CLEVELAND, Ohio — Medina County Domestic Relations Court Judge Mary Kovack has bucked her colleagues around Northeast Ohio and resisted the Ohio Supreme Court’s guidance to delay all but the most urgent of court hearings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kovack said in a phone interview Friday that she has stripped her three court magistrates of the ability to grant attorneys’ requests to postpone scheduled trials and final hearings, and wants to personally review each case where an attorney requested a continuance based on the COVID-19 virus.

The judge also said she did not plan on ruling on several motions for continuances that mentioned the pandemic until after scheduled telephone conferences that the court’s policies said would result in in-person proceedings unless they ended in a settlement.

The moves resulted in several unnecessary court hearings that have needlessly put plaintiffs, defendants, attorneys, witnesses and courtroom staff at risk of being exposed to COVID-19, and created the appearance that people set for trial during the pandemic must settle their cases to avoid potentially being exposed, two local attorneys alleged in court filings reviewed by cleveland.com.

Attorneys David McArtor and Adam Thurman on Friday each filed separate requests of the Ohio Supreme Court to compel Kovack to comply with guidelines that Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor issued in March and grant continuances in all non-essential cases.

The court late Friday halted court hearings involving McArtor and Thurman until they rule on their applications, and gave Kovack until noon Tuesday to file her formal response.

The attorneys, who as of Friday morning each had outstanding requests for trials set for Monday before Kovack to be postponed, said in the filings that it appears Kovack is using people’s fear of being exposed to the COVID-19 virus to push settlements and avoid a backlog of cases from piling up on her docket. The virus, as of Thursday morning, had infected hundreds and left five people dead in Medina County.

“You’re at the end of a COVID-19 gun,” McArtor, whose 72-year-old mother-in-law lives with him and his wife, told cleveland.com. “It’s settle, or else.”

Thurman likened the policy to “using [the virus] as a sword to get people to settle their case.”

Kovack denied this characterization in an interview with cleveland.com. She said the court has expanded its use of teleconference and applied for a grant from the Supreme Court that would pay for software for the court to be able to hold all hearings by video conferencing. Kovack said the court suggested the system could be in place as early as next week.

“We’re hearing the things that we have to, and we’re trying to resolve the rest by phone,” she said. “Hopefully this will all be moot by next week.”

McArtor and Thurman both lamented filing the writs.

“I think this is unfortunate and unnecessary,” Thurman said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

McArtor said he has hosted campaign fundraisers for Kovack at his house during her 2018 re-election bid and still considered her a friend.

“It’s sad that it’s come to this,” McArtor said. “But her course of actions during this incredible crisis makes no sense.”

Neither attorney is asking the state’s high court to take any disciplinary action against Kovack.

The complaint says that Kovack, on March 16, issued rules saying all in-person, final hearings in cases before trial would be converted into teleconferences with her magistrates to reduce face-to-face contact to reduce the spread of COVID-19. If both sides couldn’t come to a settlement over the phone, everyone involved had to report to an in-person hearing that same day, the rules said.

If the sides still couldn’t agree to the in-person hearing, then everyone had to prepare to go to trial, often in a matter of days, including issuing subpoenas for witnesses.

Those rules remained in place as DeWine and Public Health Director Dr. Amy Acton on March 22 announced stay-at-home orders that forced the closing of non-essential businesses, and O’Connor urged judges to postpone non-emergency civil proceedings.

McArtor’s filing includes several court hearings where Kovack or magistrates acting on her behalf either refused to postpone hearings in cases where both sides agreed to delay the hearing and one case where the witnesses refused to show up.

Kovak’s court denied an unopposed motion that McArtor’s partner, Kris Aupperle, filed on March 26 to postpone a hearing set for March 30, the complaint says. The two counselors who had to testify as witnesses at the hearing had lawyers for the agency where they work contact Aupperle and tell him that they would not honor the subpoenas and would not come to court due to the coronavirus, the filing says. Aupperle called into the court teleconference with the magistrate, and all the other people involved in the case said the witnesses were not coming and again asked for a continuance. The magistrate denied it and ordered everyone to court for the hearing.

Five people, including both parties and attorneys and the magistrate, sat in the judge’s 15-feet-by-20-feet courtroom for 90 minutes, the filing said. McArtor said there was not enough room in the courtroom to follow social distancing practices.

The witnesses did not show up, so the hearing could not take place. The magistrate suspended the hearing for 60 days.

“Which begs the question, why didn’t they do that to begin with,” McArtor said.

