Twenty-one days after mailing, the complaint against a sitting Michigan judge has still not been picked up from the post office by the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission. The complaint has been sitting at the post office for two weeks. This is not a one-time delivery anomaly — a prior complaint tracked by Clutch Justice documented the identical pattern. If a recently mailed JTC complaint has not been collected in three weeks, it is a reasonable inference that it may eventually be returned to the sender. The documented failure to collect mail in a timely manner raises a direct question: how many other complaints are sitting uncollected?
Why This Is Problematic
The JTC’s mail is not being delivered to the address listed on the Commission’s website. It is being held at the post office for pickup. The Commission is not conducting timely pickups. This is a documented pattern — a prior complaint brought to Clutch Justice’s attention was similarly held at the post office rather than delivered. The current complaint has been sitting uncollected for two weeks as of this update.
The practical implication is significant: a person who has submitted a formal judicial misconduct complaint — certified, trackable, following the Commission’s own stated process — may have their complaint returned to them unopened because the Commission did not collect it. The complaint represents an act of civic participation that carries personal risk for the complainant. The Commission’s failure to collect its own mail is a process failure that compounds every other documented problem with the JTC’s accountability infrastructure.
How many other complaints are currently sitting at the post office? How many may involve urgent matters — allegations against judges who are actively hearing cases while a complaint about their conduct sits uncollected two miles away? How many have already been returned to senders who assumed their complaint was received and processed, when it was never opened? The JTC’s mail handling process does not answer these questions because it was not designed to. A 57-year-old process — created before cell phones, email, and digital tracking existed — was never designed for public accountability. The question is why it has not been redesigned in the intervening decades.
The 57-Year-Old Process Problem
The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission was established by Article VI, Section 30 of the Michigan Constitution and has operated under substantially the same complaint process since its creation. The process predates the digital communication infrastructure that now makes every other governmental complaint mechanism — from FOIA requests to unemployment claims — accessible electronically, trackable, and acknowledgment-generating.
The JTC still requires notarized complaint forms. There is no electronic submission option. There is no digital complaint tracking. There is no automated acknowledgment. The Commission picks up its mail on its own schedule, from a post office, without any public timeline for doing so. The documented result is that judicial misconduct complaints against judges including those identified in prior Clutch Justice coverage — Oakland County’s Judge Kirsten Nielsen Hartig, Allegan County’s Judge Margaret Bakker, and Barry County’s Judge Michael Schipper — take years to generate formal action, while complainants have no visibility into whether their filings have been received, reviewed, or dismissed.
The State Bar of Michigan opens voting for a Judicial Tenure Commission seat on July 1, 2025. Nominee M. Michael Koroi, Esq., is a documented supporter of court reform. The JTC’s structural problems — the mail handling failure, the notarization requirement, the absence of electronic submission and complaint tracking, the investigative timelines that allow documented misconduct to persist for years — require institutional actors who are willing to address them rather than inherit and perpetuate them. A JTC member committed to modernization would be a necessary, though not sufficient, step toward a Commission that functions as a genuine accountability mechanism. Clutch Justice will be publishing a Q&A with Koroi in the coming weeks.
Rita Williams, Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission Tracking: Failure to Pickup, Clutch Justice (June 21, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/21/michigan-judicial-tenure-commission-tracking-failure-to-pickup/.
Williams, R. (2025, June 21). Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission tracking: Failure to pickup. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/21/michigan-judicial-tenure-commission-tracking-failure-to-pickup/
Williams, Rita. “Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission Tracking: Failure to Pickup.” Clutch Justice, 21 June 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/06/21/michigan-judicial-tenure-commission-tracking-failure-to-pickup/.
Williams, Rita. “Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission Tracking: Failure to Pickup.” Clutch Justice, June 21, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/21/michigan-judicial-tenure-commission-tracking-failure-to-pickup/.
