What do you call an ex-judge?

COLUMBUS

When should you stop calling a retired judge by that honorary title?

And, perhaps more importantly, how many pages of legalese will it take to prove that point?

For Bill O’Neill, the Democratic challenger hoping to join the Ohio Supreme Court, the answer to the second question is 102. We don’t know the answer to the first question yet.

O’Neill won the Democratic primary to face incumbent Justice Robert Cupp, a Republican, in November. He wasn’t endorsed by his party in the primary race but still snagged 71 percent of the vote.

Earlier this year, O’Neill distributed some campaign fliers touting his experience — a decade on the court of appeals, retired U.S. Army colonel, registered nurse and assistant attorney general.

The ad made it clear that he is a “former” judge, having retired from the appeals court about five years ago. But he still used “judge” before his name.

Somebody didn’t like that and filed a complaint, saying O’Neill was passing himself off as a sitting judge.

“I am concerned that this will mislead potential voters as it did me in believing that Mr. O’Neill is a sitting judge,” the complainant wrote, according to documents.

O’Neill said he wasn’t trying to mislead anyone, he was just using the title the way most people do. Once a judge, always a judge, so to speak.

Public’s memory

“... Once you retire after your tenure of service, your name is ingrained in the public’s memory and you will always be Judge O’Neill,” he told a grievance panel, according to documents.

But that panel ordered O’Neill to stop using the title, and the former judge pushed the issue to a first-of-its-kind grouping of appeals court judges to hear the case.

The appellate panel must decide whether O’Neill will be allowed to call himself judge in future campaign materials.

O’Neill filed 102 pages as part of his merit brief to prove his point.

“The state has no compelling interest in requiring judicial candidates to hew to such an exacting and impossible level of accuracy,” O’Neill argued. “Listeners as well as speakers control the implications of any given statement, and Rule 4.3(C) prohibits true statements based on what they may imply. There is no constitutional warrant for such a proscription. What is more, the contested rule, on its face, prohibits more speech than is necessary to serve whatever interest the state does have in regulating judicial campaign speech.”

It’s a serious situation. We can’t have people masquerading as something they’re not to fool voters.

But to the average Ohioan, this situation must sound absurd.

Former elected officials routinely are called by their previous titles, often for the remainder of their lives.

I know of at least one former state lawmaker who regularly calls himself “Senator,” both in conversation and in letters and other documents.

House Speaker Bill Batchelder often referred to former Rep. Lynn Slaby as “Judge Slaby,” since the latter was a retiree of the bench.

“... If I’m on the golf course and people say, ‘Judge, how are you?’ and I say, ‘My name is Bill,’ they will not respond,” O’Neill wrote in his legal filing. “They just will not respond. It’s a title that follows you for life, and I don’t think there is anything misleading about it.”

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.