Retiring judge took job personally “and it’s killing me.”

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - Lehigh County Judge Kelly L. Banach was wearily wrapping up a marathon morning court session in 2014 when a prosecutor and detective hurried to the bench. We’ve just come from investigating a homicide, they told the judge. Marked on the victim’s calendar, they said, was a lunch appointment that day - with Banach.

More than six years later, Banach’s eyes still well up when she talks about Carlos Lugo, a man she put behind bars for leading a drug ring, one of many offenses on his lengthy rap sheet. Lugo was fresh out of prison when they crossed paths one afternoon at Pizza Mart, her favorite lunch spot near the courthouse in Allentown. He confided that he was trying to stay straight but, unable to find a job, was feeling the familiar pull of criminal life.

You’re better than that, Banach told Lugo, ticking off a list of jobs he might qualify for. Encouraged, Lugo agreed to tell the judge about his progress in a few weeks, over a slice.

One day before the lunch meeting, Lugo and two friends attempted to rob a man on Westminster Street in Allentown. The man pulled his own gun in self-defense and shot Lugo, 35, dead.

“I was stunned,” Banach said. “I think I even said out loud, ‘Carlos, couldn’t you have just waited til lunch? We could have talked about it’.”

Banach, who retires this month after 17 years on the bench, said Lugo’s death hit her hard because she took his failure to succeed personally. It’s a lament she voices frequently in court, especially to the defendants who appear before her again and again, highlighting the futility of the pep talks she hands down with her sentences and, to some degree, the criminal justice system.

“I took this job personally and it’s killing me,” she said in a recent interview.

She considered herself a problem-solver, but her efforts often had no effect, as the same people would return to her courtroom with the same issues she had tried to address. And the system, with all its weaknesses, was beyond her power to improve.

Banach oversaw both adult and juvenile court. As the mother of two sons, it was a particular gut punch to recognize the faces of young men standing before her because they’d passed through her juvenile courtroom as teens. Neither the creative sentences she’d craft there, full of rehabilitative programs, nor her motherly advice from the bench, had put them on a better path.

“How much of this is my fault,” Banach began to wonder.

“I’ve sent a whole generation of men of color to prison,” she said. “Justifiably. They’ve committed crimes. The sentences were legal sentences and reasonable sentences. But, yet, I’ve sent these men to jail, leaving generations of children without male figureheads.”

Banach said this realization led her to issue sentences that some may feel were more lenient that those given in other courtrooms.

“I think there are a lot of judges, especially in criminal court, that the longer they sit and the more dismayed they become, their sentences become harsher. I’ve been the reverse. The longer I sit, the more I realize it doesn’t help. Even extended periods of probation. It just trips people up,” she said.

Banach, 63, didn’t always feel so down about her career. Growing up in Allentown’s West End, she was cognizant from a young age that she lived a privileged life, and she wanted to give back to the community. Her father, Stanley, was a doctor and her mother, Marietta, worked in a medical lab.

After graduating from Cornell University and Villanova University School of Law, Banach joined the Bucks County public defender’s office in 1983 and worked there for two years. After a brief stint as a civil litigator, Banach was hired at the Lehigh County district attorney’s office in 1987, where she rose through the ranks to senior chief deputy and supervisor of the Special Offenses Unit, prosecuting sex offenders and child predators.

It was in the DA’s office that she met her husband, Richard Mongilutz, then an Allentown police detective. He was the investigator on many of her cases, and they didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

Banach recalled walking into an interview room one day to see Mongilutz serving coffee and doughnuts to a man suspected of raping several children.

“I couldn’t believe it. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the hallway and said, ‘What the hell is that’?”

Mongilutz explained that suspects were more likely to open up to a detective who treated them like human beings. Watching the way he handled people shaped Banach’s judicial philosophy, she said. Life is hard and people are struggling, she reminds herself often. Be kind.

That approach has led to some successes. Luis Perez says Banach’s kindness saved his life. He was 26 when Banach sentenced him for retail theft. A single father of four small children, Perez had his first contact with police as a 10-year-old heroin mule for his father, who was incarcerated as a result, leaving Perez to care for his younger siblings.

Perez said he was hardened and hopeless at his guilty plea hearing in 2006.

“Judge Banach asked me what was going on in my life. Not just about my crime, but me. It was the first time someone had asked me that, and I kind of just broke down,” he said.

Banach took an interest in Perez and connected him with people and programs. He used what he learned to found ReciproCITY, an Allentown nonprofit that connects people experiencing homelessness, poverty or reentry hurdles with services,.

“That day in Judge Banach’s courtroom was the defining moment in my life. She gave me the open door to grab the opportunities I needed. Thank God for her,” he said. “She changed my life.”

When Banach feels like she’s not getting through to a defendant, she’ll enlist someone with more influence. It’s not unusual for the judge to summon siblings, pastors and grannies leaning on walkers to the front of the courtroom. Don’t tell me you’ll do better, she says to the person being sentenced, tell them.

This personal touch extended to crime victims too, said Kim Silvestri, who supervises the victim-witness unit of the Lehigh County district attorney’s office. Silvestri described Banach as “always conversational with victims, kind, funny at appropriate times, no-nonsense and honest.”

Silvestri noted that Banach never failed to say “I’m sorry” after victims told their story, and would acknowledge that there was only so much the courts could do to ease their pain.

“One of the most compelling things I ever heard her say, which impacts me every day in my work, is ‘Generally speaking, the criminal justice system is rather unsatisfactory.’ It was compelling to me as a victim advocate because it’s the truth,” Silvestri said.

Banach, who describes herself as “quirky” and an “over-sharer” who doubts there is a higher power, said she marvels at victims who come into court ready to forgive. She lets the ones still struggling with their feelings know they aren’t under any obligation to turn the other cheek.

“Telling someone they have to forgive, that’s minimizing the experience of a victim. It tells them that what they’re feeling is wrong, that the feeling will garner them some greater consequence in the great beyond,” she said.

Despite her motherly demeanor in court, Banach should also be remembered as a crime fighter, said Steve Luksa, Lehigh County’s first assistant district attorney. He recounted numerous times the judge made herself available when he needed a search warrant approved in the middle of the night or, most memorably, when she was halfway through a manicure at a nail salon.

Banach told the wet nails story during a Dec. 15 ceremony to unveil her official portrait, which will hang in courtroom 2A. She posed for the painting while holding a face mask with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s photo on it. Due to the pandemic, the ceremony was held on Zoom, with the portrait sitting in one frame of the video conferencing system, while dozens of well-wishers popped in an out of the other screens.

Luksa was the prosecutor who informed Banach that Lugo, the former inmate she ran into at Pizza Mart, would miss their lunch date. It didn’t surprise him at all that the judge would have lunch with someone she’d sent to prison.

“Judge Banach has always believed that most people who come through her courtroom can be redeemed. That given the right set of circumstances, an individual can be better,” Luksa said.

After some rest and maybe a little travel with Mongilutz, Banach hopes to return to the courthouse next year as a senior judge, sitting one afternoon a week in juvenile court.

Being a judge is tough and disappointing, but she said she’ll feel worse if she doesn’t help.

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