Our fifth Lucas County Prosecutor was the son of the first Lucas County prosecutor, Andrew Coffinberry; they were the only father and son to both be elected to this office. Born in 1818, in Mansfield, Ohio, where his father practiced law prior to moving to Toledo, Coffinberry studied law under his father, whose first office was in Perrysburg Ohio. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1841, five years after his father served as the first Lucas County Prosecutor. He subsequently opened a law office with his father in Maumee, Ohio.

It is said that he, at a young age, attained the public's confidence because of his personal integrity and ability as an attorney. He was only twenty-five years old when elected Lucas County Prosecutor! After his term was completed, Coffinberry moved to Hancock County, where he purchased and edited the Findlay Herald Newspaper.

Yet another career was launched when Coffinberry moved to Cleveland in 1855, where he was elected to a judgeship on the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court and served in that capacity during the Civil War, from 1861-1865. It was said of him:

He delivered some very able opinions, verbal and written, which elicited the favorable consideration of the public...no judicial opinion pronounced by him has ever been reversed on review by a higher court...Judge Coffinberry has been successful in almost every undertaking and has richly deserved it. [Knapp, H.S., History of the Maumee Valley, 1972, p. 318].

When a special ceremony was organized in 1936 by then-outgoing Lucas County Prosecutor Frazier Reams, James M. Coffinberry's great-grandson James Coffinberry Morley, was in attendance as a special tribute to both his great grandfather and his great, great grandfather, the very first Lucas County Prosecutor, Andrew "Count" Coffinberry.