Michigan’s sentencing system is not advisory in spirit; it is statutory in design. The Legislature created sentencing guidelines to constrain judicial power, promote proportionality, and ensure that people across the state are punished according to law rather than personal philosophy. Judges may depart from those guidelines, but only when legally justified and only when the extent of the departure is proportionate to the offense and the offender.

But sentencing law is only one part of what keeps courts legitimate. Due process also depends on basic procedural control: reliable scheduling, meaningful notice, and a court that actually functions in a predictable, transparent way. When those foundations erode, judicial power stops being constrained by law and starts operating by disruption.

In Barry County, a growing body of appellate remands and documented procedural failures now raises the question of whether Judge Michael Schipper is honoring that framework at all.

Over the past year, the Michigan Court of Appeals has repeatedly sent Schipper’s sentences back for reconsideration after extreme upward departures that could not be legally sustained. At the same time, cases like People v. Handley show hearings being canceled without proper notice, leaving parties and families unable to appear or be heard.

These are not isolated corrections or clerical missteps. They reflect a deeper and more troubling pattern: a court that appears to treat both sentencing law and basic procedural safeguards as secondary to the judge’s own discretion.

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“I Can Do Whatever I Want”

Court transcripts from Schipper’s courtroom reveal statements that go far beyond frustration with legal constraints. In sentencing proceedings, Schipper has openly described the Michigan sentencing guidelines as something “created by people in Lansing,” rather than as binding law passed by the Legislature. In another instance, he stated on the record that he “can do whatever” he wants, even if it appears unconstitutional from the outside.

That framing is not just rhetoric. It reveals a judicial philosophy fundamentally at odds with how sentencing is supposed to work in Michigan.

The guidelines are not suggestions from a distant capital. They are enacted law. They exist precisely to prevent trial judges from imposing wildly disparate punishments based on personal belief, political instinct, or emotional reaction to a case.

When a judge publicly dismisses those limits, the rule of law inside that courtroom is no longer secure.

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Pattern of Retaliation Against Speech and Family Advocacy

Across multiple cases, Judge Schipper and Prosecutor’s Office have treated constitutionally protected speech and family advocacy as punishable conduct. This is not incidental. It is a recurring pattern that turns sentencing into a tool for suppressing dissent and isolating defendants from their support systems.

In Michigan, defendants and their families have a First Amendment right to speak, to criticize court proceedings, and to advocate publicly and privately for their loved ones. Courts may regulate conduct inside a courtroom for order and safety, but they may not retaliate against people for their speech, their criticism, or their advocacy.

That line has been crossed repeatedly in Schipper’s courtroom.

Family members who speak out, file complaints, or challenge the process have been treated and scored in the Offense Variables (OVs) as aggravating factors against the defendant. Instead of protecting the integrity of proceedings, Schipper has allowed protected speech to be reframed as disrespect, noncompliance, or lack of remorse. That is constitutionally forbidden. A judge may not punish a defendant for the speech of others, and may not punish anyone for exercising their right to speak.

This retaliation is not speculative. It was explicitly acknowledged on the appellate record in People v. Arizola, where a then-Barry County Prosecutor explained to the Michigan Court of Appeals that the defendant’s family’s public advocacy and complaints were relevant to the case; that statement alone is extraordinary. It admits that protected First Amendment activity by family members was being treated as part of the sentencing and litigation posture of the case.

Once that door is opened, sentencing stops being about the defendant’s conduct and becomes about whether the defendant and their family are politically quiet, compliant, and non-threatening. That is incompatible with due process.

This practice also explains why Schipper has punished people for speaking out in open court. When defendants challenge the process, object to illegal conditions, or call out misconduct, they are met with hostility rather than neutrality. In several cases, Schipper has treated courtroom speech and protest as justification for harsher outcomes, even when the underlying legal issues were legitimate.

When combined with his public rejection of sentencing guidelines as merely “created by people in Lansing,” this becomes especially dangerous. A judge who believes he is unconstrained by law, and who also treats speech and advocacy as punishable, is exercising raw power rather than judicial authority.

