What will likely be the toughest-fought judicial race in Monroe County this year is underway in what is perhaps the least understood and recognized court — family court.
Four candidates, including two incumbents, are vying for two seats:
- The two incumbents, Republican Judge Dandrea Ruhlmann and Democratic Judge Maria Cubillos Reed, run a gamut of experience.
- Ruhlmann has two decades on the bench and is now seeking her third 10-year term.
- Reed was appointed in June and is the first Hispanic person on Monroe County’s Family Court bench.
- Another candidate is lawyer Kristine Demo-Vazquez, a Republican.
- Another candidate is local lawyer Maroun Ajaka, a Democrat.
“It’s really the most important court that there is,” Demo-Vazquez said. “You’re dealing with families and children.”
Decisions from family court “may affect the rest of their lives and maybe even generations,” she said of the families and youth who come before the court.
Family court has an extensive reach, with its jurisdiction including juvenile delinquency, allegations of child abuse, child custody and adoptions.
“It is being on the front lines in peoples’ lives,” Ruhlmann said of family court. “Quite frankly, you can have an impact.”
Dandrea Ruhlmann
Ruhlmann, 62, is seeking her third term as a Monroe County Family Court judge. If elected, she would under current law be able to serve eight years of her term since 70 is the mandatory retirement age.
Ruhlmann said the family court cases that she has handled now total more than 25,000.
“There’s really nothing I haven’t seen in family court during the 20 years, although every case is unique,” she said. “Oftentimes I think people give short shrift to the complexity of family court.”
The reach of family court can be surprising, Ruhlmann said, as evidenced by the occasional legal papers she has had to file for parental custodial abduction cases that crossed international borders.
Family court has also witnessed the offspring of the escalating gun violence locally, just as have the courts with a larger focus on criminal cases.
Ruhlmann has worked with county probation officials as part of the Gun Involved Violence Elimination, or GIVE, program to try to provide extra protections to individuals and the community with teens who have pending delinquency cases that include a weapons charge. In those cases, probation now conducts a search for illegal weapons before a youth is released home, Ruhlmann said.
Ruhlmann also is one of the judges who presides over Youth Part, which in recent years has handled felonies allegedly committed by teenagers. (Whether Youth Part gets the case initially can also depend on the age of the accused and whether the felony is classified as a violent crime.) With these cases, judges determine whether the case will stay in Youth Part, which is more like a standard criminal case, or be routed to Family Court.
The judges have legal criteria to follow for that decision.
Those cases, when the accusations involve ugly violence committed by youth, can be especially taxing. But, as many who practice in family court attest, often cases there are emotionally fraught, whether allegations of juvenile crime or decisions that children need to be removed from parents.
“If you’re going to be a family court judge it’s going to weigh heavily on your mind if you truly care, and I truly care,” Ruhlmann said. “It’s a calling and I feel like I have more to give.”
Ruhlmann said she thinks her experience should be the most significant consideration for voters, regardless of their party. “I have a full body of work and I often wish that that body of work would inform the voters rather than any political party,” she said.
Ruhlmann is married with two children. She is 1987 graduate of the Washington and Lee Law School.
Ruhlmann received the highest ratings from the Rochester Black Bar Association, a rating of “highly qualified” and “highly sensitive,” the latter rating based on the sensitivity toward marginalized people and communities. She also received a “well qualified” score, the second highest rating of four from the Greater Rochester Association for Women Attorneys, or GRAWA.
Ruhlmann is also running on the Conservative Party line. Her campaign website is reelectjudgeruhlmann.com.
Maria Cubillos Reed
Judge Cubillos Reed was appointed to a Monroe County Family Court opening this summer by Gov. Kathy Hochul and was approved by the New York State Senate.
Born in Colombia, Cubillos Reed, now 49, and her family migrated to Florida when she was 8. Undergraduate studies at the University of Rochester brought her to the area. Afterward, she moved to Boston, then decided on a career in law — her father was a lawyer in Colombia — and attended and graduated from Boston University’s law school in 2003.
While in Boston she interned with a Legal Aid Society office, working with battered women who spoke Spanish as their primary language. There, she said, she saw the need for intervention with fragile families as well as the need for individuals like her who spoke Spanish.
“Using my Spanish I knew would be something that would set me apart” with her ability to help a broader swath of people, Cubillos Reed said. And the work, she said, “solidified my need to get into law.”
Her Spanish language has also been beneficial on the bench, she said.
Before her judgeship, Cubillos Reed worked with different local practices, before opening her own law office in 2017. Her focus was family law and its expansive reach, from matrimonial cases to child abuse allegations to custody disputes.
Reed said she sees a need for family court to strengthen its outreach and connections to human service programs.
“There are a lot of services in Monroe County,” she said. “There seems to be a disconnect between the courts and the service providers. … I personally think that a judge needs to be more involved in the community because service providers come and go.”
