Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission Releases 2024 Report: Judge Marge Bakker’s Ex Parte Conduct Featured Anonymously

The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission released its 2024 Annual Report with no fanfare. It rarely does. These documents move through the system quietly, described in bureaucratic language designed to inform without alarming, document without exposing, and provide accountability without delivering it.

The 2024 report is worth reading carefully.

What the Report Documents

The MJTC received 622 complaints against Michigan judges in 2024. It closed 586 of them without taking any action. That is a 94.2% no-action rate from the body whose sole function is judicial oversight.

Among the cases the report chose to describe, one involves a circuit court judge who engaged in years of ex parte communication with a prosecutor. The entry is anonymized. The conduct described is documented. Allegan County residents and anyone who has followed Clutch Justice’s prior coverage of Judge Marge Bakker and People v. Loew will recognize it immediately.

What Ex Parte Communication Actually Means

Ex parte communication is contact between a judge and one party, or a party’s representative, conducted outside the presence of the opposing party. Under the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct and Michigan’s own judicial ethics standards, it is prohibited. The prohibition is not a technicality. It is the structural mechanism by which judicial neutrality is maintained. When a judge communicates privately with a prosecutor about cases, the defendant in those cases is participating in a proceeding in which the referee has a private relationship with one side.

The MJTC report documents that this communication at the Allegan County court was not a single incident. It was a pattern sustained over years. That distinction matters. Years of private contact between a judge and a prosecutor is not inadvertence. It is a working relationship that, by definition, existed outside the formal record of every case it touched.

The Bakker Record

The ex parte conduct documented in People v. Loew is not only prior Clutch Justice coverage. It is referenced in the Michigan Judicial Institute Disqualification Benchbook as an example of the kind of conduct that triggers disqualification requirements. The case has been part of the formal institutional record of Michigan judicial ethics for years.

Myrene Koch, the former Allegan County prosecutor with whom Bakker engaged in the documented communications, was ousted by voters. She is now working as an Assistant Prosecutor in Berrien County.

The Pattern Does Not Stop with Bakker

Former Judge Roberts Kengis, who was also a former Allegan County prosecutor, engaged in ex parte communications documented in a prior JTC report. Kengis is no longer on the bench. The pattern of former prosecutors becoming judges in the same county system they previously prosecuted, and then maintaining private working relationships with current prosecutors, is not unique to Allegan County. It is a structural feature of how small judicial circuits operate when the same professional networks cycle through multiple institutional roles over decades.

Why the Anonymization Is Its Own Problem

The Commission’s stated rationale for anonymizing cases in public reports is due process protection for judges whose matters have not been formally adjudicated. That is a defensible principle in the abstract. Applied here, it produces a document that tells the public “a judge did this for years” without telling the public which judge, in which county, affecting which cases and which defendants. The people most directly harmed by that conduct, the parties who appeared before Bakker in cases she should have been recused from, have no mechanism to identify themselves as potentially affected.

Anonymization in an oversight report is not neutral. It is a design choice that protects institutional actors while leaving affected parties without information they need to pursue their own remedies.

De-Anonymizing the JTC Record

Clutch Justice is working to match every anonymized entry in the JTC’s annual reports to identifiable judges, using prior coverage, court records, case documentation, and public information. The goal is a first-of-its-kind Michigan judicial accountability record that provides the public with what the Commission’s own reports withhold.

If you have information about additional JTC report entries, or cases in which you believe Bakker’s documented ex parte communications affected your proceeding, reach out. Michigan’s courts belong to the public. The record should too.