The pattern is now visible across multiple cases: defendants who remain silent are treated more favorably than defendants whose families demand accountability. That is not justice. That is state-funded coercion.

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When Speech Becomes a Sentencing Factor

One of the most alarming elements of Schipper’s record is the repeated appearance of speech, criticism, and dissent as sentencing factors.

In multiple cases that later returned from the Court of Appeals, defendants were subjected to harsher punishment after engaging in conduct that would ordinarily be protected by the First Amendment: speaking out, criticizing the court, or publicly challenging how their case was handled. Rather than treating those expressions as irrelevant to criminal culpability, Schipper treated them as evidence of moral blameworthiness or justification for harsher sentences.

That practice is flatly unconstitutional.

Courts have long held that judges may not punish people for speech, activism, or criticism of government. When speech becomes a proxy for obstruction, or dissent is treated as defiance, the courtroom becomes a place of retaliation rather than justice.

The appellate remands now accumulating from Schipper’s docket show that higher courts are increasingly unwilling to tolerate that line being crossed.

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Procedural Breakdown: When the Court Itself Stops Functioning

Judge Schipper’s pattern is not limited to unlawful sentences or retaliatory treatment of speech. It also includes basic failures of courtroom procedure that directly undermine due process.

In People v. Handley, hearings were canceled without proper notice. That is not an administrative inconvenience. In criminal cases, notice is the mechanism by which the right to be heard exists at all. When a judge cancels or moves hearings without ensuring that the parties and families are properly informed, defendants lose the ability to appear, prepare, or participate, and the record becomes distorted.

This behavior places Schipper squarely in Fit-Bench Category 5: Procedural Control. That category is triggered when a court shows repeated difficulty managing scheduling, notice, access, and basic process in a consistent and lawful way. These are the mechanics that make judicial power accountable. When they fail, nothing else in the courtroom can be trusted.

The significance of Handley is that it shows the problem is not limited to how Schipper decides cases. It extends to whether the court itself is operating in an orderly, transparent, and legally compliant way at all. When hearings disappear, the law disappears with them.

Combined with his guideline defiance, retaliation against speech, and resistance to appellate correction, these procedural breakdowns move Schipper’s profile from concerning to systemic.

The court is no longer merely reaching questionable outcomes. It is failing to reliably execute the process that is supposed to produce lawful ones.

That is exactly the type of risk Fit-Bench was designed to detect. No safety-sensitive system allows this many independent breakdowns to continue without review. Michigan’s judiciary currently does.

The Legislature Versus the Judge

Michigan’s sentencing guidelines were created to ensure that criminal punishment reflects:

• The seriousness of the offense
• The defendant’s prior record
• Statutorily defined aggravating factors
• Mitigation, rehabilitation, and proportionality

They were specifically designed to remove personal ideology from sentencing.

When a judge openly rejects that system by claiming the guidelines come from “people in Lansing” rather than from the law itself, it signals a refusal to recognize legislative authority over punishment. That is not judicial independence. That is judicial override.

The repeated appellate remands in Schipper’s cases demonstrate that this is not a matter of philosophical disagreement. It is a matter of legal compliance.

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The Schipper Pattern Through the Fit-Bench Lens

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In a separate Clutch Justice case study, this court’s behavior was already analyzed using the Fit-Bench framework, a non-diagnostic performance screen designed to detect when judges in safety-sensitive roles show risk-linked patterns that would trigger confidential evaluation in any other profession. That earlier analysis included Judge Schipper as a case study. This article now expands that existing case study using the appellate record and courtroom conduct documented here.

Fit-Bench does not accuse. It measures. It looks for repeatable performance indicators that correlate with known cognitive, neurological, and impulse-control risks, especially in the age range where those conditions become statistically common.

Judge Schipper, estimated to be in his early 60s, sits squarely inside the window where mild cognitive impairment, early neurodegenerative disease, and head-injury related decline most often first appear. Those conditions rarely begin as memory loss. They present as judgment errors, emotional volatility, rigidity, impulsivity, and difficulty applying complex rules under pressure.

