Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Justin Beresky spoke with EastIdahoNews.com reporter Nate Eaton in an exclusive interview. Watch the 55-minute conversation in the video player above | Jordan Wood, EastIdahoNews.com

PHOENIX — It’s not common for a judge to speak on the record with a reporter, so when I emailed Judge Justin Beresky requesting an interview, I knew there would be some conditions.

For one, I was aware he would likely not answer questions about the two Lori Vallow Daybell trials he presided over earlier this year. If he wanted to discuss them, I’d be more than happy to listen, but the Arizona Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judges from making public statements about cases in their courtrooms.

However, it was the Daybell trials that made Beresky known worldwide. For a few weeks in April and then again in June, an untold number of people watched him conduct court as Daybell represented herself in the highest-profile trials Arizona has seen since the Jodi Arias murder case in 2013.

Memes featuring Beresky’s photo were shared on social media and phrases he said in court were printed on t-shirts and badges. Online commenters frequently wrote about Beresky’s good looks, giving him nicknames such as “Judge McSteamy,” “Judge McDreamy,” “The Court’s Finest” and “The Honorable Hottie.”

As Beresky sat day after day in a Maricopa County courtroom presiding over a case with Idaho ties, few knew that he himself has deep roots in the Gem State. That’s the story I wanted to tell, and after some time, Beresky agreed to sit down with me for his first-ever media interview.

Childhood in Grangeville

Justin Beresky was born in Oregon and when he was in kindergarten, his family moved to Grangeville, Idaho, a rural farming town of about 3,500 people located 75 miles southeast of Lewiston. His father was a chiropractor and his mother was a homemaker.

“She got a Realtor’s license and did a little bit of that. She had a side business and would go into other people’s homes and give women consultations on what colors were good for them to wear,” Beresky recalls. “She actually put on a fashion show in Grangeville when I was in sixth or seventh grade with the local JCPenney providing all the clothes. … I think she has a picture in her living room where I have my sister on one arm and my sister’s best friend on the other, and we’re all dressed up going down the runway.”

Justin Beresky participated in a fashion show organized by her mother during his childhood in Grangeville, Idaho. | Courtesy Justin Beresky

Beresky’s small-town childhood was idyllic. He’d ride his bike with friends to the pool, play hide-and-seek on summer nights, ski in the winter, camp, visit the rivers and explore nearby forests.

In the fifth grade, a boy named Chad Hill moved to town, and he and Beresky became friends.

“He was very funny and active in sports. His best sport was probably baseball and he was our ace pitcher,” Hill tells EastIdahoNews.com. “He had a pitch with a curveball that we called the ‘hoop of fire.’ When he threw it, our whole team was excited.”

Hill says Beresky, who is now in his early 50s, was outgoing and “the girls seemed to like him.” The two of them, along with six other boys, formed a tight-knit friendship that still endures today. They keep up a running group text, and most of them recently took a fishing trip together.

Beresky excelled in school and, as a teenager, thought he might become a teacher.

“When I was in third or fourth grade, I took some sort of basic aptitude test, and it said I should either be a teacher, a lawyer or a garbage man,” Beresky says with a smile.

Beresky didn’t take much interest in the law until sixth grade, when brothers Mark Henry Lankford and Bryan Stuart Lankford — later known as the “Grangeville brothers” — were charged with the 1983 murders of Robert and Cheryl Bravence, a Texas couple vacationing near Grangeville. The case, which ultimately resulted in death sentences, caught his attention.

College and law school

Beresky’s parents divorced when he was in high school, and his father moved to New Mexico.

“I felt like I needed to get out of town and find some new, exciting adventure. So I went to the University of New Mexico,” Beresky says. “I really liked New Mexico, and for me, growing up in Grangeville and then moving to Albuquerque, it was like this big adventure being in a big city for the first time in my life.”

Beresky worked toward a degree in secondary education and planned to become a teacher. In his senior year, he student taught in high school classes and enjoyed it. But as graduation approached, he wondered if there might be something else in store for him.

“I was about to graduate and was only 21. I thought it was a little early to get tied into a teaching career, so why not go to law school and just see what happens? So I took the LSAT and applied to some law schools,” Beresky says.

He was accepted into the University of Idaho College of Law in Moscow, which worked in his favor because he qualified for in-state tuition. He moved back to Idaho and embraced the challenges of law school.

“I really liked the trial week that we did before our final year, where you get together with other students in your class and you’re trained on how to do a trial,” Beresky recalls. “You learn the different aspects, cross-examination, direct examination, and at the end of the week, you put on a trial. That week, I think, really galvanized for me that I’d like to be in the courtroom when I became a lawyer.”

