4 judges and a 5-time challenger running for Montgomery County Circuit Court

Four sitting Montgomery County Circuit Court judges are facing off in the June 23 primary against a repeat challenger who is an outspoken critic of the judicial appointment process.

The sitting judges are running as a slate. They are: Sharon Burrell, who has been a circuit judge in Montgomery County since 2008; Victor Del Pino, who served as a district court judge for six years before Gov. Wes Moore elevated him to the circuit court in January; James Dietrich, a former prosecutor who Moore appointed to the circuit court in the fall of 2025; and Catherine McQueen, who worked in family law before Moore appointed her to the bench in late 2024.

Their challenger is Marylin Pierre, a longtime Montgomery County lawyer who served in the U.S. Army Reserve and Military Police Corps. This is her fifth attempt to win a seat on the county’s circuit court; in 2023, she received a reprimand from the Maryland Supreme Court over comments made in a previous election cycle.

They are competing for four seats on the 6th Judicial Circuit, which covers Montgomery and Frederick counties.

Pierre said her outsider status gives her better insight into problems with the legal system.

“Some of my most ardent supporters are people who have actually been in the courtroom,” she said. “People who have not been in the courtroom think everything is fine, because everything is fine on paper. But when people actually show up in the courtroom, they see what happens there.”

Dietrich spoke with The Banner on behalf of the entire slate of sitting judges. He said the vetting process that goes into the selection of circuit court judges should give voters extra confidence in choosing the sitting judges on their ballots.

“When we talk to voters, we encourage them to do their own research,” Dietrich said. “But the vetting process does a lot of that research for them.”

Circuit court judges are the only judges in Maryland who can face contested elections for their seats, one of the quirks of Maryland’s judicial selection system. The candidates are nonpartisan, but Democratic and Republican voters will separately nominate four people for the general.

Maryland lawmakers have discussed changing the system, out of concern that judges raise campaign funds from people who could have cases before them.

Chosen by the governor when there is a vacancy on the bench, circuit court judges must face election to a 15-year-term after their appointment. But they can be challenged by any member of the Maryland bar who meets minimum constitutional requirements: being at least 30 years old and residing in the state for at least five years and in the county where they are running for at least six months.

Challengers bypass the extensive vetting process that lawyers go through before being appointed judge by the governor, said Morgan Drayton, policy and engagement manager at Common Cause Maryland.

“It’s kind of unequal when you have people skipping this whole in-depth process that’s supposed to create a curated list of well-qualified candidates,” Drayton said.

The vetting process includes interviews with the local bar association and specialty groups like the Women’s Bar Association of Maryland, the LGBTQ Bar Association of Maryland and the Maryland Hispanic Bar Association, among others. Maryland also uses judicial nominating commissions, 13-member boards that screen and recommend lists of candidates for the governor when there is a vacancy.

Pierre said in 2024 that she has applied to her judicial nominating committee nine times without success. She told The Banner that the judicial selection process too often rewards candidates who have connections in the legal community, rather than those who are best suited for the bench.

She is also concerned that young Black men in Maryland face harsher sentences than young men of other races.

Pierre received a reprimand from the Maryland Supreme Court in 2023 over comments she made about a group of sitting judges when she was running for a Montgomery County Circuit Court seat in 2020. The justices found that Pierre made a false statement when her campaign tweeted that some judges sent defendants to jail because they “could not speak English,” a claim Pierre later acknowledged was untrue, and also that she misrepresented information when she applied for the New York State Bar in 1999.

The Maryland Supreme Court also cautioned the Office of Bar Counsel, which investigates attorney misconduct, to avoid launching investigations so close to elections in the same decision, Pierre noted. She and another disciplined attorney asked the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a stronger standard for attorney free speech protections following the case, but the high court declined to hear their arguments.

Dietrich declined to discuss Pierre’s history in an interview, saying that voters can “do their own research.”

Before he became a judge in October, Dietrich led the Felony Trial Division in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office; before that, he spent 21 years working in the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office.

McQueen, who was appointed in 2024, spent much of her legal career working in family law and guardianship cases. She was often court-appointed to work in guardianship cases involving vulnerable adults who had been financially exploited or neglected.

Del Pino was first appointed to serve as a district judge by former Gov. Larry Hogan in 2019 and was elevated to the circuit court by Moore earlier this year. Before becoming a judge, he worked as a prosecutor in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office and in private practice.

Burrell became the first African American woman appointed to the bench in Montgomery County in 2008. She is currently the chief judge of the 6th Judicial Circuit and chairs the Maryland Judiciary’s Equal Justice Committee. She worked for the County Attorney’s Office in Montgomery County for 21 years before she became a judge.

Dietrich said that the sitting judges agree that one of the most important parts of the job is ensuring that the people who come before them are treated well and get a fair opportunity to be heard.

“The days of the grumpy judge looking down over their glasses at people and intimidating them, I hope, are gone,” he said. “We are public servants.”

Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter in Baltimore.