Nine Bucks lawyers seek four county judge seats
Scholars have written volumes on the grueling process federal judge nominees face getting onto the bench. An appointee often endures a prolonged, politically charged, psychically draining confirmation saga before finally hearing cases — if he or she is confirmed.
Pennsylvania’s state and local judicial aspirants undergo a sometimes equally arduous, but very different, path to office. Because the commonwealth is one of 29 states where trial court candidates get voted in by residents, the hopefuls spend much of a year asking voters for the job.
Bucks County Court of Common Pleas candidate Chelsey Crocker Jackman already keeps a demanding schedule at the Langhorne-based Begley, Carlin & Mandio law firm specializing in land use and local government. As early as late March, the Holland native who now lives in Buckingham Township was riding around after work to at least six campaign events every week, taxing the time she has enjoyed devoting to coaching her elementary school-age daughters’ soccer and cheerleading.
The upbeat Jackman doesn’t bewail the sacrifices she has made to run, though she credited her dedicated family as the top tier of her campaign team.
“My family has been unbelievably supportive and have been sort of pseudo-campaign managers,” she said, noting that her father built her candidate website. “My coaching duties at home have taken a back seat. All of the cooking and laundry has seemingly been relegated to my husband who has very much stepped up and been very supportive.”
Republicans face, and Democrats avoid, a primary fight
An alumna of Pennsylvania State University and Widener University School of Law, Jackman is one of five Republican candidates seeking four Common Pleas spots now opened by retiring judges. The others running are the Eastburn and Gray firm President Grace Deon, Ottsville-based Magisterial District Judge Gary Gambardella, Monahan Law Office sole practitioner Colin Monahan, and managing Pizzo Rudolph attorney Joe Pizzo.
This fall, the top four vote-getters of the five will face four Democrats: Bucks County Register of Wills Linda Bobrin, real-estate lawyer and firm principal Dawn Marie Burke, Bucks County Solicitor Amy Fitzpatrick, and Curtin Heefner family-law partner Tiffany Thomas-Smith.
That is, the top four Republicans will likely face the four Democrats. Most of the candidates on both sides have a chance at earning the opposite party’s nod in next Tuesday’s primary; all but Monahan and Thomas-Smith circulated petitions to collect signatures from both Republicans and Democrats so they’ll appear on both primary ballots in hope of getting nominated to run on both general-election slates. This process, called cross-filing, is intended to water down partisanship in judicial races, though it usually doesn’t pan out — voters tend to nominate members of their own party.
Despite Republicans going into a primary battle, the GOP candidates held off on negative messaging… for a while. The Bucks County Republican Committee (BCRC) weighed in in March, endorsing Jackman, Deon, Monahan, and Pizzo, though its announcement didn’t reprove — or even mention — Gambardella. Each Republican hopeful, at least at first, spoke graciously about the four others, seeing attacks on fellow attorneys by aspiring judges as unbecoming. Yet, contentions surrounding this campaign are heating as quickly as the springtime Delaware Valley air.
Jackman has largely avoided the intra-party fray so far. She served as a prosecutor in Bucks County’s special victims unit for eleven years before going into private practice, finishing her stint as chief of the human trafficking division. She believes such experience positions her to capably oversee child-welfare trials and other tough cases. Warrington Township Police and the Citizens Crime Commission have given her awards for her work.
“To help a child or be the voice for a victim, I believe, is a calling,” she said. “And I have a calling to serve Bucks County and I can’t think of a better way than to preside over cases that I’m uniquely equipped to handle given my background in child welfare and child abuse. I think the two most important decisions that a judge can make are to take away somebody’s liberty and to take away somebody’s children, and I have the experience to get those decisions right.”
Deon is likewise enjoying a calm path to the Republican nomination. A former Bucks County Bar Association (BCBA) president, she received easily the highest ratings among candidates from bar members in an April recommendation vote. (Ratings for all candidates can be seen on the BCBA website.) The first woman to become chief executive of a southeastern Pennsylvania regional law firm, she also holds leadership roles in the Bucks County Foundation and the National Alliance for Mental Illness.
“Being a judge is always the way I wanted to end my legal career because it basically marries my love of law with my civil community dedication,” she told The Independence.
Between Pizzo, Monahan, and relative party outsider Gambardella, on the other hand, anything could happen on election night.
