Retired judge David Fais dies after hospital stay for breathing issues

On Apr 19, 2021

David W. Fais poses for a portrait in his courtroom in February 2015, the month he retired after 26 years as a Franklin County Common Pleas judge. (Columbus Dispatch photo by Brooke LaValley)

David W. Fais, who served for 26 years on the Franklin County Common Pleas bench before an age-limit for judges forced his retirement in 2015, died Saturday morning.

Fais, 78, recently had been released from a Columbus hospital, where he was treated for breathing problems, said Ron Janes, a close friend who graduated from Ohio Northern University’s law school with the former judge.

“It’s a shock,” said Janes, who praised Fais for his compassion as a judge.

“He made everyone feel comfortable in his courtroom,” he said. “We don’t have enough people like him on the bench, and I don’t know that we ever will.”

Tim Jackson, who served as Fais’ bailiff for 25 years, said the judge developed into a “grandfatherly” figure on the bench. He “wanted to know everything he could about people, whether it was the attorneys or the defendant or the victim’s family.”

Fais, the son of a judge and a central Ohio native, presided over some of the county’s most high-profile cases.

The one he considered most memorable was that of Jerry Hessler, who went on a shooting rampage, killing a husband and wife and their 5-month-old daughter on the North Side and a 64-year-old man in Worthington on Nov. 19, 1995. The case attracted so much attention that the jury’s verdict in October 1996 was carried live on local TV.

Hessler was one of two defendants that Fais sentenced to death based on recommendations from juries.

“You don’t sleep the night before,” Fais told The Dispatch, reflecting about death-penalty sentencing at the time of his retirement. “I never second-guessed myself, but in this profession, you don’t have a higher responsibility than that.”

Another high-profile case was that of Matthew Cordle, whose video confession and apology for killing a man in a drunken-driving crash became a YouTube sensation in 2013 and attracted international attention.

“I sincerely believe his statements were genuine, that he regrets that night,” Fais later said of Cordle, whom he sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.

Fais grew up in Grandview and earned a bachelor’s degree at Otterbein College. After law school, he worked as an assistant Columbus city attorney and an assistant county prosecutor and in private practice before seeking a judgeship in 1988, running to complete an unexpired term. He won that race and was re-elected four times.

His father, the late G.W. Fais, was a Franklin County judge for 19 years, first in Municipal Court and then Common Pleas. The younger Fais kept a portrait of his father on his courtroom wall.

After retirement, he was hired as deputy director for investigations at the State Medical Board of Ohio and remained with the agency for five years.

Brian Simms, a longtime assistant Franklin County prosecutor, said Fais became a mentor to him during his years on the bench.

“There are certain personalities in Common Pleas Court that you gravitate to,” he said. “He was such an exceptional jurist. And you couldn’t find someone who was a better friend or someone who touched more lives, especially in the legal community. No one had a bigger impact on my legal career.”

Fais beat a 1993 throat-cancer diagnosis and spoke with a raspy voice from surgery that saved his life, but took his vocal cords.

“I didn’t know if I ever would return to this bench,” Fais told The Dispatch in 2015. “I put it in the hands of the man up above. It forever changed my life.”