Michigan ranks last nationally for government transparency — a structural condition that creates fertile ground for prosecutorial misconduct to persist without accountability. Michigan prosecutors have embezzled forfeiture funds, engaged in the very conduct they were prosecuting, and structured criminal indictments in ways the Michigan Supreme Court found unconstitutional. These are not isolated failures of individual character. They are predictable outcomes of a system in which elected prosecutors face minimal formal oversight, operate under broad immunity, and rarely encounter professional consequences proportionate to the harm their misconduct produces. Understanding the documented cases is the first step toward understanding what reform would actually require.
Understanding Prosecutorial Misconduct
Prosecutorial misconduct refers to inappropriate or illegal actions taken by a prosecutor — the official charged by the state with seeking justice rather than securing conviction at any cost. Common forms include suppressing evidence that would benefit the defense in violation of Brady v. Maryland, making improper or inflammatory statements to juries, knowingly using false or misleading testimony to obtain conviction, and engaging in personal conduct that violates professional ethics standards applicable to all licensed attorneys.
What makes prosecutorial misconduct particularly significant is the structural environment in which it occurs. Prosecutors exercise enormous discretion: they decide who to charge, what to charge them with, what plea offers to extend, and what evidence to present. They operate under broad absolute immunity from civil liability for conduct in their prosecutorial role. They face bar disciplinary proceedings that are historically slow and rarely result in meaningful sanctions. And because prosecutors are typically elected officials, their accountability runs primarily to voters rather than to institutional oversight bodies with the expertise and authority to meaningfully evaluate prosecutorial conduct.
Michigan’s ranking at the bottom of national government transparency assessments creates additional structural cover. When public records are difficult to obtain, when disclosure is limited, and when oversight infrastructure is thin, misconduct that would otherwise be detected and documented persists longer and produces more harm before accountability mechanisms engage — if they engage at all.
Documented Cases
Former Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith was charged in 2020 with embezzling more than $600,000 from drug and drunk driving forfeiture funds — money seized through law enforcement operations that should have been directed to law enforcement purposes or returned to public coffers. Smith used those funds for personal expenses including home security systems and events unrelated to any official purpose.
Smith pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison, ordered to pay restitution, and subsequently disbarred. The case illustrates a form of prosecutorial misconduct distinct from wrongful conviction: the misappropriation of the institutional resources that a prosecutor controls by virtue of office, for personal benefit. It also illustrates a pattern that is made possible by inadequate financial oversight of the funds that prosecutors manage through forfeiture proceedings — funds that, in Michigan’s transparency-deficient environment, may be particularly vulnerable to diversion.
Stuart Dunnings III served as Ingham County Prosecutor for nearly two decades. During that time he cultivated a public reputation as a particularly aggressive prosecutor of sex work offenses. In 2016, he was charged with engaging in prostitution — the very conduct he had been prosecuting — as well as misconduct in office. The charges covered hundreds of instances spanning years of his tenure.
The case carries a specific institutional significance beyond the personal hypocrisy it documents. A prosecutor who is enforcing laws that he is personally and repeatedly violating is not merely a hypocrite. He is corrupting the integrity of every charging decision he makes in that category of offense: every case in which he decided to prosecute, every plea he negotiated, every sentence he sought against individuals engaged in conduct he was simultaneously engaged in himself. The scope of that institutional harm — extending across hundreds of cases and years of enforcement decisions — is not captured by the criminal sentence he received.
Dunnings pleaded guilty to a felony count of misconduct in office and a misdemeanor for engaging the services of a prostitute. He was sentenced to three years of probation, with the first year in jail, and was subsequently disbarred.
The Flint water crisis — in which the state’s decision to switch the city’s water source to the Flint River without adequate corrosion control resulted in lead contamination of the water supply and poisoning of residents — produced criminal charges against multiple state officials, including former Governor Rick Snyder and health department executives. The prosecutorial effort represented one of the most significant attempts in Michigan history to hold government officials criminally accountable for decisions that caused widespread public health harm.
In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the mechanism used to bring those charges — a one-judge grand jury — was unconstitutional. The ruling did not address the merits of the underlying conduct or exonerate the officials charged. It addressed the procedural vehicle through which the indictments were issued, and found that vehicle inconsistent with Michigan constitutional requirements for grand jury proceedings. The charges were dismissed as a result.
Subsequent prosecution efforts refiled charges through a conventional charging mechanism. But the constitutional collapse of the original indictments produced years of additional delay for Flint residents who had already waited years for any accountability — and raised fundamental questions about how a prosecution of this significance had been structured around a procedural mechanism that was ultimately found unconstitutional.
Michigan’s last-place ranking for government transparency is not a peripheral fact about these cases. It is a structural condition that shapes how quickly misconduct is detected, how thoroughly it is documented, and how much harm accumulates before accountability mechanisms engage. An environment of limited disclosure, slow FOIA responses, and inadequate institutional oversight does not cause misconduct — but it extends the window in which misconduct can occur without consequence, and it makes the documentation necessary for accountability harder to assemble after the fact.
Sources
Rita Williams, Uneven Justice: Examining Prosecutorial Misconduct Cases in Michigan, Clutch Justice (Apr. 26, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/04/26/uneven-justice-examining-michigan-prosecutorial-misconduct-cases/.
Williams, R. (2025, April 26). Uneven justice: Examining prosecutorial misconduct cases in Michigan. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/04/26/uneven-justice-examining-michigan-prosecutorial-misconduct-cases/
Williams, Rita. “Uneven Justice: Examining Prosecutorial Misconduct Cases in Michigan.” Clutch Justice, 26 Apr. 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/04/26/uneven-justice-examining-michigan-prosecutorial-misconduct-cases/.
