Five candidates are on the ballot. But for most voters, the deeper question is not just who is running—it is why it remains so hard to know what these judges have actually done.

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews

In Montgomery County, one of the most powerful offices on the ballot is also one of the least transparent.

Circuit Court judges do not merely oversee family disputes. They decide felony cases, major civil cases, juvenile matters, guardianships, protective-order disputes, and appeals from lower tribunals. They can separate parents from children, authorize forced evaluations, define credibility, shape liberty, and stamp ordinary citizens with labels that can follow them for years. Yet when election season arrives, voters are given remarkably little usable information about the people asking for 15-year terms on the bench.

That is the real story in the 2026 Montgomery County Circuit Court race.

Yes, there are names. Yes, there are résumés. Yes, there are carefully polished biographies and campaign slogans. But what voters often cannot see is the part that matters most: how these judges wield power in real courtrooms, how often their decisions are reversed, how many litigants leave court claiming they were steamrolled or mischaracterized, how many complaints were filed but never became public, and how often the system itself inflicted harm that no campaign brochure will ever mention.

For years, MDBayNews has heard from parents and litigants who describe Montgomery County family court as a place of exhaustion, coercion, and procedural trauma. Some say they lost access to their children. Some describe being ordered into mental-health or psychological evaluations they believed were unwarranted. Others say the court treated the emotional damage caused by prolonged litigation as proof that they themselves were unstable. Those accounts are deeply serious, and they should not be brushed aside simply because they are uncomfortable for the legal establishment. Some of these stories involve judges on this slate up for election. At the same time, these stories are hard for outsiders to systematically verify because court records are fragmented, many sensitive proceedings are sealed or hard to access, and the judiciary is not organized for voter-facing accountability. That opacity is not a minor design flaw. It is the central democratic problem.

Who is running

There are five candidates for Montgomery County Circuit Court in 2026. Four are sitting judges running together as the “Elect Sitting Judges” slate: Sharon V. Burrell, Victor M. Del Pino, James J. Dietrich, and Catherine H. McQueen. The fifth is longtime challenger Marylin Pierre, a Montgomery County attorney making yet another run for the bench. The primary is June 23, 2026, and the general election is November 3, 2026. Under Maryland’s Constitution, judges appointed by the governor must stand for election for a full 15-year term at the next general election after appointment.

On paper, the contest looks simple. Four appointees. One challenger. Four insiders arguing that they were rigorously vetted. One outsider arguing that voters deserve a real choice. But once you look closer, the race becomes a case study in how judicial elections can appear open while remaining structurally closed.

Sharon V. Burrell

Burrell is the longest-serving of the group. She has served on the Montgomery County Circuit Court since 2008, after appointment by then-Gov. Martin O’Malley. Public biographical material notes that she became the first Black female judge on the Montgomery County Circuit Court. Before taking the bench, she spent 21 years as an attorney for Montgomery County government. Her public profile is that of an experienced institutional judge who has handled a wide range of dockets over many years.

That is the official version. What voters do not receive is anything like a plain-English report card on her body of work. There is no public dashboard showing how often litigants appealed her rulings, how many were affirmed, how many were reversed, or how her courtroom compares to others in treatment of self-represented parties. Voters are told she is experienced. They are not told, in any systematic way, what that experience has produced.

Victor M. Del Pino

Del Pino was appointed to the Circuit Court by Gov. Wes Moore in January 2026 after serving as a District Court judge in Montgomery County since 2019. Before joining the bench, he practiced law privately for nine years, focusing on criminal, personal injury, and immigration matters, and before that served as a prosecutor in Montgomery County, including as chief of the gang prosecution unit. Moore’s office noted that he was the first Latino to hold that gang-unit chief role in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Again, voters get a credentialed story: prosecutor, judge, professor, fluent Spanish speaker, local roots. What they do not get is a serious public examination of judicial temperament, decision patterns, or courtroom impact. In a county where judges can profoundly affect family integrity, liberty interests, and reputations, biography routinely substitutes for accountability.

James J. Dietrich

Dietrich was appointed by Gov. Moore in September 2025. According to the governor’s office and the Maryland State Archives, he served as a prosecutor in Montgomery County and previously in Howard County, and he also teaches as an adjunct professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. Public reporting has noted his role in the prosecution of the Alex Ye threat-of-mass-violence case.

As with Del Pino, the public narrative is clean and conventional: seasoned prosecutor, educator, serious lawyer, safe pair of hands. Maybe that is true. Maybe it is not. The point is that ordinary voters are not given much beyond curated résumé items and a few forum quotes. The county’s judicial elections ask the public to ratify a power structure while revealing very little about how that structure behaves when no cameras are present.

