By Riley McCoy
For The Register-Herald
Beckley — Five Supreme Court candidates hope to convince voters through different measures of merit and views on rights, restraint and public trust.
The upcoming May 12 special election will decide who fills the late Justice Tim Armstead’s seat on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.
Armstead, a former House speaker and House of Delegates member, died in August after battling cancer. Appointed to the Supreme Court by then-Gov. Jim Justice in 2018, he later won both a special election to finish former Justice Menis Ketchum’s term and re-election in 2020. His seat’s unexpired term runs through Dec. 31, 2032.
Justice Gerald M. Titus III already serves in that capacity after a special appointment by Gov. Patrick Morrissey in December, but voters still have to decide whether to keep that continuity or turn instead to Judge Laura Faircloth, Judge Todd Kirby, retired Judge H.L. Kirkpatrick or attorney Martin P. Sheehan.
In exclusive interviews, the candidates sketched out not just their resumes but also their own views of what experience, judgment and judicial purpose should look like on the state’s highest bench.
Justice Gerald Titus presented himself as the continuity candidate in the race and argued that he already stepped into the work and found his footing on the state’s highest court.
“What I feel I bring is the right mix of experience and energy,” Titus said. “So, I have a variety of experience which helps with the variety of cases that the Supreme Court hears.” He added that he was “in the prime of my legal career” and had already been hearing cases, taking part in the court’s administrative functions and finding “the rhythm and cadence” of the job.
When asked what issue mattered most, Titus spoke less to one area of case law than to public trust in the institution itself.
“A priority has to be maintaining confidence in the judiciary,” Titus said. “It’s important to have predictability, clarity and stability in the application of the rule of law, so that people know what the expectations are, and also so that everybody, regardless of what walk of life you’re from, whether you’re rich or poor, or this party or that party, that you understand that the law will be fairly applied to you.”
His judicial philosophy shared a similar theme.
“Judges apply the law as it is written,” Titus said. “Judges don’t make law. Judges apply the law,” adding that “the judiciary stay in its own lane” while legislators legislate and the executive governs.
Titus returned often to the broader responsibilities of the court, emphasizing steadiness, fairness and the institutional role he said he already was serving.
Away from the bench, Titus spoke first about family, calling his work with wife Meredith “our public service” and saying what he most liked to do was “spend time with my kids,” including visits to what one of his young children called the Capitol, or simply, “the mountain.”
One of Titus’ opponents is a Berkeley County native and longtime Martinsburg attorney.
Before taking the bench on the newly created 27th Judicial Circuit Court, Judge Laura Faircloth came into the race with years of civil trial work behind her and nearly a decade on the circuit court. Elected in 2016 and later re-elected after the circuit was redrawn, she grounded her candidacy in courtroom work, personal independence and a constitutional view she said transcended traditional labels.
“Are you honest and are you willing to do the job? It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman,” Faircloth said. “I’m used to being a woman in the minority, and I think that it has made us try harder and do better.”
From there, she turned to the daily docket she said defined her work, from civil and criminal cases to guardianships and appeals, and to the problem she said kept surfacing in court.
“What I see as being a real, pressing concern in my courtroom is the huge epidemic that we have drug addiction,” Faircloth said. “We can handle it in treatment at work. We can handle it by way of probation and required recovery. We can handle it by way of jail or prison time.”
Her view of the law was just as direct.
“We are governed by laws and not of men,” Faircloth said. “The thing about being in the judiciary is we are the final, I believe, guardian of liberty for everyone, and I take that very seriously. So I’m a very strict constitutionalist.”
She identified a public-special-needs-abuse case as the outcome she was proudest of and said her ruling turned on what she viewed as an overly broad West Virginia statute that could not stand as applied — a position she said the Supreme Court later upheld.
Outside the courtroom, she returned to the land and the animals that kept her grounded.
“I come from a farm family, and I still live on the farm that my great great grandparents bought right after the Civil War,” Faircloth said. “I love my farm. I love my horses, and I have six rescue horses, so they’re here until they die.”
She added, “It’s very nurturing to the soul to have animals that look to you and know that you’re caring for them.”
Longtime Wheeling attorney Martin P. Sheehan leaned heavily on long practice, difficult files and a court system he said needed to move faster. He traced his credentials through decades at the bar, service as an assistant U.S. attorney, bankruptcy trustee, law school teacher and former national president of the National Association of Bankruptcy Trustees. Sheehan then boiled the argument down to one line: “What you want in life is a young doctor, an old lawyer.”
