On Sunday, November 12, Geauga County Probate and Juvenile Court Judge Timothy Grendell was the subject of an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com. The editorial comments on the latest round of efforts to hold him accountable for his courtroom antics. Below is an excerpt with a link to the full editorial on Cleveland.com.
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The Ohio Disciplinary Counsel’s four-count complaint against Geauga County Juvenile and Probate Court Judge Timothy Grendell is not likely to reach a conclusion until next year, when it’s scheduled for multiday hearings. Nonetheless, the 62-page complaint from Disciplinary Counsel Joseph Caligiuri, as amended, includes a series of shocking allegations against the longtime Geauga County judge, some of which date to 2017.
Grendell, 70, a former state senator, denies any misconduct. And however the case ends up, Grendell, who has held his law license since 1978, will not be able to seek re-election past his current term because he’s hit Ohio’s judicial age limit of 70.
Among the four counts are charges that Grendell wrongly ordered two boys to jail for three nights for refusing to visit their estranged father, and, in another custody case, that he forbade the mother of two other boys from letting them be tested for COVID-19 without his specific authorization, even though one of them was so asthmatic he was later hospitalized.
The third count involves Grendell’s conduct during his well-publicized dispute with Geauga County Auditor Chuck Walder. And the fourth count charges that, in 2020, Grendell, a COVID skeptic, inappropriately invoked his judicial authority while testifying in favor of a bill that his wife, then-state Rep. Diane Grendell, had introduced, asserting that the state was not truthful in its COVID statistics. In order to deliver that testimony, the complaint asserts, Grendell closed his court at noon so he could travel to Columbus — which meant, according to the complaint, that the court was closed when the mother of the two boys in one of the counts arrived to apply for a court-appointed attorney to represent her.
Please continue reading the rest of the editorial here.
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