The probate court system is unique among justice systems in Connecticut. It is the only court where judges are elected, not appointed. And, as with any elected figure, members of the public can donate to a judge’s election campaigns—including attorneys who work with them.

Inside Investigator reviewed probate judge election donations over the last five years, during which there were seven contested elections: three in 2022, three in 2024, and a special election in 2025. In total, over $58,000 in donations were made by almost 200 practicing lawyers to campaigns of probate judges for these elections. This constitutes almost 10% of all political donations made for probate judge campaigns during these elections. In some cases, the attorneys themselves, or members of law firms they run, had cases that appeared in front of the judges whose campaigns they gave to.

There are benefits to electing probate judges: voters get direct say in who oversees some of the most intimate matters that end up in court, including estate disputes and conservatorships, and it is easier to vote an elected judge out of office than to remove an appointed judge. 

On the flip side, having lawyers donate to the campaigns of judges who directly oversee their cases creates grounds to question the impartiality of judges. 

Consolidation of the Probate Courts

In 2009, the Connecticut Legislature passed a wave of reforms to standardize and consolidate probate courts through “An Act Concerning Reform of the Probate Court System.”

Before these reforms, there were 117 probate districts in Connecticut. Each court had the liberty to choose its own hours of operation, although they needed to be open for a minimum of 20 hours a week. Probate courts were also funded with statutory fees. These fees first covered the cost of operating a court, including maintaining physical infrastructure and court employee salaries. The leftover money would be applied to a statutory formula to determine how much a judge would be paid based on how many hours they worked. 

There was a massive pay disparity; the year the reform legislation was passed, the salaries of probate judges ranged from $10,000 to $110,085.

The 2009 reforms consolidated probate districts, shrinking the number of districts from 117 to 54. The reform bill also standardized how courts operated by mandating probate courts be open to the public for 40 hours a week, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. The bill also required a court administrator to determine how much a judge would be paid based on how many hours they work. The payment would need to fall between $80,000 and $110,000.   

Before these reforms were implemented, judges frequently ran in uncontested elections. Once the consolidation took place, however, electoral opposition became common, and most of the challengers served as judges before the districts were consolidated.

In every election since 2022, money has been given almost exclusively to the victorious candidate, including the 2025 special election, which did not have an incumbent.  

In the past five years, 208 donations were made by 198 individual attorneys to the campaigns of probate judges, totaling $58,303.64. This number includes lawyers who made multiple donations, as well as a single $50 donation from Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz to the campaign of Danbury Judge Joe DaSilva.

Forty-one of those 200 donations were for more than $500 and totaled $31,231. Some of these donations came from close relatives and spouses who are also attorneys. Probate judges must recuse themselves from any cases involving their spouses or “third degree relatives,” which includes siblings and first cousins. But the overwhelming majority of donations were made by people who are not related to the candidates.

The single largest donation was given by Anthony Monelli of Cretella, Fappiano & Monelli, PC. Monelli made a $1,500 donation to Judge Benjamin Gettinger’s campaign in 2022. Joseph Mager of Mager & Mager also donated to Gettinger that year; he made two donations totaling $1,250. 

There is no database tracking how many probate cases individual attorneys are working on, or have worked on in the past. Identifying the probate cases attorneys are on requires either going in person to a probate courthouse or researching individual cases in the online probate library. Only after opening information about the individual in the case can one see the party’s legal representation. There were over 128,000 active or ongoing cases in Connecticut probate courts in 2025, according to the most recent Office of Probate Court Biennial Report. 

Inside Investigator identified three probate cases in which Mager acted as a fiduciary since 2022, including one where John Mager, the co-principal at Mager & Mager, was also a fiduciary. John donated $1,000 to Gettinger’s campaign in 2022. Additionally, Inside Investigator found two cases that Joseph Mager was working on in 2022, before the election, including one that took place in October, one month before election day. This is not a comprehensive list of Mager’s cases. 

Neither Monelli nor Mager could be reached for questions about their donations. 

Matthew Grimes is another attorney who made a sizable donation in 2022. 

Grimes gave $500 to the campaign for Judge Rosa Rebimbas. Grimes said he thinks he had one ongoing case in the Naugatuck District Court when Rebimbas was sworn in as a judge, but it was wrapping up. Since then, he says he has not had a single case in her district. 

Although he has never donated to a judge who has overseen his cases, he doesn’t see a particular problem with people who do.

“Probate is very, very statutory. Either something checks a box, or it doesn’t,” Grimes said. “Either it’s black, or it’s white. There’s very little room to maneuver.”

Alex McCurry, Susan Asplin and Kathleen Broad learned this the hard way when it was time to divvy up their late sister, Janet Moultis’, estate. Moultis left a substantial amount of her estate to her siblings in her will and included the provision “survivors take all.” McCurry, Asplin, and Broad insist that Moultis was very clear about her wishes: she wanted that portion of her estate to pass to her living siblings, and if a sibling were to have passed away before she did, their children would not receive their portion. However, the executor of her estate and Judge Gettinger determined that her repeated use of “survivors take all” was merely “boilerplate” language, and not enough of a basis to disinherit her nieces and nephews. The siblings are in an ongoing legal battle over her estate. 

Trust and estates are not the only areas of probate law. Conservatorships are also managed in probate courts and have been the subject of controversy both in Connecticut and across the country. For example, one conservator in the state, Kristin Exner, sold the home of a woman under her care for an under-market rate to a man with whom Exner co-owns a real estate business; the house was later resold for a profit. The sale is being reviewed by a grievance panel.

