As a Superior Court judge in Yuma County, Maria Elena Cruz couldn’t go to the grocery store without running into a constituent or someone who appeared in her courtroom. She said it made her a better person. 

Cruz was first elected to the bench when she was 35 and has spent her career in service of her community. Now, as she ascends to the Arizona Supreme Court, she keeps the same small town perspective at the center. 

This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity. 

How did you first come into contact with the legal system? How did that later foray into pursuing a career in the law? 

I had a serious car accident. One of those where I thought in the moment that I probably was going to die. I’m bracing myself for the moment where all the questions will be answered, where either the lights will go off or some transformation will happen. I remember grabbing the steering wheel and thinking, “This is it, and I’m about to find out all the answers.” And I was out for a short period of time, and then I opened my eyes, and I was still here. I was still here, and later in looking for legal representation, it was through connections and contacts that I was able to have an appointment with an attorney. 

When you think about it from the perspective of living here in Phoenix, personal injury attorneys are everywhere, everywhere, and that was not the case for me. And I remember thinking after that matter, or as that matter was progressing, just this is not something I would be able to do without an attorney. And this attorney is uniquely positioned to help me. I saw attorneys as servants of the people, in a sense, their profession, no doubt, but certainly there to provide a unique service, to champion the rights of an individual. And I thought, that’s work that I could do. 

Once you started working in law, at what points did you pivot? What guided your thinking in those transitions?

I, in law school, had the opportunity to participate in the prosecution clinic, and started prosecuting cases, under supervision of a professor, misdemeanor cases. And I found that to be incredibly important and gratifying work. I thought I felt like a superhero. Just righting the wrongs, bringing people to justice. I, honestly, in my mind, I felt like, bring me a cape. I’m a superhero now, right? And I had incredible respect for our system. Fortunately, I had never been exposed to sort of the negative side of the legal system, especially of the criminal law system, and so I didn’t realize how quickly and how easily someone’s rights can be trampled on. It’s something that I just needed to see up close. 

Some of my colleagues recommended that I get some experience as a defense attorney. They said the best prosecutors have some defense experience. And I thought, well, I’m probably not going to like it, but I’ll go do it, and then I’ll know. In my first group of assigned cases as a defense attorney, I had the case of a person who was innocent, completely innocent, not even in the country when the offense occurred. He was accused of a drive-by shooting, and it was a misidentification. And I could not believe that this could happen so easily. It was incredibly difficult knowing that so much responsibility rested on me, on the work I did. It took two months to get this person out of custody every time, but I was successful in the end. But every weekend, every Friday, I would think, here’s another weekend that I wasn’t able to get this person out, and here’s an innocent person in custody and potentially going to prison.It was incredibly eye opening, and it didn’t sour me to the work that I had been doing as a prosecutor, but it balanced me. It really brought me to center. 

How did you approach your work as an attorney?

I didn’t want to just be someone who defended people, helped them get out of trouble and continue on a revolving door. That didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to know that what I was doing was to a good and righteous end. With each client, after we talked about the case and potential defenses and what we could do, I always took the time to talk about the person. How did we get here? Were we on the right track, and we took a wrong turn because something happened? Or were we never on the right track because unfortunately, we were born into circumstances where other people had made decisions that had put us in the wrong place? Empowering those people to understand that regardless of how you got to be where we are today, where you’re on the other side of the glass looking at me, there is a way out of this. 

Most sentences in our criminal justice system are not life sentences. Most of them are not death sentences. Most of them are for a period of time. And so there’s always the opportunity for those folks to choose again and choose differently. So I wanted to be there, have that conversation and feel like I was actually adding value to the community by doing that. Even though nobody required it of me and it wasn’t technically my job to do but I needed that for my own soul.

Being from a smaller county, you’ve connected with and been elected by your community, how has this informed your perspective as a judge? 

A judge in a rural community is used to being with people. We live among the people whose disputes we resolve, and among the people we supervise on probation. 

I had a program called Swift, Accountable, Fair, Enforcement, SAFE, and it was to address probation violations, low level probation violations or low level offender violations. And the idea was, when there was a positive urinalysis result or some failing to bring that person in within 24 hours, like the next morning, you’re in front of a judge. We issue a sanction, you complete the sanction, and you’re back in good standing and moving on. 

I had a person in the program who had a violation come before the court the next morning. We talked about her doing two days in custody, but she had a job at a grocery store, and we didn’t want her to lose her employment as a result of this. So we planned to schedule her sanction for the weekend. I’m going to release you. You’re going to go to work, and then in a couple days, you’re going to turn yourself back in. And so we go through that process, and then later in the day, cut to Maria Elena Cruz grocery shopping, pushing her little cart, and there’s the woman at the register that I just released from jail. 

Those interactions happen all of the time. It may seem an annoyance to some to have to be so visible, to be on all the time, but I think it makes us better people. We’re accountable for all of the decisions that we make.

How do you plan to empower and represent the people who have not seen themselves reflected in the Supreme Court before? What does that look like to you?

Doing the job of a justice to the very best of my ability is my goal. As I’m doing that people will see me. It’s very apparent that I’m a woman, it’s very apparent that I’m Afro, Latina. That I’m not white, and that diversity will speak for itself, and people will see someone doing this work and looking like anybody else in the community. And of course, it’s not just a matter of having me, it’s a matter of having my colleagues on the court as well, just looking at us as a collection of citizens from a cross section of our state, I think that will be key. 

What has kept you tied to your community? What do you love about Yuma?

When I tell you that I love Yuma, when I tell you how much that shocks me that I got to this point, because when I got to Yuma at 14, I never thought that I would utter those words. Yuma has given me every opportunity to serve and to excel. 

Feeling so connected to my community, being elected by them, that was an incredible moment for me… To have the trust of the public placed in me to make decisions over who’s going to be the primary parent of a child, a person has been convicted of an offense, and I have discretion to decide whether to let them stay in the community under supervision or go to prison, what’s best in this case – all of those critical decisions – to have my community bestow me with the power and responsibility to make those decisions and then re-elect me over and over to do that, affirming their initial decision, connected me to them in a way that is difficult to describe. 

I am Yuma. Yuma made me. I wouldn’t be where I am without my community. They’re the ones who thought I should come out here and be a Court of Appeals judge for them. They’re the ones who wrote letters, people from both parties, to the governor to get me here. 

I’m Yuma. I’m rural. I’m here.