And the Losers Are . . .

Think of McGinty as the class clown — only he gets to impose life sentences. "He makes fun of clients. He makes fun of attorneys," says one lawyer. "He thinks he's a comedian."

Attorneys often find themselves acting the straight man in McGinty's routines. That's what happened to Patrick Leneghan when he showed up late for court one day, after getting a flat tire. McGinty scolded Leneghan, then demanded that he go to his car, remove the tire, and bring it back to the 21st floor of the Justice Center as proof. When Leneghan returned, McGinty snapped a photo of tire and attorney that he hung on his door as a souvenir of his own sadistic sense of humor.

Yet sometimes McGinty's colorful comments go over about as well as a Prius crashing into a UAW rally. In 2002, after a part-Cherokee woman drunkenly attacked two cops outside Browns Stadium, he managed to outrank Chief Wahoo as the Cleveland personality most offensive to Native Americans by sentencing the woman to write a 10-page essay on alcoholism among her ancestors.

"Do you know anything about genetic disposition to alcoholism?" McGinty asked her in court. "Have you ever been on an Indian reservation?" (Keep in mind these comments were coming from an Irishman with a drunk-driving conviction.)

"I'm not sure he thinks before he speaks sometimes," says one attorney. "Frankly, I don't think that he thought he was being racist."

An appeals court later threw out McGinty's bizarre sentence, but voters didn't seem to care. When he ran again in 2004, no one bothered to challenge him. That didn't stop the judge from talkin' trash, inviting anyone to take him on. "I'll pay the filing fee," he told a reporter.

Most Likely to Appear as an Exhibit in the Natural History Museum
Judith Kilbane Koch
There was a time when Judge Judith Kilbane Koch was considered a master jurist — fair, intelligent, compassionate. Then electricity was invented [cue cymbal crash].

At age 69, she's not exactly ready for the nursing home yet. But nearly every lawyer surveyed says it's way past time to take this old dog to the farm. "She's a nice lady," says one lawyer. "She's just getting a little dotty."

That became apparent back in 2004, when Koch was presiding over the trial of Biswanath Halder, who killed a man and injured two others during a shooting spree at Case. The judge was supposed to hear testimony from psychiatrists to determine whether Halder was mentally competent to stand trial. Instead, she decided such testimony was way overrated.

"We all know he's crazy," she said during a pretrial meeting, according to a letter sent to the judge by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason.

When one psychiatrist ruled Halder competent, Mason said in his letter, Koch demeaned the shrink by saying, "What kind of doctor is she, that she would find this guy competent?" Mason took his complaints to the Ohio Supreme Court, but the high court ruled Koch could stay on the case. "I don't even know where to start," says one lawyer, when asked about Koch. "Something's not right. It's disconnected."

Even more bizarre was Koch's behavior in the case of Traci Heath, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to paying $12,000 to a hit man (actually an undercover cop) to kill her husband, Joe. Sentencing guidelines required Koch to send Heath to prison for at least three years. But after her lawyers presented a report portraying her as a battered wife, driven to desperate measures by an abusive husband, Koch let Heath walk with probation.

When a shocked Joe Heath asked that he at least be repaid the $12,000 his wife spent planning his murder — he wanted to help pay his daughter's college tuition — Koch called him "selfish" and ordered the money returned to his wife.

She's "irrational," says one lawyer. "Both sides walk out of her courtroom with their hands in the air, like 'What just happened?'" Not surprisingly, an appeals court later overturned the judge's wacky sentence.

Yet despite her tendency to eat pages out of the phone book and refer to lawyers as "Dorothy? Dorothy? Is that you?," Koch is holding onto her job as tightly as a winning bingo ticket. When her six-year term expires next year, she'll be past the legal age to run again. But that didn't stop Koch from trying to pull a fast one. In 2006 she tried to switch seats, running for one whose term expires in 2012.

"Just as I'm getting good, they tell me I can't serve anymore," she told The Plain Dealer. Luckily for us all, Koch lost in the primary — which came as a relief to her bailiff, who was starting to tire of receiving his annual Christmas bonus in the form of two crinkled dollars and a pair of new socks.

Most Improved
Bridget McCafferty
In peewee football, winning the Most Improved award isn't something to celebrate at Baskin-Robbins. It probably means the coach was just happy little Timmy quit barfing during the huddle. That's kind of how lawyers feel about Judge Bridget McCafferty.