Monroe County Court Judge John Connell shares his passion for scuba

Daily Record (Rochester, NY), Oct 12, 2004 by Nora A. Jones

I can't think of anything more relaxing than the silence and weightlessness experienced on a dive, Monroe County Court Judge John Connell noted as he discussed his passion for scuba diving. It is effortless to move, you see things that perhaps no other human has seen, and you have only the sound of air bubbles.

With 23 years of diving experience, he has enjoyed countless dives in both salt and fresh water.

Charting A Career Course

A Rochester native, Connell attended LeMoyne College in Syracuse, earning his undergraduate degree in history.

I was very interested in some type of foreign service and took the Foreign Service Test, he reflected. It seemed it would be beneficial to have a law degree for this type of work. I had no interest whatsoever in criminal law.

During his stint at Union College, Albany Law School, Connell became interested in trial work while serving as a student intern in the Schenectady District Attorney's Office.

In 1972, he clerked for (then-Family Court Judge) Howard A. Levine, who has since retired from the New York Court of Appeals. From there he briefly went to work for a law firm before joining the Schenectady DA's Office full time in 1974.

Beginning to miss being near the Great Lakes and Finger Lakes, Connell inquired at the Monroe County District Attorney's Office about a possible transfer. He learned that there was an immediate opening, came in the next day for an interview and two weeks later was working in Rochester. With prior experience in a DA's office, Connell worked in the felony and supreme courts and later headed up the Career Criminals Bureau. He also spent time working in the Narcotics Unit and in the Homicide Bureau.

When the mob wars started, I was working in homicide investigation, alongside Don Wisner and Bob King who were federal prosecutors and Mel Castro who was working for the state, Connell said. As it turned out, I never got to prosecute any of these cases because by the time trial dates came up, I had been appointed to fill a vacancy on the Monroe County Court bench.

That was 1984, and later that year he successfully won the election to put him in the job for 10 years. In 1994, he again succeeded at the polls and is currently campaigning for his third judicial term.

Exploring New Waters

In 1981, Judge Connell began taking scuba diving instructions at the Maplewood YMCA.

It was something I always wanted to do and I finally made time to do it, he said.

Spending time in the pool and in lake water, he earned his first certification diving in Canandaigua Lake.

The first level of certification allows you to dive up to 30 feet, he explained, noting that there is essentially a new aquatic atmosphere every 30 feet.

In the years that followed, he continued to train to dive deeper, and enjoyed many dives in Canandaigua, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River and Alexandria Bay.

There are numerous ship wrecks in that region of the St. Lawrence, Judge Connell noted. The fresh water keeps them from deteriorating. I found a paddlewheel boat from the 1800s particularly interesting, but there are so many things to see and explore.

Judge Connell has also done saltwater diving, perhaps most memorably in the Caribbean and the Pacific off of Hawaii.

I was still working at the DA's office when I took a trip to Hawaii and made a 140 foot dive to explore a sunken U.S. World War II sub off the Maui coast, he reflected. It was a deep dive and I blew out the blood vessels in my ears - which is really the only injury I've ever had in the water. The difficulty was the doctors wouldn't let me fly home and I knew my colleagues wouldn't want to believe I was really stuck in Hawaii. But that's how it was. I stayed one extra week and got medical permission to fly home.

Just a few weeks ago the judge was diving in Lake Ontario, offshore from Hedges Nine Mile Point Restaurant. He reported there were many fish and all sizes of boulders. The water was about 64 degrees.

The temperature of the water doesn't seem to affect Judge Connell. Of course, he wears a wetsuit for his dives.

A wetsuit basically involves admitting a small amount of water into the suit so your skin warms the water for insulation, he explained. A drysuit is essentially the same thing, except a thin layer of air is channeled in for insulation.

He went on to explain that modern diving equipment has many safety features built in, taking the guessing out of many aspects of diving. The console has a depth gauge, a gauge monitoring air supply, water temperature, a compass and instruments to track how quickly you are descending or how long you can safely stay out.

You wear weights to counterbalance the water's buoyancy, Judge Connell explained. And you use a regulator to reach a state of weightlessness below the surface. Astronauts actually train for weightless activity in the scuba environment.

On The Home Front

Judge Connell was widowed when his two sons were young. Seven years ago he married Susan, who has taken up diving and is training to become a scuba instructor.