SE Kansas City News

Her husband Mike Cierpiot is a Republican Missouri state senator representing Jackson County, but Connie Cierpiot is a public figure to be reckoned with in her own right. She recently was appointed to the 16th Circuit Judicial Commission as a non-lawyer layperson commissioner.

“Connie just got appointed last year by the governor,” said Phyllis Norman, an attorney member of the commission. “Now there are two women on the panel and it's great. They listen to everything we have to say and, actually, the chief judge, who just came on, she's a woman too. There's now three of us [women] and then the two men.”

Of the commission's five individuals, two are elected, two are laypeople and one is the head of the court. Cierpiot and her colleague Damon Daniel are the two laypeople, while Cynthia Martin, the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the Western Division, came aboard July 1 as chair of the commission.

In addition to Norman, the other attorney member is Kirk Presley.

Cierpiot served in the state legislature from 1994 to 2002, and Daniel works as president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, which was founded in 1977 by concerned citizens who organized to address the unsolved murders of nine African-American women. 

“We work as a team,” said Daniel of his colleague Cierpiot. “In terms of expertise and careers, there are some differences but at the end of the day, we all have the same goal in making sure that we have qualified judicial candidates and the best judicial candidates to put forward to the governor.”

Cierpiot has two sons, Patrick and Lucas, and two grandchildren, Ellie and Louis. The Cierpiot family attends the First Church of the Nazarene in Blue Springs, according to media reports.

The commission’s merit-based, nonpartisan process of selecting judges has become a national model that other states have adopted. The way it fills judicial vacancies is governed by the Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan, which was adopted by ballot initiative in the 1940s.

Martin describes her fellow female commissioners, Norman and Cierpiot as, “a highly respected female trial lawyer and a highly respected female public servant with past experience in the General Assembly and as a member on a state licensure board.

“I do not want to discount, however, the honor of serving with a highly regarded male trial lawyer and the extraordinary gentleman who performs yeoman's work for our community as the head of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime,” Martin said of Presley and Daniel. “When a judicial nominating commission is itself diverse, the message is communicated to all that diversity and inclusiveness is, indeed, a genuine objective of the nonpartisan selection process. 

"In fact, one of the hallmarks of the nonpartisan selection process is its promotion of diverse judicial candidates far more successfully than is experienced with elected judicial positions. Missouri's nonpartisan judicial selection process is the great leveler, and that is manifested by the constitution of the commission itself.”

Cierpiot’s term expires Dec. 31, 2024. She declined to be interviewed.