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Preparing for life after bench

First female judge in county retires after 24 years

Trumbull County Family Court Judge Pamela Rintala was the first woman judge in Trumbull County. She was elected in 1994, and is retiring at the end of this year. Rintala will continue as a visiting judge on the family court circuit. The court's dog, Trinity, has been a main stay in the court, and acts as a calming factor for children.

WARREN — It was more than 70 years after the first woman judge was elected in Ohio that Trumbull County elected its first woman judge, Pamela Rintala, in 1994. After 24 years, Rintala will retire from the Trumbull County Family Court bench at the end of the month .

Rintala, 68, still is surrounded by binders and stacks of paperwork on her bench and desk, one last case before she takes leave of the position to serve as a visiting judge in other family courts. With a 67-page decision — her record — nearly complete, she is set to end her tenure of presiding over divorces, matters of child custody, cases of abuse or neglect and juvenile offender cases, among other responsibilities.

During her tenure, Rintala said she has seen new trends develop in marriage and divorce, saw the effects of drug and alcohol dependency on families, enforced new laws, struggled with funding, created new programs, won awards and helped guide more children into treatment and diversion programs, in lieu of institutionalization — one of the main reasons she chose to study law and pursue a judgeship.

Rintala had just switched her major from math to sociology at Kent State University, after unarmed college students were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard in 1970, when she took a trip that made her want to be a judge.

“I went on a tour of the Mansfield prison, where the movie, “The Shawshank Redemption,” was filmed. I was like 20 and there were these teens staying in the huge building with military-style bunks and footlockers. On one end, there was a guard post and on the other end, all out in the open, there were bathrooms and toilets,” Rintala said.

The tour was horrifying, she said.

“And I’ll never forget this, it was one of those things just seared into my memory, one of the kids came up to me. He said, ‘Now that you have seen this, how can you leave and not do anything about it?’ I vowed to become a juvenile judge and never send kids to places like this,” Rintala said.

After graduating, Rintala worked as a social worker and then a detention counselor in the Trumbull County Juvenile Justice Center. After she was promoted to juvenile probation officer, Rintala began taking evening classes at the University of Akron’s law school, passing the bar in 1980. She worked and paid her tuition out of her paycheck, requiring no student loans for the bills, which amounted to a couple of hundred dollars a semester.

“I don’t know who can do that now. My parents weren’t in the position to help me, my mom was a nurse and my dad worked for the phone company. With five kids,” Rintala said.

EARLY CHALLENGES

She joined only a handful of other women attorneys practicing in the county.

Both as judge and attorney, Rintala faced frequent remarks about her appearance and sexuality, men often dismissing her brains for her body.

“They told me, ‘next time you show up to court, wear a bikini.’ Or, ‘I hope there is a bikini under that robe.’ I understand the Me Too movement,” Rintala said. “This one guys said to me, ‘Let’s have a baby. With my brains and your body and looks, we could have the first female president of the United States.”

Even her college guidance counselor told her not to worry too hard about her class choices.

” ‘You look like the type to get married and drop out,’ he said,” Rintala said.

After some time as an attorney working in the court, serving as a “court referee,” Rintala saw some things she thought she could help change and decided to run as an independent.

She knocked on doors while towing her son, 4 at the time, around in a wagon. She thinks being a mother helped, and she never ran in an opposed race again after knocking out the sitting judge in a fairly comfortable win, though the local Democratic Party and other organizations didn’t bet on her.

“Maybe it was time for a woman,” Rintala said.

While some young offenders still end up in facilities, and others spend time away from home in the Trumbull County facility, the system strives to provide more classes and therapy to the kids, is refocused on education and reserves time away from home for kids that have committed more violent crimes. The largescale instructions have been shut down or dramatically changed.

“They used to lock them up for running away or other minor things. But the philosophy really started to change. The research showed that brain development is not complete yet at these young ages,” Rintala said. “At that age, they aren’t fully developed enough, sometimes, to understand what they are doing isn’t right.”

Some kids come from families that haven’t been effective at teaching their children the right path, but with counseling and programs that aim to help teens find a calling and a job, to contribute to society, the court can be helpful, Rintala said.

GENERATIONS LATER

But, after being in the system for long enough, Rintala has also seen whole generations come before her in one way or another. Some of the kids she worked with as a probation officer are now grandparents, she said.

“Sometimes you see some of the same type behaviors or issues come through,” Rintala said.

While serving as judge, Rintala created the Solace Center, a supervised visitation center, and the Family Dependency Treatment Court, a specialized docket handling cases of parents who are in danger of losing their children due to addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Over her years, Rintala said she has accumulated some advice for parents going through divorce.

“Don’t put the kids in the middle of it. Listen to the kids. Don’t turn them into messengers. Think about fairness and what is good for them,” Rintala said.

And over time, Rintala has seen different trends in the way couples split.

“It used to be, about 90 percent of couples that filed for divorce, the woman filed. Now, it is about 50/50,” Rintala said.

Also, more dads get more custody rights, and now spousal support can go to a man too, not just to a woman.

“It is more complicated now. We consider a lot more factors,” Rintala said.

And, a lot of the marriages she sees dissolving had shorter time spans than most of the earlier divorces she was involved in, Rintala said.

“Some are less than a year,” Rintala said.

A 1968 graduate of Western Reserve High School, Rintala is married to attorney David Boker, the two have a son, Michael, 27. In addition to serving as a visiting judge, Rintala plans to offer her expertise in family law to couples going through divorce in the form of early intervention mediation — in an effort to help couples solve their divorce disputes before spending a lot of money on attorney fees and unpleasantries, she said.

Warren criminal defense attorney Samuel Bluedorn was elected to replace Rintala, who declined to run again.

Sitting family court Judge Sandra Stabile Harwood will take over Rintala’s administrative judge duties, unless she decides to give those responsibilities to Bluedorn.

rfox@tribtoday.com

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