LEWISTON — Robert Clifford reached into one of the cardboard boxes stacked against a wall in his dining room and pulled out a framed photograph of 14 men dressed in black robes.

The 87-year-old retired judge pointed out the justices of the Maine Superior Court, including himself at the center in the back row.

He left his two robes in the Androscoggin County Courthouse when he cleared out of his chambers last month, an office he occupied for more than three decades.

It took him and his secretary the better part of a day to shred his notes and draft opinions from cases he presided over during his long career on the bench and pack up the rest of his belongings, which are jammed in boxes and plastic totes that line the walls of his home.

The robes served their purpose, he said. He left them behind for someone else to wear.

He won’t be needing them, he said.

Today, Clifford is dressed in khakis and a navy blue wool sweater.

After serving nearly a half-century as a Maine judge, Clifford didn’t seek reappointment to the bench for another seven-year term.

It was time to retire, he said.

Clifford hadn’t imagined when he graduated from law school in 1962 that he would embark on a career as anything but a lawyer in general practice at the local family firm, he said.

A lifelong Lewiston resident, Clifford resides with his wife in a modest two-story stucco house next door to the home in which he grew up.

After graduating from Lewiston High School, Clifford studied at Bowdoin College, where he graduated with honors in government.

While there, he enrolled in the ROTC program, which led to a stint in the U.S. Army after earning his law degree at Boston College Law School.

A commissioned officer, he was based in Germany, where he served as a company commander and adjutant to a full colonel. While abroad, he met his wife, Clementina “Tookie” Radillo, who worked there in the Special Services, which provided entertainment for the troops.

Clifford reached the rank of captain before he was discharged and he returned home to practice law.

He stayed close to home most of his life while charting a course as arguably one of Lewiston’s most valued politicians and, later, as one of Maine’s most vaunted jurists.

Before becoming a judge, Clifford was elected as an alderman, followed by two terms as Lewiston’s mayor.

Clifford served two terms in the Maine Senate where he played a key role in making lasting changes to state law.

He was a co-sponsor of Maine’s criminal code.

“We had to do a lot of lobbying to the legislature because it was a huge change,” he said. “Maine’s criminal laws were just a bunch of hodgepodge and (the revision) was very good for judges and lawyers because it was organized” into logical categories.

Clifford also sponsored a bill that moved the Maine Superior Court from under the auspices of county government to the state which, unlike the county, had the money to staff the courts and maintain the buildings.

“I loved being a senator,” he said, “but you couldn’t do it and practice law.”

Clifford then chaired a local commission that drafted Lewiston’s city charter, effectively centralizing power and modernizing the city’s government.

Although he was a conservative Democrat, Clifford said he “never got too deep into the partisan part of the politics” in government.

 

HAPPY AS A JUDGE

In 1979, Clifford was appointed by then-Gov. Joseph Brennan, a friend and colleague from the Maine Legislature, to serve on the Maine Superior Court.

He turned down the job after having second thoughts, but changed his mind and is glad he did, he said.

“I took to it nicely,” he said. “I was very happy as a judge.”

In 1984, Clifford was tapped to serve as the first chief justice of that court, which, because it presided over all jury trials, was known as the trial court.

Two years later he was appointed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting most often as the law court because it heard appeals from Maine’s lower courts. He sat in that court for 23 years until he retired in 2009, but remained in active-retired status until this year.

In that latter role, Clifford presided over trial court matters in Maine Superior Court, but was also called back to the state’s highest court from time to time to sit in on appeals cases.

In hindsight, he said he preferred presiding over trial court where he worked closely with the attorneys and juries, ruled on evidentiary motions, articulated the law and ultimately played a greater role in the eventual outcome of cases.

As a justice on the state’s highest court, Clifford was part of a “collegial body” that would read briefs submitted by the parties on a case up on appeal. The seven justices would then listen, in most cases, to limited oral arguments before they would retire to chambers, confer and reach a tentative majority opinion. A justice who disagreed with the majority could suggest amendments and might end up writing a dissenting opinion, which could, in turn, become the majority opinion, he explained.

In the trial court, there is a single justice who presides over the courtroom and the case. In the law court, there are seven justices who “have to get along well” to be effective, he said.