Beresky admits he was naïve when he graduated from law school. Unsure how to find a job, he moved to Arizona, took the bar exam and began walking into law firms to ask if they needed help.

“I had connections in Arizona and knew that I liked the climate. I was naïve in a sense, too, because I thought I’d come to Phoenix and be here for a year or two and then maybe take a bar somewhere else and move there,” he explains. “I had no plan to stay here, and then it just sort of happened. I got into this career here and plan on staying until my career is over.”

In the courtroom

Beresky knew he wanted to be in the courtroom on a regular basis, so his best option was practicing criminal or family law. After spending a few months working for a civil practitioner, he applied for and was offered a job with the Maricopa County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

“The great thing about here in Phoenix, whether you’re at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office or the public defender’s office, if you get a job there, you’re gonna be in the courtroom right away,” Beresky says.

He recalls his first jury trial, which occurred after he had been on the job for two or three months. It was a DUI case, and the defense attorney was a well-known trial attorney “who would have absolutely mopped the floor with me.”

Beresky’s mentor, who was helping with the case, took over halfway through the trial, and they ended up getting a conviction.

After two years in the prosecutor’s office, Beresky decided it was time to move on. He and Geoffrey Fish, a friend he had worked with in the prosecutor’s office, decided to open up a defense practice together in June 2001.

“When we opened, we took a variety of cases – civil, some family, bankruptcies and small claims. We ultimately ended up doing mostly criminal defense work,” Fish, who is now a Maricopa County Superior Court judge, tells EastIdahoNews.com.

Beresky says opening a firm was “kind of scary,” and shifting from prosecution to defense work demanded a different set of skills.

“You have to have a certain bedside manner and build a rapport with your client … because sometimes you have to tell them things they don’t want to hear, or you have to tell them things that maybe are probably bad news for them,” Beresky says. “I also think when you’re a prosecutor, you have a little bit of built-in credibility and gravitas with a jury, just from the nature of being a prosecutor. So you have to work a little more as a defense attorney to get that sort of consideration with the jury.”

Gregg Woodnick, an attorney in Phoenix, met Beresky and Fish in the mid-2000s.

“Justin was just a nice guy. As a defense attorney, you might be termed a little aggressive and get the moniker of being a jerk, but he was just a nice guy,” Woodnick tells EastIdahoNews.com. “People really liked him as a defense attorney because he was approachable, kind and helpful.”

As a defense attorney, Beresky was often asked how he could represent clients accused of terrible crimes. He says he always saw them first as people with constitutional rights that deserved to be protected.

“At the end of the day, you’re just trying to make sure the process works,” Beresky says. “So people say, ‘Oh, that person got off on a technicality or whatever.’ Well, I don’t think constitutional rights are a technicality. I’ve also had people who were truly innocent of what they’ve been charged with, and those are the difficult cases too. So I don’t go into a case thinking you’re guilty or you’re innocent. I just go and try to get the best result that I can for my client.”

One day, when Beresky was in court, he had a bad experience with a judge who was being “unnecessarily rude” to everyone in the courtroom. Beresky was irritated and had an idea.

“This thought just popped into my head that I could do better than that. I had never really thought about being a judge or anything at any point,” Beresky says. “That thought kind of took seed and it developed. After a while, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I really could do a good job as a judge.”

Becoming a judge

Maricopa County uses a thorough application and vetting process to select judges. A governor-appointed committee reviews applications, checks references and chooses whom to interview. The panel then forwards its recommendations to the governor, who ultimately appoints the new judges.

Beresky applied a few times before being selected as a Maricopa County court commissioner, which is a similar position to a magistrate judge in Idaho.

“I started out in the probation violation court, and then after that, I was assigned as a special assignment commissioner, which kind of means ‘have legal pad, will travel.’ You get plugged in to fill different spots,” Beresky says. “I did that for several years too, which I think helped my application process (to be a judge) because it showed that I could handle all these different calendars.”

Maricopa County has roughly 100 judges and 80 court commissioners, and each year a few positions open as judges retire. In January 2018, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey appointed Beresky to one of those seats on the bench.

The judges rotate assignments every few years between criminal, civil, family, juvenile, and probate divisions. They don’t choose their departments, and they don’t choose their cases.

“I spent a total of four years in family court, which is a lot of custody cases and divorced people fighting over visitation with their children, child support, splitting up assets and debts, those sorts of things,” Beresky says.

He was then reassigned to criminal court, which he says became his favorite since he had previously practiced criminal law as a prosecutor and defense attorney.

