COLUMBUS, Ohio – To Democratic Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly, it’ a sign of the times that after decades of judicial elections came a career first this year – he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood.
He hadn’t sought the endorsements of the political arm of the abortion provider in his 14 years as a Cuyahoga County judge or his 2018 race for the high court. Despite Republican lawmakers perennially attacking abortion access in Ohio, all Americans then had a landmark Supreme Court case shielding their right of access to reproductive care. Republicans were thought to have the edge on the issue, regularly passing paper-tiger, anti-abortion legislation sure to be found unconstitutional in the court system.
That was then. Now, a new crop of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have rolled back that right and left states free to ban or restrict all abortions. Ohio, home of a short-lived six-week abortion ban, responded 16 months later by enshrining the right to abortion access into the state’s constitution by a 57%-43% vote, a shocker in a ruby red state.
What exactly the new amendment means for Ohio’s restrictive laws is a question likely to be decided by the next state Supreme Court. Donnelly’s is one of three seats on the ballot this fall. In an era of Republican political dominance, Donnelly thinks Republicans’ unpopular positions on abortion could be the ticket to winning an uphill race.
“You’re not hearing that right now, are you?” he said of Republican candidates on their endorsements from Ohio Right to Life, the most prominent anti-abortion lobby in the state. “Are you hearing them beat the drum saying ‘I’m the right to life candidate’? They saw what happened in the last three elections.”
Donnelly declined to say what he thinks the amendment means, but he identified himself as “pro-choice” in a roughly 60-minute interview with Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. His rival, Cincinnati-based Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan, declined an interview request for this article. Shanahan also did not sit for an interview with Cleveland.com’s editorial board, which endorses candidates.
The court is likely to hear several challenges to existing state law on abortion now that the amendment is in effect. It also could be staring down a parade of legal challenges related to another issue on the November ballot: redistricting reform.
Like other Democrats on the slate, Donnelly was eager to talk about boneless chicken wings. A Cincinnati man in 2016 ordered a plate of boneless wings, one of which turned out to have a 1.3-inch bone inside. The bone tore a hole in his esophagus, lodging there and causing massive discomfort and an eventual infection. He spent two months in the hospital, at times in a medically induced coma. He later sued the restaurant for damages.
The Ohio Supreme Court upheld a decision blocking the man from bringing his case before a jury. The Republican justices ruled he should have known to expect bones in his boneless wings. The term “boneless,” they ruled, was a “cooking style” and not a guarantee of a lack of bones in the wings. The Democratic justices blasted the ruling in a dissent, calling the ruling illogical and another “nail in the coffin” of the constitutional right to a jury trial.
The case attracted lampooning late night talk show host attention and went viral on social media. Despite the levity around the issue, Donnelly said it captured a bigger trend: Republicans siding with businesses and insurers, keeping a dangerous product on the market and protecting its sellers, and depriving people of a fundamental right to a trial.
“Think about changing the plaintiff in that case in your mind,” he said. “What if it was a toddler? What if it was a mom feeding their kids chicken tenders they buy at the store? Do you think they have an expectation that there would be bones in there?”
Before his election to the Supreme Court in 2018, Donnelly worked as a Cuyahoga prosecutor for five years, a private attorney, and then a common pleas judge for 14 years. He graduated from John Carroll University and Cleveland State University College of Law.
Besides case work, Donnelly for years has championed the effort to create a statewide sentencing database. In 2021, a white woman stole nearly $250,000 from the village of Chagrin Falls. A judge sentenced her to two years of probation. A Black woman who stole $40,000 from Maple Heights City Schools went before another judge a day later who sentenced her to 18 months in prison. The case highlighted (beyond racist patterns in the criminal justice system) the disparity in sentencing similar crimes between judges and the lack of a centralized database to track such punishments.
“Proportionality has gone out the window,” Donnelly said.
Lawmakers in 2022 nearly enacted a pilot program to create such a database but removed it from a sweeping criminal justice reform bill shortly before its passage. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Nathan Manning, a North Ridgeville Republican who steered the legislation, said Tuesday that lawmakers pulled the idea to assuage concerns of unspecified interested parties in what was already a complicated negotiation process.
The action, Donnelly said, was one in a line of failures from Republicans on judicial and criminal justice issues he offered. Despite losing all other statewide elections in 2018 and 2020, Democrats managed to win three Supreme Court seats those cycles. The races at the time were technically nonpartisan and didn’t list candidates’ party affiliations on the ballot. In 2021, Republicans changed the law to explicitly state Supreme Court candidates’ affiliation, a first in state history. In 2022, Republicans swept all three races by a wide margin.
While Donnelly rejected the notion that the court is just another political branch of government, he described the 2021 law change as a major turning point in the “politicization of the judiciary” executed solely for Republicans’ short-term gain.
Who’s Megan Shanahan?
Shanahan worked as a prosecutor before winning election as a municipal court judge in 2011 and common pleas judge in 2016. She received her bachelor’s degree from Kent State University before attending law school at the University of Cincinnati.
Some of her campaign ads describe her as a “tough on crime” prosecutor who led over 50 jury trials who puts hundreds of criminals in prison. Speaking to the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, she criticized Donnelly’s criminal sentencing database idea.
“It should be left to the province of the judges we elect on how they manage their cases and impose sentences,” she said. “One other topic that was touched on with that project: Who owns the data? Who manages the data? Who decides what data goes in, how it’s compiled and spit back out? Are we going to turn that over the Google to take care of? You can’t do justice by spreadsheet.”
To help voters pick a judge to vote for, five lawyers’ associations – representing Cleveland attorneys, women attorneys, defense lawyers, and prosecutors – reviewed candidate questionnaires and interviewed judges. Four of five deemed Donnelly “excellent” with the holdout finding him just “satisfactory.” Its website says Shanahan “refused to participate.”
She responded with a post on her campaign website noting the group’s chair resigned in April after the state GOP chairman called attention to her Facebook posts, one of which suggested she dreamt about the assassination of President Donald Trump.
Shanahan wrote that “ideology has poisoned the judicial ratings process” and the whole thing was a “partisan charade.” She called on the organization to initiate a “fairness audit” of itself.
The money
Thus far, Donnelly has raised more money than his opponent by a nose.
As of records available Tuesday, he has raised $753,000 over the past two years for the race. That includes $60,000 from the Ohio Democratic Party. Other big donors include select law firms around the state and a spread of labor unions.
Shanahan has raised $751,000, including $85,000 from the state Republican party. Big donors include select law firms, a political committee of car dealers, the Ohio Business Roundtable PAC, a truckers’ PAC, the Chamber of Commerce, an accountants’ PAC, and the Ohio Farm Bureau’s PAC.
Donnelly’s political committee has about $691,000 on hand to Shanahan’s $548,000.
Jake Zuckerman covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
