Former Allen County judge Richard Warren, seen here in 2016, will be retiring from his role as a magistrate for Lima Municipal Court.
File Photo | The Lima News
LIMA — At 83 years old, former Allen County Common Pleas Court Judge Richard Warren has decided to retire from working as Lima Municipal Court chief magistrate, but he’s not slowing down.
Warren was a common pleas judge in Allen County for 24 years until his retirement in 2012, and he said afterward he promised the municipal court two years of work. Those two years turned into 12 years.
“I thought it was time. There aren’t too many people that work at 83,” Warren said about his recent retirement announcement. “I reached the point where my age, the number of years I’ve been doing it, my health is still good, and my wife’s health is still pretty good, and we thought we better take advantage of our health while we still can.”
While he will retire as a magistrate on Sept. 5, he said he’s been approached with other job offers in a similar field where he could work as much as he wanted, but he hasn’t decided if he will take a new position yet. This just proves Warren agrees with the motto, “If you love your job you don’t have to work a day in your life.”
“I grew up on a farm, and we did a lot of work, and I thought I had it pretty bad, and I never realized how lucky I was, and I’ve used that over the years,” Warren said. “You see these young kids have nothing, nobody gives them any direction, and you think in your own life, ‘What if I had been in a situation like that?’ You try to take that into consideration and maybe give opportunities and chances.”
He thought the best part about working in the courts was the relationships and friendships he made, the different challenges he faced daily and the differences he made in people’s lives.
“Sometimes I’ll go to a gas station or something and somebody will come up to me and shake my hand and say ‘I’m so and so, do you remember me?’ and sometimes I wanna duck, and they’ll say ‘I’m so and so, you sent me to prison. I was a smartass kid and you saved my life and I’d like you to meet my wife and daughter.’ I get goose pimples telling you about it, but those are the things that made it worthwhile,” Warren said.
Warren oversaw over 300 jury trials in his career and dealt with high-profile cases like a Leland Avenue arson and murder; a Eureka Street shooting that killed a baby and where Warren gave the suspects the death penalty; and an anesthesiologist who killed his wife.
Other notable accomplishments in his career included being named Ohio Assistant County Prosecutor of the Year in 1984 — as he was an assistant Lima city prosecutor in 1969 and an assistant Allen County prosecutor from 1969 to 1988 — and being the recipient of the Ohio State Bar Foundation’s Ritter Award for Outstanding Ohio Attorney/Judge in 2010.
As a Lima prosecutor, he did civil work, including representing the Lima school district in negotiations and preparing bond levies for them.
“If you missed a comma, it’s off the ballot, and you’ve lost millions of dollars. I did that for a while, and eventually, it became so complicated I said this is not for us to do. And today all the schools have their own private attorneys,” Warren said.
As a judge, he helped co-found the WORTH Center with other local common pleas court judges in 1992 to try to help the war on drugs. He said it was one of the first community-based correction facilities of its kind in the state at the time with another one in Montgomery County.
“There was a philosophy that everyone ought to go to prison, and the judges felt that wasn’t right and we should be doing what we can for treatment and at the same time teach them responsibility,” Warren said. “That’s the one reason why the WORTH Center was started, to house low-level felonies, most generally those that were involved in drugs, to get them off drugs, get them employment, get them back into the community rather than just warehousing them where nothing got done.”
Warren graduated from Cory-Rawson High School in 1959 and was co-captain of the football and basketball teams. He played football in college at Heidelberg University in Tiffin and thought he wanted to be a coach but switched it up junior year and graduated with a degree in history and speech in 1963. He then graduated from the Ohio Northern University College of Law in 1966.
He said he kept his career local, rather than taking opportunities that arose in public relations at Ford and John Deere, because he was involved in private practice at the Romey and Warren law office and knew many locals.
In his free time, Warren likes to play piano, work out at the YMCA, do yard work and travel.
Warren said two part-time magistrates are still in Lima Municipal Court and will likely take on more responsibilities to fill his role when he leaves.
Reach Charlotte Caldwell at 567-242-0451.
