Geauga County judge suspended after jailing KIDS who refused dad visits

The Ohio Supreme Court suspended Geauga County Judge Timothy Grendell for 18 months and ordered him off the bench without pay.

However, the court subsequently suspended 12 months of the original decision, effectively reducing Grendell’s time off the bench to just six months, as Cleveland.com reported.

The Board of Professional Conduct, which oversees discipline for attorneys and judges across the state, also previously recommended an 18-month suspension with six months dropped if Grendell remained in good standing, according to another report from the site.

Grendell could return ot the bench in May 2026 and serve the remainder of his term, which ends in February 2027. Considering that Ohio law bars judges over 70 from seeking re-election, this would be the end of 72-year-old Grendell’s judicial career.

The court found Grendell violated judicial conduct rules when he jailed two teenagers for refusing to visit their father during a custody dispute back in 2020.

According to justices, Grendell “willfully turned a blind eye to legal safeguards” when he directed his constable to detain the boys on “trumped-up charges” for three days in juvenile detention.

Grendell had the boys, who were 13 and 15 years old back then, arrested, ordered a juvenile detention facility to hold them under the maximum restrictions and forbade them from talking to their mother until he had a court hearing.

The news source said that Grendell also threatened to “claw back” money raised through an online fundraiser created to help the mother pay legal fees.

Even though Grendell previously said that the reason why he did this was to serve the children’s best interests, Justice Patrick DeWine wrote in the opinion filed on Nov. 21 that “the means that he employed to accomplish that end evince both a conscious disregard for the law and a failure to impartially perform his duties.”

“He just was out of control. He could not accept being defied,” Chris Quinn, an editor at Cleveland.com, said on the Nov. 24 episode of Today in Ohio podcast.

During the podcast, Quinn also pointed out the double standard.

“If anybody else did something like what Grendel did, they would slam him. They drop 16 tons on him and say, how dare you?” Quinn said.