O’Connor on that same day released her guidelines urging judges to postpone non-essential hearings -- those that are not necessary to “protect a person’s health, safety, housing, or to prevent some other imminent, serious harm” -- even absent an attorney’s request. McArtor and Aupperle resubmitted 10 requests for Kovack to delay cases that she or her magistrates had previously denied, the filing says. Eight of those motions were still pending as of Friday morning, the filing says.

Kovack on Friday told cleveland.com the guidance was not an order. She repeatedly attempted to quote the order as saying judges “should not” grant blanket continuances.

McArtor’s complaint also cited a Wednesday teleconference in a custody dispute case between two law enforcement members where he demanded a magistrate rule on a motion to continue the case before he engaged in settlement negotiations. The magistrate said the judge, who had emailed magistrates over the weekend and told them that only she could rule on motions to continue, had his motion and had not decided on it.

That magistrate told all the other parties on the phone that if the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement and settle the case that day, he would dismiss the case, and they would have to refile it.

“This case will be done today one way or the other,” the filing quotes the magistrate.

The attorneys told the magistrate that the case, filed in November, still had seven months to settle, that both the father and mother could not come to an agreement that day but agreed to postpone the hearings until a later date, the filing says. The magistrate then stopped the hearing and set a telephone hearing later that day with Kovack on the line, the filing says.

Kovack said during the telephone hearing that she was ruling on continuances on a “week-by-week basis,” and said only a small number of attorneys requested them, the filing says. She also said that she did not receive O’Connor’s guidelines, the filing says.

She expressed concern about the number of cases she would have by Labor Day, the filing says.

“I am doing what a higher pay grade told me to do and have been trying to resolve things,” Kovack said, according to the filing.

She denied the motion to postpone the hearing and verbally dismissed the case, though a journal entry had yet to be filed as of Friday, the filing says.

“It appears that judge Kovack is more concerned about her docket than she is the safety of the litigants, practitioners and parties that appear before her, and even her own court staff,” McArtor said. “She’s very focused on how much work she’s going to have.”

Kovack told McArtor that she bought masks, gloves and sanitary wipes to use during the hearings.

The next day, McArtor had to come to the courthouse for an uncontested divorce hearing in front of one of Kovack’s magistrates, and there were no masks, gloves or wipes available, he said.

Kovack told cleveland.com on Friday that the court ran out of masks on Thursday, but more should have been delivered on Friday. She could not confirm whether the masks were delivered because she was not scheduled to be at the courthouse that day.

The judge accused McArtor of yelling during the Wednesday telephone conference. She said the sides had circulated a proposed agreement during the hearing before McArtor stopped the negotiations and said they would not agree to a settlement. She asked to speak to McArtor’s client about her reasons for stopping the deal, and McArtor declined to let his client address the judge directly, Kovack said. McArtor then asked what would happen if Kovack refused to postpone the trial and he did not show up to protect his mother-in-law. She said since McArtor was the plaintiff, she would dismiss the case.

She told cleveland.com that she did not dismiss the case.

“I feel a little set-up,” she said.

Kovack said the court could “communicate better” and that she would clarify the court’s order to make clear that people would not be forced to come to court. But she said she didn’t see a need to change any of the court’s policies because McArtor and Thurman were the only attorneys to voice complaints.

“If I had seen across the board every lawyer on the planet filing this, I would feel differently,” she said. “But that’s not what I’m seeing.”

Attorney Steve Bailey, who is on the other side of the trial involving Thurman scheduled to start Monday, said he does not feel comfortable coming to the court for non-essential hearings. He and his wife are both 65 years old, and his daughter is immuno-compromised, and he does not want to risk exposing them, he said.

Bailey said he supported McArtor and Thurman in their filings for the writs, but did not think that the Supreme Court should order Kovack to issue blanket continuances. He said other courts had done a better job of using things like videoconferencing to conduct as much business as possible.

Bailey said the ultimatum that Kovack and her magistrates gave people to either settle their cases, be dragged into court, or have their cases dismissed and pay to file them again creates the appearance that she is using COVID-19 fears to settle cases.

“I’m not prepared to go so far as to say that, in fact, Judge Kovack is threatening people’s health to get them to settle because quite frankly, that would be horrendous,” Bailey said. “I’ve had my differences with Judge Kovack over the years, but I’m not prepared to attribute to her that level of cynicism.”

He added, “it’s a damn shame it had to come to this,” he said.

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