Gambardella, despite lacking Republican Party top-brass support, is a longstanding community fixture, a thirteen-year district-court incumbent, and a 21-year veteran of the Bucks District Attorney’s Office. As a prosecutor, he handled over 100 jury trials including some death-penalty-qualified homicides.
He undertook the first narcotics-forfeiture jury trial in Pennsylvania history, eventually depriving a drug dealer of his 130-acre horse farm and 27 race horses. He took his tough-on-crime persona with him to the local bench.
“I think I’m probably considered the most law-and-order of our eighteen [Bucks] district judges,” he said.
There’s more to his record than stringency, though. The son of an Air Force serviceman, he founded a program to ensure Bucks County military families receive proficient legal counsel. Later this month, he will chaperone a Tohickon Middle School class to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in Arlington, Virginia and tour the U.S. Supreme Court, one of numerous school field trips he has guided.
While Gambardella and some of the others run on their hometown familiarity, Monahan is campaigning on a varied, well-traveled legal career, having won cases in federal courts and local jurisdictions across eastern Pennsylvania. A defense attorney specializing in civil rights, personal injury, and criminal law, he also works on election-integrity issues, sometimes representing clients at Bucks County’s Board of Elections.
“I have not been stuck in the same courthouse the entire time, so I have a really good view of how different judges do things differently and how some things in some places are maybe a little more efficient,” he said. “I’ve obviously seen the other end where they don’t run as well as they do in Bucks County in certain circumstances.”
Monahan’s journey to legal practice wasn’t initially smooth; his childhood was far from privileged. His father left when he was a preteen and his mother suffered from cancer and endured constant treatment for it. He witnessed loved ones struggle with mental-health problems and addiction.
“Not everything was always peachy-creamy for me growing up; I tell people I was an expert in family law from the time I was fourteen,” he recalled. “I know what it’s like to ‘not have,’ I know what it’s like to have tough times. And certainly people’ve had life way harder than I’ve had, I’m sure, and it’s nothing against people who haven’t had difficulties in life, but I think it just gives me a wide perspective, a wide view of the world.”
Some local critics brought his earlier economic struggles into online discussion about the judicial races, suggesting he should have disclosed a credit card debt judgement made against him in Northampton County. The creditor eventually received a favorable judgement of less than $300. A few days after related anti-Monahan Facebook posts appeared, Gambardella posted a campaign message assuring the public he himself never received any adverse civil judgments.
“The bottom line: If you hear talk about potential problems involving a judicial candidate, rest assured — that candidate is not Judge Gambardella,” his campaign team wrote.
Gambardella says he made the post to clarify that he was not subject to any civil judgments, hearing some people were making vague accusations at the time.
Monahan is unfazed by the matter.
“Like every other human being on the planet, I’ve had good times and bad ones,” he said, adding he doesn’t minimize the importance of meeting small debts. “It’s regrettable that we’re talking about a $200 dispute.”
In recent days, Gambardella has become more direct in his salvos against other candidates, blasting Monahan and his running mate, Joe Pizzo, a solicitor for Bensalem and Northampton Townships.
A litigator who also practices zoning, real-estate, and election law, Pizzo also served as a board member of the Bucks County Housing Development Corporation and of the Bucks County Community College Foundation. Republican Governor and fellow Bucks Countian Mark Schweiker appointed him to an advisory commission for the 7th Judicial District to identify candidates for county judge appointments.
“Service is something that has always been a part of my DNA,” Pizzo said. “It was passed on to me from my parents and hopefully I’ve done a good job of instilling the same ethic for giving back to the community in my children.”
Forum remarks disputed
Gambardella supporter and Right for Bucks founder Andy Meehan, in the group’s latest newsletter, criticized Pizzo’s erstwhile service as BCRC secretary, condemning Pizzo and other party leaders’ administration of an internal party election in 2022. Meehan has supported a related ongoing lawsuit filed by the GOP leaders’ Republican opponents.
Right for Bucks’s newsletter also discussed a moment during a BCBA forum during which Pizzo was asked about a Supreme Court justice who inspired him. Pizzo began his reply with a story about Harry Blackmun, the justice who authored the recently overturned 1973 decision legalizing abortion nationwide.
“[A] question to Joe Pizzo was, ‘Which US Supreme Court Justice do you most admire?’ Pizzo’s answer was ‘Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe v. Wade – the case that legalized abortion.’”