One of the great perks of the job on the high court, he said, was presiding over the ceremony when new attorneys were sworn in and admitted to the state bar.

“That’s a very, very happy occasion,” he said. It’s possibly the only time in the courtroom when everyone is in agreement.

Near the end of his tenure on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Clifford chaired a committee that would recommend that the responsibility for paying attorneys’ fees to private lawyers opting to represent indigent defendants be shifted from judges to an independent commission. Because Maine had no public defenders office, that duty fell to rostered criminal defense attorneys who were paid hourly. Since then, state-funded pilot public defenders offices have taken some of the burden from the rostered attorneys in parts of the state.

The last major trial over which Clifford presided featured a 19-year-old West Paris woman facing two manslaughter charges stemming from a crash that claimed the lives of a 16-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man who were passengers in the same car.

The highly volatile court proceedings, held in Oxford County, required additional courtroom security and have stayed with Clifford in the 10 years since the trial.

In upholding the convictions on appeal in 2015, Maine’s law court praised Clifford’s oversight of the case, saying: “The court adeptly handled a publicized and emotional case and thoughtfully decided the evidentiary issues presented in order to provide (the defendant) with a fair trial.”

 

PRAISE FOR CLIFFORD

That glowing appraisal of Clifford’s judicial temperament is shared by many of Maine’s jurists, including Valerie Stanfill, who now holds the title of chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

Clifford hired her as his law clerk in 1984, her first year out of law school, calling her “smart as a whip.” She worked with him for one year before joining a Lewiston law firm.

She appeared before him as a trial lawyer arguing appeals when he was a justice on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

By the time he retired from the law court, Stanfill had been appointed to the bench as a Maine District Court judge.

Clifford was the reason she sought work as a lawyer in Lewiston, she said, opening her eyes to the high quality of law being practiced in the middle part of the state.

He didn’t give her advice but instead modeled, “what I consider to be one of the finest judicial demeanors ever. He certainly had an influence over me my whole career and certainly as a judge. From my perspective, I think he is truly one of the best trial jurists ever to serve the state of Maine,” she said.

“He is the very embodiment of procedural fairness, all the best qualities,” she said. “He gives a voice to litigants, to lawyers. He always lets everybody be heard. He treats everyone who comes in front of him with respect and no one leaves his courtroom without being confident that the process was fair. Yet, at the same time, he was certainly decisive and able to do the work that a judge needs to do and to make the hard decisions that a judge needs to make. Those are very hard things to balance.”

Donald Alexander, who retired as a longtime associate justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, said last month: “Justice Clifford’s service reflected then and reflects now the important attributes of a good judge — thorough knowledge of the law, absolute integrity, hard work, and case management skills that move the case along, while assuring that each party is treated fairly, has an adequate opportunity to be heard, and can believe that their case will be decided impartially after each has had their say. This is sometimes easier said than done and Bob has done it well.”

Alexander went on, noting Clifford’s attention to the importance of always considering the human element in the practice of law: “He applied these attributes to each case that came before him as a trial judge or on the law court. Often, we would be debating a fine point of law conferencing an appeal, what some call arranging fleas on the head of a pin. Bob participated actively in the discussion, often interjecting to remind us that we are talking about things that matter to real people and must not forget the human issues in the litigants’ lives that led to the appeal.”

Alexander called Clifford “the gold standard for a competent, fair, ethical judge that we aspire to be but, because you do it so well, can never quite reach.”

 

A MODEST CEREMONY

On Oct. 4, a small group gathered in Courtroom No. 1 in Auburn for the hanging of Clifford’s official portrait, gracing its wall among other prominent jurists from central Maine.

The ceremony, which is a rite required of every justice who has sat on the high court, was a brief, modest affair as requested by Clifford.

In keeping with his signature humility, he instructed the photographer to make his portrait smaller than those of the other justices hanging in the vast courtroom.

“I didn’t want to make a big thing out of it,” he said about the ceremony. “I didn’t speak long. I thanked people for being there and mentioned the many people who had been nice to me as mayor and as senator and, especially, on the court that included my fellow judges as well as the clerks. And then it was over.”

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