How the Survey System Works — And How It Can Be Gamed
For one week per year, every person leaving the courthouse is supposed to receive a survey. That sounds fair enough. Here is the problem: the court controls the docket, which means the court controls which cases are scheduled during survey week, and therefore controls which litigants receive surveys.
Obviously this is flawed, because it only shows what the court wants the state system to see.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Barry County’s own publicly available data tells this story clearly. According to the 2021 Court Caseload Report, the sample breakdown looks like this:
Only 5 individuals surveyed from this population. That is a 1.7% survey rate for the case type most likely to produce critical feedback.
Nearly half of all survey respondents in 2021 came from divorce cases, despite those cases representing a much smaller share of the total docket.
Divorce case overrepresentation in Barry County’s survey sample has been consistent every year since 2015, with the uptick correlating to Schipper’s tenure on the Circuit Court.
Why It Matters
By scheduling and distributing surveys to cases that will produce favorable reviews, the court is not getting a true representation of court performance or public satisfaction. It is skewing the numbers. And those numbers get reported to SCAO as if they mean something.
The people whose experiences are most absent from this data are the people who appear before Judge Schipper in criminal court. The defendants. Their families. The people who have been subjected to sentences that exceed guidelines, violated plea agreements, and the courtroom conduct that multiple attorneys have described as abusive. They are not being surveyed. They are being excluded from the record that gets sent to the state as evidence that the court is performing well.
A satisfaction survey that systematically excludes the most dissatisfied population is not a satisfaction survey. It is a cover story.
You can find the full Barry County 2021 Public Satisfaction Survey report published by SCAO here: SCAO 2021 Public Satisfaction Report — Barry County →
The 2021 Caseload Report showing total case volumes is here: SCAO 2021 Caseload Report — Barry County →
Cross-referencing these two documents is how the cherry-picking pattern becomes visible. The survey data only makes sense when compared against the actual caseload.
2021 Public Satisfaction Survey — Barry County 5th Circuit — courts.michigan.gov →
2021 Caseload Report — Barry County 5th Circuit — courts.michigan.gov →
