Ziegler takes Monroe County lessons to appeals court

When word got around that Judge Todd Ziegler was leaving the Monroe County bench, one of the people who reached out was a treatment court graduate.

Ziegler had spent 19 years hearing cases in Monroe County, where he grew up. Most of the time, he said, he made a decision and never found out what happened to the people afterward. In treatment court, he saw people get sober and reconnect with their families. Some kept in touch.

“Those connections remind you why you’re doing the work,” he said.

Gov. Tony Evers appointed Ziegler to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District IV. Ziegler is based in Madison, and the district covers 24 counties, including Monroe County. He said he plans to run for election in April to keep the seat.

As a circuit judge, Ziegler spent much of his day hearing directly from people in court. Now he reads briefs and transcripts, discusses cases with other judges, and writes opinions.

There’s something he tells himself when he opens a case file. “While a case may be routine to me, it is the most important case for the people involved,” he said.

He’d begun to understand that as a lawyer in Sparta. For 11 years, he represented people in everything from divorces to criminal cases. Clients wanted their chance to tell the judge what had happened. If they lost, they wanted to know why. Ziegler took that with him to the bench in 2007.

“I think it really comes down to people just want to be heard, and they just want to be treated fairly in a respectful manner,” Ziegler said.

Ziegler helped start the county’s OWI Treatment Court in 2012. It brought attorneys, treatment providers, probation staff, and others together to work with people whose cases were tied to addiction. When participants finished, he asked what the court could do better. The team made changes based on what graduates told them.

“Being a treatment court judge made me a better judge overall,” he said.

It made him think more about what a judge could miss in a brief encounter. Someone who reacted badly in court might be carrying the effects of trauma. The facts and the law still governed the decision, Ziegler said, but he could explain at the start of a hearing what would happen. When he ruled, he could tell people how he had considered what they said.

At least 80 people have graduated from Monroe County’s OWI Treatment Court, Ziegler said. The program exceeded his expectations, including after the county adapted it to serve people with fifth or sixth impaired driving offenses.

He grew up working in his parents’ grocery store in Leon and on area dairy farms. Law school hadn’t crossed his mind until a friend at UW-Platteville talked about going. After earning his law degree at UW-Madison, Ziegler spent a year clerking for Appeals Judge Gordon Myse in Wausau. He liked the hours spent working through legal questions and drafting opinions.

Ziegler had little time to decide whether to run for judge in 2007. Monroe County Circuit Judge Stephen Abbott announced he would retire shortly before nomination papers were due. A few local attorneys urged Ziegler to run. He talked it over with his wife, Andrea, and entered the race. After work and on weekends, he knocked on doors, meeting people in the county where he’d grown up.

When the District IV openings came up in 2026, Ziegler called judges and court staff to talk about the job. Those conversations reminded him what he had liked about the work. He wanted to bring his experience as a trial judge in a rural county to the appeals court.

On appeal cases, judges generally use the existing record to decide whether a legal error occurred. Ziegler said that after years of presiding over hearings and trials, he can often picture the cases behind a transcript and consider what the trial judge was weighing in the moment. Some of the issues he sees now rarely came up in Monroe County.

Ziegler has continued returning to Monroe County for treatment court graduations. He arrives early so he can talk with the graduates before they walk into court.

“Graduations were typically very emotional for me,” he said.

He remembers what happened when graduates took their stories to the County Board.

“I went to county board meetings for 19 years,” Ziegler said. “And the only times that I saw standing ovations were when our treatment court graduates would come and talk.”