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Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael Ryan announced Tuesday that he will retire Aug. 6, three days after his 65th birthday and 24 years after his first assignment to the bench.
Ryan is the most experienced of the justices in that he has been a prosecutor, a Superior Court judge, an Appeals Court judge and a Supreme Court justice.
\"Justice Ryan has been a selfless public servant for nearly all of his life,\" Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch said. \"His service to our country, our state and this court is to be commended. Arizona is losing a wonderful judge who is thoughtful, patient, courageous and kind. He is a quiet colleague, but he has a wonderful sense of humor and has been an absolute pleasure to work with. It has been an honor to serve next to him.\"
Ryan told The Republic that he was retiring to spend more time with his family — he is married with three sons and two grandchildren — and expects to continue doing volunteer work and court projects.
When he graduated from college in his native Minnesota in 1967, Ryan was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and shipped out to Vietnam in the spring of 1968. He was wounded twice in five months and after the second injury began using a wheelchair.
When he left the hospital he moved to Arizona and after first starting a master\'s degree in English, instead decided to go to Arizona State University law school.
He took a job at the Maricopa County Attorney\'s Office in 1978.
Among the cases he prosecuted was a retrial of a Marine Corps vet who had been convicted of murder but was granted a retrial because he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. When Ryan took the case, he realized the killer was from his own Marine unit; he got the conviction.
Ryan was appointed to the Superior Court in 1986 and presided over major trials, including the Phoenix Suns drug trial in 1987, the felony trial of former Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham in 1988 and the \"AzScam\" public corruption cases in the early 1990s.
Ryan went to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1996 and was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2002 by Gov. Jane Hull.
Since then, Ryan said, the major issues before the Supreme Court have been maintaining the court system through budget crises and coping with a resource-straining explosion in the number of death-penalty cases and the difficulty in finding enough defense attorneys to help defendants through the appeals process.
Still, as he faces retirement, Ryan said, \"I\'m very conflicted. It\'s very hard to walk away from this.\"
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