OH Supreme Court Justice Melody Stewart announces reelection bid as GOP aims to lock in control of court

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio Supreme Court Justice Melody Stewart, a Democrat who is the first Black woman elected to the court, said she is running for reelection in 2024.

That’s when Stewart’s first, six-year term on the court ends. She’s 61, below the state’s 70-year-old age cutoff for judges.

Meantime, Justice Joe Deters, whom Gov. Mike DeWine appointed to the court last December for the associate justice seat that had been vacated when Sharon Kennedy became chief justice, will seek a six-year term next year, instead of a two-year term that he’d normally run for to retain his seat, said Kenny Street, a political strategist with Deters’ campaign.

It’s unclear at this point whether Deters will challenge Stewart or Justice Michael P. Donnelly, another Democrat who said he’s running for reelection.

“No decision has been made on that front,” Street said. “But we do expect that he’ll run for one of the full-term seats.”

Decisions made by Ohio’s highest court are high stakes. The court is expected to set the limits on the proposed abortion rights constitutional amendment, if it passes in November. The court also is likely to evaluate a new congressional map that state leaders must draw after the 2024 election. Questions about whether private school vouchers unconstitutionally take money from the public school system are also expected to go before the court in coming years.

Republicans, who have dominated most statewide elections in Ohio for years, are working to eventually wipe out all the Democrats recently elected to the court. Voters have elected three Democrats since 2018 to the seven-member bench. The Republican-controlled legislature recently changed the longstanding law requiring Supreme Court general elections be nonpartisan to requiring a partisan affiliation after each candidate’s name.

The change could benefit Republican candidates, as the state has leaned further to the right in recent years. Deters, a former Ohio treasurer who most recently served as Hamilton County prosecutor, has better statewide name recognition than the two other Republicans who are running for the court, which could help the Ohio GOP if it is trying to challenge a sitting Democratic justice.

Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Megan E. Shanahan is running for the Ohio Supreme Court, as is Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Dan Hawkins. Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer left a message with an Ohio GOP spokesman to inquire about which Supreme Court seats each are seeking. An associate of Shanahan said he didn’t whether she’s decided which seat and a spokesman for Hawkins didn’t return a message.

Stewart – who most recently served on the Ohio 8th District Court of Appeals, which hears appeals from lower Cuyahoga County courts – is not a fan of partisan interference on the court.

“It’s clear to me and I hope to everyone that the change in the law to put the party affiliation on the ballot was designed for no other reason than to make it more difficult for me and Justice Donnelly and Justice (Jennifer) Brunner, quite frankly any Democrat who would run for the Supreme Court, to maintain a seat or get elected on the Supreme Court,” she said in an interview. “Unfortunately, I think the legislation was completely politically motivated.”

Stewart said she’s never decided a case based on party identity.

“Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, we all take the same oath,” she said.

In the last two years, a divided Supreme Court repeatedly rejected legislative and congressional maps as unconstitutional gerrymanders.

The decisions were politically explosive, with Republican lawmakers weighing impeachment for then-Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, the lone Republican to side with the court’s Democrats on the maps. The discussion drew ire from Republican redistricting commission members Gov. Mike DeWine and then-House Speaker Bob Cupp, but praise from Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who also sat on the commission.

Kennedy, while on the campaign trail for chief justice, told Republican voters that the court battles over redistricting were “the fight of our life,” which was later criticized as putting politics over the facts of a case.

“Without saying a whole lot, I think that was probably – at least for my time on the court – probably the bleakest times on the court,” Stewart said. “I think it was challenging for all of us.”

Promise to a nephew

Nevertheless, Stewart said she hopes for a second term.

“I can only control my part in that and try very hard to not be political or personal in anything in my job,” she said. “I would hope that rhetoric is toned down. I don’t think it’s good for justice in general.”

Stewart, who has seven nieces and nephews, has a personal reason for running. The youngest will turn 18 next year. He was 12 when she first ran, and she recalled his disappointment that he couldn’t vote for her.

“I said, ‘If I get elected, you’ll be able to vote for me in 2024,’ and his eyes got big,” she said. “That little kid now is captain of the football team and a big kid, a linebacker. I flash back to that moment where my 12-year-old nephew, at that age, was disappointed that he couldn’t vote for me, that everybody else in the family could but he couldn’t.”

Some judges call themselves strict constructionists, a legal philosophy in which they apply a law as it’s written, instead of how they believe it was intended. Others are originalists, seeking to interpret law through the Constitution as it was written and ratified, not assigning new meanings as times change.

Stewart said she doesn’t exclusively subscribe to any judicial philosophy.

“There are pros and cons for all those positions,” she said. “It’s enough for me to read the case, read the facts, read the law and apply it, even if the application meets with what I think is an unjust result. I can still apply the law faithfully and then say, ‘This works a grave injustice. The legislature should revisit this. These are some things we can consider.’”

Since serving on the Supreme Court and on the 8th District Court of Appeals, Stewart said she’s had the opportunity to listen to her colleagues’ interpretations and legal analyses as they discuss cases and the writing of decisions.

“That is absolutely invaluable to me, to weigh those and consider those,” she said, “because at the end of the day, if you feel something is morally wrong, if you feel that it’s just a decision that is repulsive, you can still say that. But you still have to faithfully apply the law. And it’s got to work evenly for everybody. It’s got to work the same.”

Stewart has worked an attorney for the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland. She was a law professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and Cleveland State’s law school, where she was also an assistant dean. In addition to her law degree, she has a doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

Her undergraduate degree was in music from the University of Cincinnati. She plays piano, classical guitar and percussion, first learning music theory and piano at the Music Settlement in Cleveland.

During the pandemic, when businesses were closed and even the Supreme Court justices heard cases remotely, connected together through technology, she got back into writing music spanning different genres.

“It is all over the place,” she said. “It is classical. It is popular. It is modern. Even the classical could sound more like impressionist music. Or it could sound like some from the 18th century or 16th century, a counterpoint fugue. It’s hard to describe, because it just comes up.”

Laura Hancock covers state government and politics for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.