He said he had spent years handling the cases that went sideways, joking that if a matter was “a little off the beaten path,” his name was probably on it, and “if it’s really screwed up altogether,” his name was “gold leaf on the file.”
The issue that most clearly animated him was delay at the Supreme Court. Sheehan said one fully briefed case had sat since June 2024 without argument, then reached for the old maxim: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
He said the court needed “a system that’s gonna actually work on this backlog,” and argued that his bankruptcy background taught him how to handle high volumes, identify issues early and move complicated matters in a systematic way.
Sheehan described his own judicial approach as rooted in experience, opinion writing, procedural discipline and a court system that moved cases instead of letting them linger.
“The reality is, bankruptcy is a place where you make very fast decisions. Hundreds of cases go by and you make very quick judgments,” Sheehan said. “The bankruptcy approach to deal with a high volume of cases, every one of them individually, but dealing with them systematically, is what allows the court to advance the ball and to become more effective in dealing with things like the backlog you have.”
He later called opinion writing “a different skill set” he had spent years developing for courts and legal publications.
Sheehan pointed to murder trials, a triple homicide, technical pension litigation and even cases involving “21 dead bodies” as evidence of the kind of work he had handled. Away from court, the sharper edges softened.
Sheehan said he had been married to his wife, Janet Sheehan, for 48 years, joked that if she had not changed the locks it had “been a good day regardless,” called himself “pretty much a homebody,” and said his hobby was “fixing up my house,” with family, church and grandchildren filling out the rest of the picture.
In southern West Virginia, two local judges tossed their names into the multicandidate arena.
Current Raleigh County Circuit Judge Todd Kirby built his case around range as much as age. He spoke about arriving on the bench at 39 after work as an attorney, guardian ad litem, assistant prosecutor and delegate and argued that the value of that background could not be measured by years alone.
“Experience shouldn’t just be the amount of years that you have,” Kirby said. “Experience should be the various roles you’ve played, what you’ve done with that time.”
He said that record gave him a different perspective from other candidates in the race. “I do believe I am the only one that has served in the legislature,” Kirby said. “It does give me a different tool set than any of the other candidates. I have interpreted the law. I have executed the law as an assistant prosecutor, and I have written the law.”
The issue that kept surfacing in his interview was foster care and abuse-and-neglect work, which he said followed him across the state and through his own legal career.
“There’s always a conversation about foster care,” Kirby said. “It’s not necessarily a political issue, it’s a fact that we have to take care of these children. It’s about protecting vulnerable children while following the law and adhering to the Constitution.”
On constitutional philosophy, Kirby offered an answer rooted in founding documents but open to practical application.
“There has to be the ability for courts to use common sense when applying the underlying principles of the Constitution,” Kirby said. “Free speech is free speech, whether it’s behind a keyboard or you’re using a quill pen.”
He later grounded that view in a religious understanding of rights. “Our constitutional rights come from God,” Kirby said. “They are not distributed to us through Charleston or Washington, D.C.”
The other Raleigh County candidate is retired Raleigh County Circuit Court Judge H.L. Kirkpatrick, who made experience the centerpiece of his campaign.
“Experience is my strong suit, I’ve been on the bench for 30 years,” Kirkpatrick said. “During that time, I have handled almost every conceivable kind of case and as a judge, I have served on the Supreme Court temporary assignment and I believe that my experience and know how would enable me to hit the ground running as a Supreme Court justice.”
The area of law he said weighed on him most was child welfare.
“Abuse and neglect cases are the most prevalent and toughest cases that circuit judges will deal with,” Kirkpatrick said. “They involve neglect and abuse of young children, and those are difficult cases that must demand our priority as judges.”
On constitutional philosophy, Kirkpatrick took a different approach from Kirby, calling the Constitution “a living document” while still stressing text, history and precedent.
“Precedent provides predictability and stability,” he said.
When the conversation turned to major cases, Kirkpatrick pointed first to the Natalie Cochran trial. “It was obviously my biggest case,” he said, explaining that the national attention did not change his approach because, after decades on the bench, “it was routine for me.”
He also cited the Fred Zane case as another trial that drew national interest.
Outside court, Kirkpatrick described a life built around family and older hobbies, including trout fishing, the New and Greenbrier rivers, model railroading and target shooting with his sons.
He also traced his path into law back to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” stating he wanted to stay in West Virginia to practice in a rural setting and “be my own Atticus [Finch].”
Voters will decide the nonpartisan special election for Armstead’s unexpired Division 1 term on May 12, the same day as West Virginia’s 2026 primary election.
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