Catherine H. McQueen

McQueen was appointed in October 2024. According to the governor’s office, she practiced law for more than two decades, primarily in family law, and had extensive work in guardianship and conservatorship matters before taking the bench. Public coverage indicates that since joining the court, she has been ruling on family law cases.

That family-law background matters. Family court is where some of the deepest complaints about Montgomery County’s judiciary arise. Parents describe feeling outgunned, unheard, pathologized, or reduced to caricatures. Even when some of those claims are disputed or fact-specific, the public should still be able to evaluate the judges overseeing such cases in more than a superficial way. Yet the system offers little structured means for voters to do that.

Imagine how many parents she has stripped away from their children. You can’t, because the system is not transparent enough to tell you so.

Marylin Pierre

Pierre is the challenger. She is a Haitian immigrant, Howard University School of Law graduate, U.S. Army Reserve veteran, and longtime Montgomery County attorney. Her campaign argues for an “independent voice” against “political insiders and backroom politics,” and she has made criticism of the judicial nominating process central to her candidacy. Her site emphasizes equitable access to justice, dignity and respect in court, and her prior service helping resolve domestic-relations cases in Montgomery County. Public coverage shows she has repeatedly argued that voters should choose judges themselves rather than simply accepting insiders selected through an opaque process.

That outsider message is not frivolous. It speaks directly to the core frustration many voters feel: too often, they are not really choosing among well-scrutinized candidates. They are being asked to confirm a preassembled slate blessed by the political and legal establishment.

The slate problem

The four incumbent judges are not running as isolated public servants asking to be judged individually. They are running as a slate. Their joint site literally tells voters to “Vote for the Sitting Judges,” bundling the candidates together rather than inviting close comparison.

That matters.

A slate is efficient politics. It is also a protective wall. It discourages individualized scrutiny, reduces the chance that one candidate’s weak points receive sustained attention, and signals institutional solidarity: do not separate us, do not inspect us one by one, trust the package. For an office that is supposed to embody independent judgment, the optics are awkward at best.

Defenders of the slate will say that judicial candidates are nonpartisan, that grouped campaigning is normal, and that sitting judges deserve deference because they have already been vetted by the commission and governor. That is exactly the mindset critics object to. The establishment keeps saying, in effect: we already reviewed them, so you do not need to ask too many questions.

But voters should ask questions. A lot of them.

The secrecy problem

The biggest obstacle in this race is not lack of campaign messaging. It is lack of meaningful public data.

Maryland’s Commission on Judicial Disabilities can investigate complaints against judges and can impose or recommend sanctions in some cases. But complaints, investigations, files, reports, and proceedings are generally confidential, and the judiciary’s own complaint form says so plainly. The confidentiality rules mean the public cannot assume that absence of public discipline equals absence of serious complaints. In many cases, the public simply does not know what was alleged, what was reviewed, or how it was resolved.

To be fair, confidentiality has a rationale. Judges should not have their reputations destroyed by every meritless accusation. A complaint process must screen out frivolous attacks from angry litigants. That is true.

But the current balance heavily favors institutional protection over public confidence.

When the judiciary says, in effect, “trust us, we have a process,” while also shielding most of that process from view, it should not be surprised when distrust grows. In a county where court decisions can decide who sees a child, who gets labeled unstable, who gets saddled with a protective-order stigma, and who gets dragged through years of litigation, public opacity becomes more than administrative housekeeping. It becomes a democratic liability.

The hidden record problem

Judges are not legislators. They do not cast neat, easily searchable votes. Their work is dispersed across thousands of cases, many with incomplete public visibility. That makes judicial elections uniquely difficult.

A voter can review a lawmaker’s bill sponsorships, committee votes, donor lists, and public statements. A voter assessing a circuit court judge has a far harder task. Many trial-level decisions are never widely reported. Some are sealed. Some are buried in docket systems ordinary people do not know how to use. Some are never appealed. Some are appealed but not published in a way most voters will ever read. Some are felt only by the families they break apart.

And the judiciary does not make this easier.

There is no simple, public, county-level performance profile for each judge. No plain-language archive of contested rulings. No comprehensive public accounting of reversal rates by judge. No public scoreboard of substantiated misconduct complaints. No robust public database of how judges treat pro se litigants, order evaluations, or handle allegations later shown to be exaggerated or false.

That leaves voters navigating by résumé, rumor, and establishment cues.

That is not good enough.

The family court shadow over the whole bench

Some defenders of the system treat family-court complaints as niche grievances from bitter ex-spouses. That is a mistake.

First, even if only a fraction of the complaints are well founded, the consequences are massive. Family court decisions affect childhood, parent-child bonds, mental health, finances, and long-term stability. They shape lives at a depth few other government decisions can match.

