My Experience with Michigan Criminal Justice System Misconduct: A Personal Account and How to Take Action

How I Got Here

I never expected to experience the criminal justice system from this side. I have spent years studying it — how it functions, where it fails, and who it harms most. Then my husband was accused of a nonviolent financial crime in Michigan, and everything I understood about the system became something I was living inside of.

Even with the knowledge and framework I had, the experience hit me like a ton of bricks. It is one thing to understand intellectually that the system is broken. It is something else entirely to watch it move through your home, your family, and your life without hesitation or accountability.

My sincerest hope is that you never find yourself here. But if you are already here — if you are reading this because something has happened to someone you love — I want you to know that what you are feeling is not an overreaction. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And it was not designed with your family in mind.

What the System Actually Feels Like

There is a reason people describe this experience as a tornado. A tornado does not assess what is in its path before it destroys it. It does not ask whether you have children, whether you have already survived trauma, whether you are a good person who has done nothing wrong. It simply moves through.

The criminal justice system, as it currently operates in Michigan, functions the same way. The people executing it — the prosecutors, the police, the court staff — are not required to consider what they are doing to you. They are doing their job. Your suffering is not a variable they are asked to weigh.

What I Learned When I Started Researching

After my husband’s arrest, I did what I have always done: I read everything I could find. I spoke to attorneys. I studied the specific laws that applied to our situation. And I found something that stunned me even with my background — there are practices embedded in Michigan’s criminal justice system that would not survive constitutional scrutiny if they were ever seriously challenged, and yet they continue because no one with sufficient resources has challenged them.

One example is what happens to everyone else in a home when police execute a felony warrant. The Fourth Amendment does not stop at the name on the warrant. Inhabitants of a home retain constitutional protections during a search. In practice, those protections are frequently treated as nonexistent by the officers executing the warrant. When I raised this, a Michigan State Police trooper told me directly that they could do whatever they wanted. The confidence behind that statement — the certainty that there would be no consequence — was its own form of evidence about how the system actually works.

The Myth of Innocent Until Proven Guilty

The presumption of innocence is the foundation of criminal law in the United States. It is also, in practice, largely a legal fiction for everyone involved in a criminal case before the verdict is read.

From the moment of arrest, the system treats an accused person as guilty and constructs a process designed to move toward punishment. Bail conditions restrict freedom before any finding of guilt. Pretrial detention — when bail is unaffordable — means people sit in jail for months or years while awaiting a trial that may never result in conviction. Plea bargains are structured to make the risk of trial feel irrational even for innocent defendants.

For the families of the accused, the presumption of innocence was never extended at all. There is no legal protection for what happens to a spouse, a child, or a parent when someone they love is arrested. The law sees them as peripheral. The consequences they live with are not.

Why I Am Documenting This

I started Clutch Justice because I needed a place to put what I was learning, and because I believed — and still believe — that documented, specific, evidence-based accountability is the only thing that moves systems like this one. Outrage alone does not move institutions. Records do. Analysis does. Sustained, named, verifiable documentation of what is happening and who is responsible does.

This site began as a personal record of one family’s experience with Michigan’s criminal justice system. It has grown into something larger: an investigative platform that covers judicial misconduct, prosecutorial accountability, sentencing policy, and the structural conditions that allow harm to persist without consequence.

But it started here. With a family, a crisis, and a decision to write it down rather than absorb it in silence.

Additional Reading