Popular defence lawyer benched
By Sue Yanagisawa
Local News - Monday,
October 04, 2004
Kingston Whig Standard
One courtroom phone call changed Geoff Griffin’s life.
The Napanee lawyer was standing in a Kingston courtroom, about to pitch bail for
a client, when he was alerted to a phone call from the Attorney General’s
office.
It was for Griffin, and it was
urgent.
The call brought proceedings to a halt and turned his self-image inside out.
An Order in Council had just gone through, he was informed: He’d been
appointed a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice and from that moment on could
no longer represent his clients. The bail hearing was over.
Since that day – Aug. 25 – Griffin has been winding up his law practice and
looking forward and back at the same time.
Snugged in his small Napanee law office in a modest storefront next to the post
office, surrounded by the tools of the last 20 years of his career – law
books, plastic file boxes full of case files and precarious stacks of brightly
coloured file folders overflowing the wood cabinets behind his desk and heaped
onto the big wood table that dominates one half of the room – he admits,
“It’s just starting to sink in.”
Griffin applied for the much coveted Napanee-Picton judgeship that came open in
mid-July with the retirement of Mr. Justice J. Peter Coulson.
“I really did not expect this,” he said. “It was a complete and utter
surprise.”
People have asked him why he applied, if that’s true.
It’s like buying a lottery ticket, he answers: There has to be a chance of
winning or no one would play.
“You buy a ticket,” he said. “You don’t expect to win the trip to
Cancun.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds. “I want the job.”
Griffin says he just didn’t expect to be chosen.
“There were some very strong candidates, [including] some who are my
friends,” he adds.
As much as he’s looking forward to being a judge, he’s going to miss being a
lawyer.
“Oh yeah,” he says with feeling. “The first two days [after receiving the
news] it felt like a death had happened. You define yourself as a certain
person, and you’re not that [person] anymore.”
“For years, except for Christmas, I went to court – I went to courts,” he
corrects with a short chuckle, recalling his daily sprints between court houses
and communities.
Born in Beaconsfield, at the west end of Montreal Island, Griffin first arrived
in this area as a student at Queen’s University. At Queen’s, Griffin was
heavily involved in Queen’s Legal Aid. He articled in Toronto, but upon
learning of an opening for a lawyer in Napanee, he went for it, setting up shop
in 1984, the same year he was called to the bar.
“When I first got here I wanted to do some work with the area institutions,”
he says, adding “I was doing a litigation practice.”
Until about 10 years ago he did a fair amount of family law and for many years,
until the early 1990s, he was on the Official Guardians Panel, which looks after
the legal interests of children.
He’s also been a member of the Unified Family Court Committee and Ontario
Court of Justice Committee in Napanee sat on the board of directors of the
Lennox and Addington Addiction Services and the Lennox and Addington County
General Hospital Foundation until his appointment as a member of the Criminal
Lawyers Association.
His practice evolved so that in the end, he calculates, 90 per cent of it was
criminal. His case load, which had him apportioning his time between two court
levels and four communities on a steady basis, sometimes required judges,
justices of the peace, Crowns and court staff to do some serious case juggling
to accommodate him – a fact he appreciates keenly.
“These people went out of their way to help me, to accommodate me,” and he
says he feels “immense gratitude” to all of them.
Griffin doesn’t think the general public realizes “how hard working and
dedicated the court staffs are at all the courts” in this area.
He’s already cultivated an unusually good rapport with the judges he now
joins.
A man who says he’s habitually put in 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. days – and thrived on
it – has been forced to surrender his routine cold-turkey. “The first few
days was like you … lost a limb.”
Irrepressible by nature, he doesn’t dwell on the dark moments. He’s spent a
lot of time on the phone during his mandatory semi-confinement, receiving
congratulations and good wishes from neighbours, colleagues, peers, clients –
even the mother of a client who routinely presses fresh baked goods on him.