A conservatorship is established when an adult is not legally capable of making their own legal, medical, or financial decisions. Sometimes this is due to age, disability, or injury. Conservators take legal responsibility for the people under their care. Most conservators are relatives or close friends, but some are appointed by probate judges. These conservators receive a flat rate of $90 a month in state reimbursement if the court appoints them.  

A judge has discretion in determining who a conservator is, approving decisions made by the conservator, and responding to complaints against conservators. A judge also enforces wills—sometimes against the wishes of both the family and the deceased.

Why Lawyers Donate

Inside Investigator attempted to reach all of the lawyers who made donations larger than $500 to a judge’s campaign since 2022. Only four lawyers responded to questions, and all of them supported Judge Rosa Rebimbas. 

Their reasons for donating varied significantly: Mike D’Amico and Robert Russo sang praises for Rebimbas, who was an experienced probate lawyer and represented Naugatuck in the Connecticut House of Representatives from 2009 until she was sworn in as a judge in 2023. Attorney Augie Ribeiro said in an email, “I am a proud Portuguese American and often support other Portuguese Americans.” Grimes wanted to see the incumbent be unseated.

“The judge she was running against had disgraced the whole legal profession,” he said.

That judge was Peter Mariano, who at the time of his 2022 campaign was suspended from practicing law as a lawyer, although he was still allowed to keep his job as a judge. 

Mariano was charged twice for driving under the influence in 2021 and reckless endangerment. The Connecticut Bar Association suspended him as a punitive measure in 2021.

State law requires all probate candidates to have been members of the Connecticut Bar Association for at least 10 yearsbefore running, but it does not require judges to have active licenses to continue serving. 

“It was right around the time people take the bar exam, and everything like that, and (I thought), ‘This is not what future lawyers need,’” Grimes said. “I knew Rosa from her work in the legislature, and I figured that she could restore integrity. As somebody who focuses their practice on probate, how can I go in front of a judge like that guy?”

Mariano lost that 2022 election to Rebimbas.

In 2024, Mariano was charged with another DUI and missed a hearing date in March 2025. After that, state attorneys from the Attorney General’s Office filed a motion to permanently disbar him. He gave up his legal license in September 2025. 

Mariano pleaded guilty to the DUI in May 2026 and was sentenced to three years in jail, with the execution suspended after one year, and three years of probation. He also had to pay a $1,000 fine.

Grimes said he has never seen a judge give preferential treatment to someone who donated to their campaign, and that there isn’t a lot of room for favors in probate court to begin with.

 “If somebody was getting an abnormal amount of business, and other lawyers were getting turned down for the business, I would think that that might be indicative of it,” Grimes said.

By “business,” Grimes means having a judge call on a private attorney to represent a client. These attorneys are called assigned counsels, and they usually represent people who are not mentally capable of making their own legal decisions, either permanently or temporarily, or cannot afford their own counsel. Private practice lawyers sign up to be assigned counsel for certain districts.

The state does compensate attorneys who take on court-appointed clients, but compensation is usually substantially lower than what lawyers charge in their private practice. A court-appointed attorney is reimbursed $58 per hour and can submit invoices to probate courts for 6-minute intervals of work. On average, probate lawyers bill between $250 and $500 per hour across the state in their private practices. 

“You’re doing something for less pay than you would for a private client, but you’re also trying to make a difference for that person and make sure that they get the fair representation that they don’t maybe know to ask for themselves or that they maybe can’t ask for themselves, and that’s a very, very rewarding thing,” Grimes said. “Without those lawyers, you’d have a lot of people that wouldn’t have representation otherwise, or somebody to advocate for them when they’re maybe not of the mental capacity or the physical capacity to advocate for themselves.”

Earlier this year, he took a course in the Westport Probate Court so he could be assigned more cases. Since April, Grimes has been called for six cases but only represented three people. 

“They were all commitment cases involving mental health patients, and either the person got better, so the hospital was no longer pursuing commitment, or the person was able to afford a private attorney,” Grimes said. 

However, he was only involved with three of those patients because the rest of the appointed clients’ conditions improved, and they were released from the hospital. 

“There is nothing that violates any ethics rules when an attorney donates to the election campaign of a probate judge,” said Jamie Sullivan, a lawyer who handles ethical issues for other lawyers. Sullivan was the former vice-chair of the Judicial Selection Committee, which selects judges on merit for non-elected positions.

He goes on to say that there are “reasonable limits” for how much money an individual can donate to a probate judge campaign. He believes that limit is $1,000, which is also what the maximum contribution an individual can give to a judge’s campaign, according to the State Election Enforcement Commission.

Inside Investigator identified two attorneys who contributed more than $1,000 in a single donation to a judge’s campaign: Anthony Monelli, who gave $1,500 to Judge Benjamin Gettinger’s campaign in 2022, and William Britt, who gave $1,021.15 to Judge Katherine Caulfield’s campaign in 2024. 

“If an attorney can contribute more than that, it can create the appearance of impropriety and undue influence,” Sullivan said in an email.

Sullivan said of appointed judges, “If you think that politics is eliminated by the Judicial Selection Commission, you would be very wrong. Politics still plays a huge role in the selection of judges in Connecticut. Most of the members of the Commission are politically active. Most Superior Court judges are appointed because of who they know, and many have so-called Godfathers, who have a connection with the governor’s office. Politics is a part of everything.”

This year, there will be elections for judges in every judicial district in November. As of July 7, over $30,000 has been donated to the campaign of probate judges for this election cycle. 

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