“I felt like I did a good job in criminal, as far as doing settlement conferences and trials and those sorts of things,” Beresky says. “The good thing about our rotations, though, is that it helps keep things from getting stale and gives you something new. You have to learn a whole new area of law that you haven’t practiced before.”

Beresky runs an efficient courtroom and is respected among his colleagues.

Izzy Contreras, his judicial assistant, has spent 29 years working for Maricopa County Superior Court. He knows all the judges and has spent time in their courtrooms.

“I was very selective in choosing which judge I wanted to work for,” Contreras tells EastIdahoNews.com. “When his position came up, I knew it would be a good fit. He lets me be me, he lets me do my job without micromanaging me, he lets me run the office and is there for any guidance that I need. He’s very calm, very level-headed, very neutral, everything you would want a judge to be.”

Several attorneys who spoke with EastIdahoNews.com feel the same way.

“We like appearing in front of him because he runs an efficient courtroom,” says Woodnick, who has won and lost cases in front of Beresky. “He doesn’t dillydally. He doesn’t go down the drama rabbit hole that sometimes happens in court. He has an effective way of controlling that. You saw that in the Vallow Daybell case. When things started to get off track, he had a really good way of kind of recentering it and keeping it efficient in a really respectful way.”

Christine Whalin, a criminal defense attorney who has known Beresky for nearly two decades, has appeared in front of Beresky over the years.

“He’s a very well-reasoned, fair judge. He will listen to each side’s argument and I think he does everything in his power to do the right thing and follow the law,” Whalin says. “He’s very easy to get along with and I think that translates onto the bench. He rarely gets upset. I think he keeps what I’ll call ‘judicial temper’ in check and that helps him when he’s on the bench tremendously.”

Hill, Beresky’s childhood friend from Grangeville, visited him in Arizona a few years ago and watched him in court for a day. He described it as “surreal” to see his childhood buddy now presiding seriously from the bench.

“I think the only reason he wanted me to come here was so I had to stand up when he entered the room,” Hill says with a laugh. “He waited for me to get into the courtroom and then, when the bailiff said all rise, he looked at me and grinned. I knew I had been duped.”

Personal life

Beresky and his wife, Beth, are very private and live in a quiet neighborhood in Phoenix. They were married on a beach in Mexico in February 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to sweep the globe.

Both had been married before. Beth brought a daughter, now a teenager, into the family, and Beresky brought a son, who is in his 20s. Parenthood, he says, has taught him the patience often needed in the courtroom — and he’s never without a well-timed dad joke at home.

“I have all sorts of dad jokes. They’re terrible, though. Like, ‘When does a joke become a dad joke?’ When it becomes a parent,” he says with a smile. “I’ve always loved kids. If you had asked me where I saw myself when I was in high school, I would have told you I’d probably have six kids or something like that. That never worked out for me, but I love being a dad. I wish I had time to have more, but I’m getting too old.”

The Bereskys like to swim in their backyard pool, have Sunday game nights, paddleboard and kayak in nearby rivers and go on hikes. Beth watches true crime shows, while Beresky prefers cheering on the San Francisco Giants.

To unwind, he goes to the gym, takes his dog on walks and spends time outdoors.

The future

The Daybell trials came at the tail end of Beresky’s rotation in the criminal division. He began his new assignment in juvenile courts this summer and now presides over cases involving parental rights, adoptions and kids in foster care.

“It can be very heavy. Some days you’re reading reports and talking to lawyers and parents (about) these kids with serious mental health issues who are living in a lockdown facility,” Beresky says.

He will remain in juvenile court for the next several years and may have one or two final division assignments before retiring in about 10 years. At that point, he says he might put his teaching degree in law classes at local universities.

Over the summer, he returned to Idaho to help with the University of Idaho Law Week. He found it invigorating to be back on campus, reflecting on the fact that he once stood in the same place as the students he was now guiding.

Despite a career that has placed him in a high-profile, visible role this year, Beresky says he isn’t focused on fame or accolades; instead, he says he wants to be remembered simply as a good person who tried to do right by others.

“I don’t know that I care how I am remembered. What I mean by that is I think so many people chase fame or glory or whatever,” he says. “You could be the most famous person in the world, and 50 years after you die, no one’s going to remember who you are. It’s not that I want to be remembered as a scoundrel or a terrible person, but at the same time, I’m not out seeking some sort of fame to be remembered a certain way. I think you should just be a good person in life and things will work out.”

Watch our entire interview with Judge Justin Beresky in the video player above and hear his views on what makes a good judge, cameras in the courtroom, the hardest part about being a judge and whether he watches true crime programs.