That risk becomes legally relevant only when performance failures are repeated, documented, and resistant to correction. In Schipper’s courtroom, they are.

Across the cases discussed in this article, including Velasquez, Arizola, and the series of Court of Appeals remands, the same core indicators appear again and again:

He has rejected Michigan’s sentencing guidelines as merely “created by people in Lansing,” treating them as entirely optional even after appellate courts vacated his sentences and ordered resentencing within the guideline framework. That is a Category 2 and Category 7 failure under Fit-Bench: repeated misapplication of controlling law and resistance to appellate correction.

In Velasquez, he introduced immigration status, a constitutionally suspect factor, into sentencing. In Arizola, the prosecutor openly told the Court of Appeals that the defendant’s family’s protected advocacy was relevant to the case. In multiple matters, family members who spoke, complained, or advocated were treated as aggravating rather than protected. That reflects Category 3 and Category 4 failures: impaired impulse control, personalization of conflict, and inability to separate lawful dissent from courtroom management.

Across Handley and various cases, he demonstrated inability to properly exercise writs and ensure defendants were informed of cancellations. That is Category 5.

Schipper’s courtroom record also reflects Category 1 indicators: difficulty tracking facts, inconsistent rulings on the same legal questions, and reliance on prosecutors to calculate offense variables that the court itself is required to determine. In some instances, those calculations were wrong. In others, they were outsourced. Either way, the judge lost control of core legal functions.

Add to that his on-the-record political and ideological commentary, emotional escalation toward counsel and defendants, misquotation and misapplication of precedent, procedural irregularities affecting transparency, and tangents into unrelated matters, and the pattern sharpens. These are not stylistic quirks. They are textbook indicators of impaired judgment, procedural control, and cognitive reliability under stress.

By the framework’s own scoring, Judge Schipper already spans at least five Fit-Bench risk categories before any medical information is even considered. His publicly acknowledged history of contact football, a sport where roughly one in five players sustain head injury in a given season, raises that profile further.

None of this requires guessing what is happening inside his brain. The law does not require diagnosis. It requires competence, neutrality, and adherence to governing rules. When a judge repeatedly defies sentencing law, injects impermissible factors like immigration and speech into punishment, retaliates against advocacy, and continues doing so after appellate courts intervene, the issue is no longer disagreement. It is performance.

This is exactly why Michigan’s current system is so dangerous. No other safety-sensitive profession leaves this kind of risk unmeasured. Airline pilots, surgeons, police officers, and even commercial drivers are screened when patterns like this appear. Judges, uniquely, are not.

That is the gap Fit-Bench exists to close.

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When Patterns Become Institutional Problems

A single reversed sentence is correction. Multiple reversed sentences for the same conduct is something else entirely.

When appellate courts repeatedly remand cases from the same judge for extreme upward departures, improper scoring, reliance on irrelevant factors, or failure to justify proportionality, it becomes a warning signal to the judiciary as a whole. It tells higher courts that a trial judge is no longer operating within the framework designed to protect fairness and uniformity.

That is when a problem becomes systemic. Systemic does not mean dramatic. It means structural. It means a courtroom is operating under a completely different set of rules than the rest of the state, and obviously, that’s a big problem.

The pattern now emerging from Judge Michael Schipper’s sentencing record fits that description.

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Why This Matters to Everyone

Judges hold enormous power over human lives. That power is only legitimate when it is exercised within the law. When a judge treats sentencing guidelines as optional, appellate review as secondary, and speech as punishable, the harm extends far beyond any single case.

It affects every person who walks into that courtroom not knowing whether they will be judged by law or by temperament.

The Michigan appellate courts are beginning to draw that line. The public should be watching.

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Sources

• People v Milbourn, 435 Mich 630 (1990)
• People v Steanhouse, 500 Mich 453 (2017)
• People v Dixon-Bey, 321 Mich App 490 (2017)
• People v Babcock, 469 Mich 247 (2003)
• Michigan Sentencing Guidelines, MCL 777.1 et seq.

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