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Although highly successful in the senate, O'Connor grew restless and decided to return to law. She ran and won a spot on the Maricopa County Superior Court bench in 1974. Explained her senate colleague Anne Lindeman: "At the end of her term she was at a crossroads. She had to choose between politics and the law. She was more comfortable with the law." Said O'Connor about the law: "It is marvelous because it is always changing."
As a trial judge, O'Connor was stern but fair. At least twice, colleagues recall, she advised defendants to get new attorneys because their lawyers had been unprepared. After a Scottsdale mother of two infants pleaded guilty to passing four bad checks totaling $3,500, she begged for mercy from O'Connor, claiming the children would become wards of the state. The father had abandoned the family. O'Connor calmly sentenced the middle-class woman to five to ten years in prison, saying, "You should have known better." But when she got back to her chambers she broke into tears.
Judge O'Connor did not hesitate to order the death penalty for Mark Koch, then 23, who had been found guilty of murder for agreeing to knife another man in return for a $3,300 fee. The contract killing stemmed from a dispute over drugs. (Koch has since appealed the verdict and been granted a new trial.)
When state Republican leaders urged her to run against Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt in 1978, she declined. Instead, she was retained as a judge in Maricopa County and, after only eleven months, was nominated to the Arizona Court of Appeals by Babbitt, who denies trying to sidetrack a potentially dangerous opponent. Says Babbitt: "I had to find the finest talent available to create confidence in our new merit system. Her intellectual ability and her judgment are astonishing."
On the appeals court, O'Connor faced no landmark cases. But she did manage to cut the court's case load by persuading her former colleagues in the senate to modify laws involving workmen's compensation and unemployment insurance. Generally, she upheld trial judges, dismissing appeals from defendants who claimed they had been denied a speedy trial, refused transcripts, and other technicalities. In an article for the current issue of the William and Mary Law Review, she urged federal judges to give greater weight to the factual findings of state courts, contending that when a state judge moves up to the federal bench, "he or she does not become immediately better equipped intellectually to do the job."