Ohio Disciplinary Office Recommends Two-Year Law License Suspension for Judge Timothy Grendell

Judge Timothy Grendell Credit: Courtesy Geauga County Court of Common Pleas

After two delays in 2023, and a heated conduct hearing in February, the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Ohio Supreme Court has suggested that Judge Timothy Grendell face a two-year suspension of his law license.

Attorneys in that office argued in a post-hearing finding last week that Grendell, the Portage-Geauga County probate judge for the past decade, should be temporarily removed due to his botched judgment revolving around a 2020 Geauga County custody case. Grendell has sought a suspended sentence or more lenient punishment.

The Counsel’s decision, as documented in a 70-page document released Tuesday, are fair and just, they write, “given [Grendell’s] failure to acknowledge wrongdoing, coupled with the serious nature of the misconduct.”

The attorneys, who both questioned Grendell at the February hearing, based their recommendation on how Grendell handled the case of Grant Glasier and Sally Hartman, whose two teenage sons, Carson and Conner, were later sent to the Portage-Geauga Juvenile Detention for three days for refusing to visit their father, who they said they felt unsafe around.

Grendell, the court argued, had jailed the kids without good reason. He had no legal basis for “unruly charges or detention,” they write, or when converting Glasier’s motion to see his kids into a court order. He should not have used Constable John Ralph, who arrested Carson and Conner in May of 2020, as a “puppet” extension.

And instead of admitting that the teens should not have been punished, Grendell went “into damage control mode,” the panel argued, and used a court-ordered diversion contract to make a therapy assessment of the two teens seem like a logical, preplanned part of the judicial process.

“Our court has disciplined rogue judges in the past,” the panel wrote. “But this state has never seen a judge inflict pain and suffering on two innocent, young, and vulnerable children, while claiming to have acted in their best interests.

Glendell” acted in his and Glasier’s interests and no one else’s.”

The bulk of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel’s decision seems to suggest that Grendell was operating on a constant bias tied to the belief that Glasier had a legal right to see his kids bimonthly despite the teens’ claims he was, as the original complaint reads, an “abusive father.”

And when his judicial prowess was challenged, Grendell, 70, went off into a supposed campaign of threats and lashing out.

Though he denied it in the February hearing, Grendell allegedly barreled into the Chardon Police Department to threaten Chardon Court Police Prosecutor James Gillette and Police Chief Scott Niehus with a “1983 action”—a judicial move meant to take power away from law enforcement— “involving [his] employees,” the brief reads.

When parties went to court in July 2020, Grendell apparently disparaged Hartman for creating a GoFundMe page to aid in attorney’s fees. “It’s not in the best interest of these boys to be exploited to raise money,” he said.

In past interviews with media, Grendell has excused his contentious actions as more conservative views of his court. In a 2022 interview with Fox 8’s I-Team, Grendell shaped the Glasier case as a kind tough luck situation, and his duty was overall to hard decisions. “That’s not being a bully,” he said. “That’s called being a judge.”

Not in the views of the panel.

“Treating the boys like hardened criminals instead of two teenage status offenders,” the state’s attorneys wrote, Grendell “prohibited them from having any contact with each other for fear of them aligning their testimony—is an unruly case.”