Second, these same judges do not operate in a family-court silo forever. Circuit Court judges sit in a court of broad jurisdiction. The habits of mind that show up in one setting—deference to insiders, impatience with self-represented litigants, willingness to equate distress with instability, casual use of stigmatizing language, overconfidence in thin records—can matter elsewhere too.

Third, the public cost of error is often invisible. There is no county office that tracks the total number of parents who say they were wrongly sidelined, coerced into unnecessary evaluations, or mislabeled as dangerous. There is no official audit of collateral human damage from family-court decision-making. The people who say they were crushed by the system are often left carrying that evidence alone.

Center-right voters should pay attention to that. A judiciary that can deeply intrude into family life while remaining highly insulated from scrutiny is not a small-government model. It is the opposite.

The establishment case for the incumbents

There is, of course, a counterargument.

The four sitting judges can fairly say they were vetted through Maryland’s appointment machinery. They can point to long legal careers, courtroom experience, and professional credentials. At the recent Bethesda-Chevy Chase Democratic Breakfast Club forum, the candidates discussed issues such as AI in legal research, clerk workload, judicial security, and the need for enough judges to handle caseloads. Burrell reportedly called for an additional judge as caseloads grow, while Dietrich and McQueen spoke about the promise and risks of AI, including fabricated citations and burdens on clerks.

Those are legitimate issues. Serious judges should think about them.

But notice what often happens in judicial forums: the conversation stays safely institutional. AI. caseloads. security. modernization. All important, all respectable, all abstract enough to avoid the sharper question: how should voters evaluate the real-world human consequences of your rulings when the system gives them so little access to your record?

That is the missing question in nearly every judicial election.

The Pierre complication

A serious article cannot ignore Pierre’s liabilities.

In 2023, the Maryland Supreme Court formally reprimanded Pierre in an attorney-discipline case arising from statements made during her 2020 judicial campaign. The court found that certain statements about sitting judges were false or made with reckless disregard for the truth. The opinion discusses campaign statements alleging that some judges sent people to jail for not speaking English and that most sitting judges had worked at the same law firm, went to the same church, and were related by marriage. The court rejected key parts of those claims and imposed a reprimand rather than disbarment.

That is real, and voters should know it. But was it judges protecting fellow judges?

This also does not erase the force of her broader critique. A candidate can have personal weaknesses and still be directionally right about a broken system. Pierre’s complaint about insider selection, voter disempowerment, and judicial insulation resonates because the structure itself does, in fact, shield the bench from normal political scrutiny. In fact, if Pierre were a judge, you would probably never hear about her reprimand. It would probably not be made public.

But voters should approach Pierre neither as a savior nor as a caricature. They should approach her as the candidate raising the question the system least wants asked: why is it so hard for the public to know what it is actually voting for? On that question, we stand with her.

Why this matters beyond one race

Montgomery County is heavily Democratic. Sitting judges are usually favored. The safest bet is that the slate wins.

But that is exactly why this election matters.

Low-information judicial races become self-reinforcing. Appointed judges run with the aura of inevitability. Bar networks, institutional endorsements, and résumé prestige do the rest. Voters skim the ballot, recognize nothing, and default to the incumbents or the slate. The outcome is then cited as proof of public confidence, when in reality, it may reflect public informational deprivation.

That is not healthy for republican self-government.

The view of the courts should not be anti-judge. It should be pro-accountability, pro-due-process, pro-family integrity, and skeptical of insulated institutions that accumulate power without transparent metrics. Judicial independence matters. Judicial unaccountability is something else.

Those are not the same thing.

The bottom line for voters

Here is what voters can responsibly say based on the public record.

The four sitting judges—Burrell, Del Pino, Dietrich, and McQueen—have establishment credentials, official appointments, and publicly polished biographies. Publicly accessible reporting does not show major public disciplinary findings against them. Pierre, the challenger, has a long local legal background and an anti-insider message, but she also carries a documented 2023 reprimand tied to false or reckless campaign statements. But it is not easy trying to stand up to the establishment.

Here is what voters cannot responsibly say with confidence.

They cannot say they have been given a full, transparent, voter-friendly account of how these judges have exercised power. They cannot say the lack of public discipline tells the whole story. They cannot say the slate system encourages deep individualized scrutiny. And they cannot say Montgomery County residents are truly well informed about the judges who may one day decide the fate of their family, liberty, property, or reputation.

That should bother everyone, regardless of ideology.

The public does not owe automatic gratitude to a judicial slate chosen inside the political-legal pipeline. It owes itself more curiosity than that.

So do your homework. Read beyond the mailers. Look at the appointment announcements, the candidate sites, the discipline records that do exist, and the arguments each side is making. Ask why so much remains invisible. Ask why judges are so hard to evaluate compared with almost any other office on the ballot. Ask whether “trust the process” is really enough for a 15-year term.

And above all, do not let anyone tell you that a blindfolded vote is an informed one.

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