He was particularly impressed with a call he got from a former client doing time
for bank robbery in Kingston Penitentiary. He describes, with head-shaking
admiration, how the call came less than 24 hours after he’d received the news
himself and a day before it was made public. He wonders how the convicts knew so
fast.
“They probably know what we’re saying right now,” he quips.
Now 47, Griffin anticipates that his new job will give him more time with his
family. He’s married with four children, the eldest an almost-15-year-old son
and the youngest a three-year-old daughter. A large portion of one wall of his
office is covered with kid’s artwork, displayed at eye level next to his desk.
“I’ll be home for evening meals for a change,” he says, confessing that in
the years spent building his practice and subsequently maintaining it, his
“role as a father was compromised. So maybe I’ll be able to pick up some
lost time there.”
On the other hand, learning people’s stories is something that greatly engages
Griffin and he’s anticipating that side of his nature will sometimes be
frustrated as a judge.
He has a reputation for taking more than the average interest in his clients.
His work has given him an education, he says, through the discovery of what’s
interesting, amusing and sometimes disheartening in the ways people live.
“I’ll miss the wide range of the human condition that I got to coax out of
people every day.”
Griffin has a reputation for thinking quickly on his feet, as well as for his
playfulness and his puckish asides.
Several months ago a client nearly derailed a good sentencing deal on multiple
charges by trying to suggest to the judge that the gram of speed police had
discovered was actually Epsom Salts.
Griffin moved in to stop him mid-sentence and, after conferring quickly and
quietly with the man in the prisoner’s dock, he announced that his client
wanted to amend his claim by conceding that his Epsom Salts could have been
contaminated with methamphetamine.
On another occasion when the lawyers’ seating had run out in a packed Superior
Court of Justice courtroom, Griffin slipped the latch on the prisoner’s dock
and sat down. He was chatting and still in the box when Justice Helen MacLeod
came through the door from the hall and he immediately stood up.
Casting a no-nonsense look around the room, she caught sight of him there and
immediately laughed. She was still grinning as she took her seat and told him
with mock-seriousness: “You look good in there, Mr. Griffin.”
“I’ll certainly miss the playfulness I was able to get away with,” Griffin
says, noting that some of that conduct would be “wholly inappropriate for a
judge.”
He’s also nervous about “trying to get the right balance between the
rehabilitation and the punishment,” a fear his predecessor believes is
unfounded. Griffin says “my job, up to now, has been to take the sting out.”
Griffin says he’s had good role models in Justice Coulson and retired Justice
P.E.D. Baker.
What he aspires to, he says, is to be, “if there is such a thing, a synthesis
of Judge Baker and Judge Coulson.”
He’d like to combine Baker’s humour and efficiency on the bench with the
plain spoken gems of wisdom and guidance Coulson delivers to the accused along
with his verdict or sentence.
“I can’t see myself becoming overly legalistic,” Griffin says.
“Procedure’s important, but I don’t want it to become too important.”
Griffin is expected to sit with another judge for on-the-job training, called
shadowing. He’s scheduled to be sworn in today.
“I think the immediate placement of myself here [in Napanee] will be
problematic,” just because of the number of cases he was handling that will
still be on the lists.
He anticipates a meeting in the near future with other judges to work out the
wrinkles. In the meantime, he could switch places with Justice Stephen Hunter
for a while. “I could certainly go to Belleville [to sit] or Bancroft,” he
says.
He’s hoping to be presiding in his own courts in Napanee and Picton around
February.
“I have clients I’ve worked for for years,” he says. “On a contested
matter, obviously I would have a great deal of difficulty [hearing the case].”
On uncontested matters, he believes he could probably hear cases involving
former clients, if there are no objections from the lawyers involved. He’s
currently studying all the case law he can find.
And as time passes the problem will become less acute.
“This is not something new to this area,” he observes, noting that his
predecessor, Justice Coulson, was Crown attorney in the very court he stepped
into as a judge and Mr. Justice Megginson and retired Justice P.E.D. Baker were
both Kingston defence lawyers before being appointed judges here.