Michigan’s Judicial Accountability Problem: Secrecy, Misconduct, and a System That Protects Itself

Michigan’s judicial oversight body operates almost entirely in secret by constitutional design. In 2023 it received 542 grievances and filed zero public complaints. The question is not whether judges deserve due process. The question is whether a system this opaque can serve anyone but the people it is supposed to oversee.

What the JTC Is and What It Cannot Do

The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission is an independent state agency with a narrow but significant mandate: investigate complaints of judicial misconduct and disability, recommend discipline to the Michigan Supreme Court when warranted. It was created by constitutional amendment and ratified by Michigan voters in August 1968 as Article VI, Section 30 of the Michigan Constitution.^[1] The Commission consists of nine members — four judges elected by their peers, three members of the State Bar (one judge and two lawyers), and two public members appointed by the governor.^[2]

What the Commission cannot do is discipline judges directly. Only the Michigan Supreme Court can impose sanctions — censure, suspension with or without pay, retirement, or removal — and only on the Commission’s formal recommendation.^[3] The Commission investigates. It recommends. It cannot act. That structure places the ultimate accountability decision in the same institution — the court system — whose members are being investigated.

The Commission also cannot function as an appellate court. It has no authority to review a judge’s legal rulings, overturn decisions, or evaluate the merits of cases. The most common allegation in grievances — disagreement with a judge’s ruling or claims of bias — falls outside the Commission’s jurisdiction unless it is accompanied by evidence of actual judicial misconduct, not merely a legal error the complainant believes was wrong.^[4]

The Confidentiality Architecture

The secrecy that defines the JTC’s operating model is not an administrative policy that could be changed by the Commission director or the legislature. It is constitutionally mandated. Article VI, Section 30 of the Michigan Constitution directs the Michigan Supreme Court to make rules providing for the confidentiality and privilege of proceedings.^[5] The Supreme Court did exactly that in MCR 9.221, which shields all preliminary investigation proceedings from public disclosure.

The practical effect is that a grievance filed against a judge, the investigation that follows, and any private discipline imposed — admonishment, caution, or dismissal with explanation — produce no public record. The complainant may receive a response. The judge may receive private discipline. Voters see none of it. The judicial biography on the ballot contains no reference to it. The bar association’s attorney directory reflects nothing from it. The public record that exists is the record the Commission chose to make public, which is limited to cases where it filed a formal complaint.

Proceedings become public only if the Commission files a formal public complaint initiating hearing proceedings, or if the judge petitions the Michigan Supreme Court to review a Commission decision. In 2023, the Commission received 542 grievances against 312 judges.^[6] It filed zero public complaints. In 2024, it received 530 grievances and resolved 622 cases — again, zero new public complaints.^[7] The ratio of complaints received to public accountability produced is not a malfunction. It is the system operating as designed.

The Cases That Illustrate the Problem

In December 2024, the Detroit Free Press published an investigation into Michigan’s judicial accountability system, detailing two cases that illustrate the gap between documented misconduct and public accountability. Wayne County’s Judge Kenneth King and Oakland County’s Judge Kathleen Ryan were both subjects of documented misconduct allegations — King for conduct involving his public social media platform and Ryan for sexual harassment of a court administrator and repeated use of racial and homophobic slurs against court staff. Neither case resulted in a publicly announced formal JTC complaint as of the time of publication.

Under the Commission’s confidentiality rules, it cannot confirm, deny, or describe any investigation that has not produced a public complaint. That means the public cannot know whether either case was investigated, what it found, or whether any private discipline was imposed. The judges remain on the bench. Voters in their jurisdictions have no formal mechanism to learn what the JTC knows or did.

The Barry County record involving Judge Michael Schipper provides a longer evidentiary arc. Clutch Justice has documented JTC-confirmed misconduct in Barry County dating to at least 2014 — conduct involving bias in pending cases that the Commission addressed through private discipline.^[8] Private discipline that is not part of the public record cannot function as a deterrent to future misconduct, and cannot inform the voters who returned Schipper to the bench in subsequent elections. The documented conduct since that private admonishment — including plea agreement violations and conduct raising quid pro quo concerns — is a matter of ongoing Clutch Justice coverage.

These cases are not anomalies. They are examples of how a confidential system processes documented misconduct: privately, without public record, and without any mechanism for voters to exercise informed judgment at the ballot box.

What the NCSC Audit Found

In March 2023, the Association of Black Judges of Michigan wrote to the Michigan Supreme Court documenting that the JTC had prosecuted Black judges at a disproportionately higher rate than White judges over the prior fifteen to twenty years. According to the Association’s data, Black judges represented approximately 16 percent of Michigan’s judiciary during that period but constituted 52 percent of judges publicly charged by the Commission between 2008 and 2022.^[9] The letter was joined by the ACLU of Michigan, the Black Women Lawyers of Michigan, and the Detroit branch of the NAACP. Governor Whitmer added her support in June 2023.

The Commission agreed to an independent review and contracted with the National Center for State Courts to conduct a racial equity analysis of JTC proceedings. Phase I of that analysis, released in August 2024, found statistically significant racial disparities in three parts of the Commission’s process: the average number of grievances filed against Black judges compared to White judges, and the relative rate of public censure.^[10] The interim report did not determine causes — only that disparities existed. Phase II was ongoing to examine whether the disparities were the product of bias in the Commission’s own processes.

The Commission’s response was to say the review would continue. That is a defensible position for an institution that genuinely does not know why the disparities exist. It is also consistent with a system that has operated confidentially for more than fifty years, during which the data showing those disparities was accumulating invisibly inside sealed files.

Michigan’s Broader Ethics and Transparency Context

The JTC’s confidentiality problem does not exist in isolation. Michigan ranked last in a 2015 national study evaluating state ethics and transparency laws, with the Center for Public Integrity citing weak public records laws and the absence of financial disclosure requirements for lawmakers and top state officials as contributing factors.^[11] The Detroit Free Press has documented that this pattern extends across branches: Attorney General offices withholding records in high-profile cases, legislative chambers stonewalling each other’s bills, and FOIA reform efforts consistently stalled by leadership in both parties.

The House Republican leader’s response to FOIA reform questions — reported as “don’t get your hopes up” — is not an outlier position. It is the consistent posture of Michigan’s legislative leadership toward public records access across multiple sessions and multiple parties in power. The JTC’s secrecy is therefore both a specific design problem and an expression of a broader institutional preference for opacity that Michigan’s government has not found the political will to address.

What Reform Would Actually Require

Meaningful reform of Michigan’s judicial accountability system faces a structural obstacle: the most significant confidentiality protections are constitutionally embedded. Requiring public disclosure of all JTC proceedings would require a constitutional amendment — a voter referendum, not a legislative act. Short of that, the Michigan Supreme Court has authority under its rule-making power to adjust the scope of confidentiality under MCR 9.221, which could produce more disclosure without constitutional change.

Specific reforms worth examining include public disclosure of private admonishments without identifying the underlying complainant, a public register of the number and category of private actions taken against each sitting judge (even if the substance remains confidential), a formal appeals pathway for complainants whose grievances were closed without action, and term limits or mandatory disclosure requirements for JTC members to reduce the insularity that a judge-heavy body tends to produce.

None of this requires eliminating the confidentiality protections that shield judges from frivolous or bad-faith complaints during preliminary investigation. Those protections are defensible. What is not defensible is a system in which judicial misconduct can be confirmed, privately addressed, and then repeated — and in which voters are expected to make accountability judgments at the ballot box without any of the information that would make those judgments meaningful.