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Four seek appeals court bench
WARREN
Judges Timothy Cannon and Cynthia Westcott Rice, both incumbents on the 11th District Court of Appeals bench, face challenges from Atty. Ron Tamburrino and Atty. Geoffrey W. Weaver, respectively, for six-year terms.
Judge Cannon is in his eighth year on the bench, his fourth as presiding-administrative judge. He was appointed to a vacancy in 2007.
He has been a lawyer for 34 years, he said, and always has had a passion for it.
Since he’s been on the court, he’s broadened his legal experience even further.
“I was a visiting justice on the [Ohio] Supreme Court a few times, and that was enlightening,” he said.
He also chaired the high court’s Advisory Committee on Case Management, which is revising guidelines for each court in the state about how to report the disposition of its cases. He remains on that committee, though he is no longer chairman.
Tamburrino has no experience as a judge. Judge Cannon said he believes it’s not so important to have been on a bench, but it is important to have tried cases.
“It’s a hard thing to do, to reverse a jury trial,” he said.
He said that he did a significant amount of appellate work as well with heavy prosecution and civil experience, and he has represented communities.
Tamburrino has worked for Sherwin-Williams in fraud investigation since 1988 until retiring this year. He was associate general counsel there for the last seven years, and he managed paralegals.
He said he managed Sherwin-Williams appellate cases for 26 years in federal and state courts throughout the country, in Canada and in some foreign jurisdictions.
He said he was motivated to run for the court because he thinks he can help it be more timely in resolving cases.
Judge Rice is running for her third term.
She has written more than 1,000 opinions and decided more than 3,000 cases, she said. She also served as a visiting judge on the state Supreme Court, as well as on the 2nd, 7th, and 9th District appellate courts.
She had 12 years’ experience as a prosecutor before sitting on the court, but after 12 years, she is quite comfortable handling civil cases, she said.
There are no issues facing the court, she said, though she believes her opponent has made one out of the court’s location.
Weaver believes the court should be moved from Warren to what he says is a more-convenient location of Chardon, but Judge Rice disagrees.
“We have a beautiful new building that’s big enough, and there’s no fiscal reason to move it,” she said.
“We have a clerk designated in every county, so there’s no reason to come to Warren to file your briefs, and we travel to counties to hear cases. The lowest number of cases we hear are out of Geauga County. So why put it in Chardon?” she continued.
Weaver said he has a broad background of experience in nearly every area of law that the court addresses.
He said he has been involved in litigation at the appellate level in approximately 50 cases.
He was with the Wiles and Richards law firm in Willoughby and Madison, Ohio, from 1995 to 2010, but he wasn’t happy, he said, so he took his clients and opened his own firm in Mentor in 2011.
He said he has a significant amount of probate work and “whatever walks in the door.”
He wanted to be on the probate or common pleas courts, he said.
“But the probate judge died. I ran and didn’t get it,” he said.
Weaver belongs to the National Rifle Association and supports pro-life organizations. He said he believes judicial candidates hide behind the judicial ethics code and don’t comment on issues, then “people don’t know who they’re voting for.”