the docket, which would take two years to clear with just six judges. The backlog was also causing the county’s jail to become dangerously overcrowded, with 78 inmates.
“Our jail must not be made a burial place for innocent and guilty alike,” the letter stated. “Can Cleveland afford to have the reputation of a place in which justice is denied to the merchant, the manufacturer, the citizen? This is a question which must be left with you to decide.”
The court got its judges, but the same issues continued to surface every few years. The state legislature granted Cuyahoga County, as well as other counties, a handful of additional judges in each of the next four decades as Cleveland grew to become one of the nation’s biggest cities.
Other factors, aside from population growth, also contributed to a higher caseload for the court. A 1917 Plain Dealer article declared that Cuyahoga County juries were paying out the largest awards in civil and personal injuries lawsuits of any county in Northeast Ohio. It attributed a surge in civil filings in the county to plaintiff’s attorneys filing lawsuits here to chase more money.
By 1963, Cleveland’s population was near its all-time high, and there were more than 1.6 million people living in Cuyahoga County. The common pleas court had 21 judges, and the chief judge at the time said they were hanging on by a thread.
“We are badly in need of judicial manpower,” Judge Arthur Day said in an April 19, 1963 Plain Dealer article.
The article said there were 11,946 cases pending in civil court at the time. Furthermore, the court saw 1,759 criminal criminal cases filed the previous year, up from just 739 criminal cases in 1950 -- an increase the article called “a booming business in criminal court.”
Day said the court’s 21 judges were ill-equipped to handle that many filings. He and a group of attorneys called on the legislature to add at least four new judges to the court.
“We have a tremendous load of cases and the number is expected to increase with our expanding population,” Day said.
But Day’s push for judges met stiff opposition in Columbus. Rep. Edmund James, a Republican from Southeast Ohio and chairman of the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee, opposed the measure. He said that previous additions of judges had failed to get the court’s docket under control. James said the court needed to try other means to catch up on stalled cases.
A group of attorneys joined in and filed lawsuits seeking to force lawmakers to reapportion the state’s judges. The state law’s only requirement was that each county have at least one judge. The lawyers argued that resulted in several small counties having one judge per 25,000 residents. Cuyahoga County had one judge for every 75,000 residents, they said at the time.
The attorneys called for the establishment of a rule to grant each county one common pleas judge for every 50,000 residents. They fought their battle in the courts.
Then-Ohio Attorney General William Saxbe, who would go on to be a U.S. Senator and the U.S. Attorney General whom President Richard Nixon fired in the famed Saturday Night Massacre amid the Watergate scandal, opposed the action and argued the current system worked. He said the legislature should decide the number of judges for each county, rather than the courts. The battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1966 agreed with the attorney general and dismissed the lawyers’ challenge.
The next year, the Ohio legislature acquiesced and granted Cuyahoga County five more judges. The court and a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Cuyahoga County had wanted eight more judges, citing a lagging civil docket that was “50 months behind,” the Plain Dealer story.
Judges keep being added despite population decline
By 1970, Cuyahoga County’s population soared to more than 1.7 million. Plain Dealer articles said multiple regional planning commissions projected that the county’s population would continue to climb, and could top 2 million by 1980.
That didn’t happen, thanks in part to a national recession. By the mid-1970s, the county started to lose residents. At the same time, Cleveland saw a surge in violent crime that saw the city regularly topping more than 300 murders per year.
A 1974 Plain Dealer editorial about the need for additional judges to be assigned to the common pleas bench pointed to recent changes in state law that required criminal cases to go to trial within 90 days if the person was jailed, and 270 days if they were released on bond. Defendants can waive that requirement, and often do.
In 1976, the state legislature again granted Cuyahoga County five more common pleas judges, raising the total number of judges assigned to the court’s divisions to 31. It also added three judges to the 8th District Court of Appeals, one juvenile court judge, and 17 other judgeships around the state.
Ohio Sen. Anthony Celebrezze Jr. sponsored the bill and cited “population growth and burgeoning court dockets” to justify the positions, according to the Plain Dealer.
A decade later, Cuyahoga County gained three new judgeships as part of a statewide court expansion 1984, even though the county’s population decline was well documented.
State Sen. Ben Skall, a Beachwood Republican, cited that criminal filings had risen 27% since the last batch of new judges were added in 1977. But Rep. Paul Matia, a Westlake Republican who was also a lawyer, argued that the bill was wasteful. Matia said the current judges and attorneys needed to find ways to settle matters outside of court, to prevent the number of filings from continuing to increase.
“Far too many cases are being filed because there are too many lawyers in the state,” Matia argued.
The bill added 12 judgeships around the state, including two in Hamilton County and one in Franklin County.
By 1990, the court had increased to 34 judges. An article announcing then-Administrative Judge Leo Spellacy’s election to the 8th District Court of Appeals noted there were 39,000 cases filed in court that year.
Where are the numbers now?
Ohio Supreme Court data show that in Cuyahoga County, the number of criminal filings, lawsuits and trials held each year have significantly decreased since the 1990s.
According to the Supreme Court data, there were about 33,800 cases filed in 2019, including 13,500 criminal cases filed and 20,300 civil cases. That’s more than 5,000 fewer than the 39,000 cases filed in 1990.
The data also shows there are far fewer trials held in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court than there were in the previous two decades, as more cases are ending with parties striking a deal and avoiding trial.
In 1997, the court held 1,077 trials. That includes civil and criminal cases, and jury and bench trials.
The number of trials dipped to 751 in 2010 and 502 in 2015. Trials have continued to decrease every year since.
Cuyahoga County’s 34 judges held a total of 377 trials in 2019, including 224 jury trials and 153 bench trials.
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