Cubillos Reed also acknowledged the occasional pain of family court work.
“It’s terrible what some people are doing to their children,” she said. “It really is disheartening. The hardest part about family court I think is really trying to distance yourself from the day-to-day issues you see.”
But the successes, whether a troubled teen finding a positive path or a child able to safely return to a home, provide the balance for those who work regularly in the court.
“The most rewarding part is when you feel as if you’ve actually made a positive impact,” Cubillos Reed said.
Cubillos Reed is married with two children.
Reed also received the highest ratings from the RBBA — ratings of “highly qualified” and “highly sensitive.” She also received a “well qualified” score from GRAWA and is the only of the four candidates to also be “commended” by GRAWA, a separate rating given to candidates “who have demonstrated outstanding sensitivity to issues of women, minorities, and bias.”
Cubillos Reed is also on the Working Families line. Her campaign website is voteformaria.org.
Kristine Demo-Vazquez
Republican Kristine Demo-Vazquez, 50, has maintained her own law practice, focusing on family court and matrimonial issues, for 18 years.
“I always knew that I wanted to deal with family issues,” said Demo-Vazquez. “Even at a younger age I always felt the need to help people when they were struggling or to help people with things they were dealing with.
“I’ve represented thousands of mothers, fathers, children, grandparents,” she said. “I’ve also handled every type of case that can come before me as a family court judge.”
Demo-Vazquez also ran for Monroe County Family Court last year. Now, she said, she practically has been campaigning for two years for the judgeship.
“It’s really been an educational piece for me in trying to explain what family court does,” she said.
Demo-Vazquez was a teen mother who, as a young adult, moved to the Boston area when her son was 5. There she worked while striving toward and receiving her law degree from New England School of Law in 2001.
“I worked my way through college, through law school,” she said. “I had to work. It was tough. I had the mother’s guilt of ‘Am I doing the right thing?'”
But, she said, she decided that law — particularly family law — was the career she wanted. Now, her years of practice, as well as her personal life story, provide her with significant insights into the needs of those who appear before the court, she said. “It’s not only my professional life, but being a single mom, being a teen mom,” she said.
As a judge, Demo-Vazquez said, she would try to find ways to fairly expedite the family court process and to also ensure her decisions originated from a “trauma-informed” understanding. In recent years, professions ranging from health care to the criminal justice field have worked to recognize the impact of past and current trauma suffered by those with whom the systems intersect.
“That’s something that’s really important to me, being trauma-informed, recognizing that people have experienced or have trauma in their life,” Demo-Vazquez said.
“People don’t understand that the case itself can be traumatic, whether it’s for the child, whether it’s for the parents,” she said. “That doesn’t even count for the past traumas that people have dealt with.”
Demo-Vazquez received ratings last year from RBBA and GRAWA that carried over to this year.
Demo-Vazquez was rated “qualified” by GRAWA, its third highest rating, and was rated “qualified” with “some sensitivity” by the RBBA. Demo-Vazquez is also on the Conservative Party line.
Demo-Vazquez is married with five children.
Her website is kristine4familycourt.com.
Maroun Ajaka
Ajaka, 56, received his first law degree in Lebanon, before his emigration to the United States.
“I grew up in a war,” he said. He came to the United States in the late 1980s, and was able to secure a “protected status” immigration status. Later, after moving from New York City to Rochester, he secured green card status for his work as a chef at Basha.
Ajaka wanted to embark on a law career and found that he could advance to the Bar examination with 24 additional credits. While working, he attended the University at Buffalo School of Law and completed the necessary caseload.
Ajaka was admitted to the Bar in 2002, pleased that he did well on the exam after the trajectory of his life from Lebanon to western New York. “An American friend didn’t pass the Bar,” he remembered.
Ajaka last year ran for state Supreme Court in an eight-county district that is largely Republican. He said he was encouraged by his showing in Monroe County, and thinks his steady load of family court practice makes him a fit for the family court bench.
“I kind of grew up in family court when I started practicing,” he said. “I didn’t have any family here and family court became my home.”
Ajaka said his criminal defense work also allows him a broad perspective of the criminal justice system and those who fall into it. Family court judges can help reroute teens before they take a wrong turn, he said.
“My experience gives me the skill and knowledge to know, ‘What is wrong with this family?'” he said.
Ajaka is also part of the county’s “assigned counsel” panel, with lawyers who represent indigent defendants when the Public Defender’s Office cannot because of a conflict.
Ajaka is married with one child. He also is on the Working Families line.
Ajaka also was rated last year by GRAWA and the RBBA. Ajaka was rated “qualified” by GRAWA and “not qualified” with “some sensitivity” by RBBA. Ajaka said he reached out this year to RBBA in hopes to schedule another interview for the family court race but was unsuccessful.
His campaign website is marounajaka.com.
Note: Some of the information in this election preview article comes from past Democrat and Chronicle stories when some of the same candidates sought election.
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