Meehan provided a video clip of the Q&A (which the BCBA no longer posts online for public viewing). Both the questioner and Pizzo used different words than those in Right for Bucks’s quotes.
“Mr. Pizzo, same question,” the moderator said. “[A] specific justice on the court, either living or deceased, who inspired you?”
“I forget when I read it — I know it was after law school — but I read [Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s] The Brethren,” Pizzo began. “For those of you who ever have the opportunity to read it: If you haven’t, please do. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the early days of the [Warren] Berger court. And one of the — I don’t know if fascinating’s the right word — but Justice Blackmun was the author of two decisions that came down at roughly the same time: Roe v. Wade and Flood v. Kuhn,” the latter addressing free agency in major-league baseball.
Pizzo went on to marvel at a moment when Blackmun expatiated upon baseball history, holding up the issuance of the Flood ruling and, in turn, the Roe decision. He didn’t clearly compliment the justice in his remarks and concluded them with a call for judges of different perspectives to work together, extolling the friendship between the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and his late leftist colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“The fact that Mr. Meehan and others associated with him have opted to take the fact that I uttered the name Harry Blackmun in what I would estimate was probably a two-minute answer to a question and that they cherry-picked those few seconds, I think that speaks for itself,” Pizzo said.
Meehan still concludes Pizzo meant to venerate Blackmun.
“If you just watch the video, you can see what he says and it seems to me like it’s — whether or not that’s the exact words, I don’t know — but it seems to me that’s what he’s saying,” Meehan said. “I don’t think anybody that watches that video is going to take umbrage with what’s in our newsletter, that [what] he’s asked about is: Who’s inspired him as a Supreme Court justice and it’s Blackmun.”
In a recent speech, Gambardella echoed Meehan, averring Pizzo “pick[ed] the most activist judge that we’ve had in the 20th century.” Speaking with The Independence, he redoubled his assessment.
“For somebody to point to Harry Blackmun as someone who’s inspired him, to me, is promotion of judicial activism,” he said.
In a written dialogue with the League of Women Voters, Gambardella also rebuked Monahan for a comment the latter made during the BCBA event.
“At a recent forum, one candidate said he wants LESS access to courts,” Gambardella wrote, referring to Monahan (capitals in the original). “Such a view disqualifies him from judicial service.”
Because the association no longer posts the video, there was no way to immediately verify whether Monahan said such a thing. But an article in The Bucks County Herald quotes Monahan on the matter of access very differently.
“In particular, Colin Monahan, sole practitioner with Monahan Law Office in Allentown, shared after the [BCBA] event in a text message that he would like to ‘see the law library even more accessible to the public’ and would update the website for more easily accessible forms and an ‘explanation of the rules’ for what they will experience once in the courtroom,” wrote The Herald’s Jeannine Fielding.
Monahan said Gambardella — and Meehan, in his newsletter — misrepresented an answer the lawyer gave at the bar forum. The candidate said he facetiously hoped fewer people would commit crimes and thereby reduce the number of people who must interact with courts.
Gambardella stood by his interpretation, adding, “I did not quite understand that, because obviously we want people to have access to the courts.”
Monahan said it would be improper if he reprehended another judicial candidate, even one castigating him.
“It’s up for the voters to decide if candidates or supporters of candidates are telling the truth or not; that’s not my thing,” he said. “But I think what people are doing and saying sort of speaks for itself.”
While hostilities between Republicans boil, the four Democrats are coasting toward nomination.
Among all candidates, only Bobrin does not currently practice law, having served as county register for five years and having previously held the Newtown Township Supervisors vice chairmanship. All three other Democrats also have civic experience: Thomas-Smith on the Board of the United Way, Fitzpatrick at the left-wing Public Rights Project, and Burke at the Bucks County Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program. None answered a request for comment.
After the primary, life will get more strenuous for them and the four Republicans they’ll oppose. When that’s over, Jackman said she looks forward to some levity after juggling both law-firm work and campaign duties.
“My children have asked for a dog every day of their lives since they could talk,” she said. “And I have said to them that, at the end of this process — because I won’t have night meetings anymore with my job and I will finally have the bandwidth to care for a dog the way a dog should be cared for — if I win, our family will grow by four paws.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect that Colin Monahan’s mother, not his sister, had cancer.
Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.
