Publishing a Formal Administrative Notice for Barry County, Michigan
Key Takeaways
- The article discusses the importance of publishing a formal administrative notice for Barry County, Michigan, particularly regarding insurance and risk management.
- It outlines the notice as a request for internal review of court and probation practices, emphasizing transparency and timeline preservation.
- The notice addresses irregularities in court record handling, third-party communications in probation, and safety management concerns.
- Publishing an administrative notice serves as a governance document, preventing ambiguity and documenting critical issues raised to public institutions.
- The article highlights potential legal consequences if the county fails to act on the notice, underscoring the importance of accountability.
QuickFAQs
A formal administrative notice requesting internal review of court and probation practices in Barry County, Michigan.
To preserve the timeline, ensure transparency, and document institutions notice.
No. It is a pre-litigation governance and risk-preservation step.
Because once notice is given, failure to act can carry legal and financial consequences for a county.
The Role of Administrative Notice in Public Oversight
Administrative notices exist for a reason. They are not accusations. They are not ultimatums. They are early-warning mechanisms designed to give public institutions the opportunity to examine and correct internal practices before harm compounds.
In local government, these notices often trigger:
- Internal risk review
- Insurer notification, such as to the Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority
- Record preservation obligations
- Process audits
None of that requires litigation. All of it requires clarity. Publishing a notice does one additional thing: it locks the timeline.
What This Notice Covers
The notice submitted to the Barry County Board of Commissioners requests administrative review in three narrow areas:
- Court record-handling irregularities
Including concerns about compliance with ministerial duties and statutory protections governing public records. - Probation reliance on third-party communications
Particularly where those communications originated from individuals subject to Personal Protection Orders and were accepted without documented neutral verification. - Risk and safety management concerns
Where probation supervision was placed on notice of credible household safety risks involving minor children.
The notice also references state-level record discrepancies between local certified records and the Michigan Supreme Court docket, raising questions about data transmission accuracy and downstream liability.
The full text of the notice is reproduced below for transparency and record preservation.
Why Publish a Notice Like This?
Publishing a notice is not about leverage. It is about process discipline. Public institutions frequently argue that problems arise from:
- Miscommunication
- Clerical error
- Isolated oversight
- Lack of awareness
A published notice removes ambiguity. It documents:
- What was raised
- When it was raised
- To whom it was raised
- And what corrective opportunity was provided
That matters to auditors, insurers, and courts alike.
What This Is Not
To be explicit, this publication is not:
- A demand
- A threat
- A claim of liability
- An assertion of intent to litigate
It is a governance document, shared publicly in the interest of transparency and institutional integrity.
Full Text: Formal Notice Requesting Administrative Review
FORMAL NOTICE REQUESTING ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW
TO: Barry County Board of Commissioners
CC: SCAO Region 5 Administrator
FROM: Rita Williams
DATE: February 16, 2026
RE: Administrative Record Integrity, Probation Practices, and Risk Exposure
Actual Notice of Threat and Failed Intervention
In August 2025, I provided Barry County probation staff with actual, contemporaneous notice that an individual with active criminal history had threatened my life. This notice was not vague or informal. It included a copy of a police report and screenshots documenting the threats. At that point, the Barry County probation officer with supervisory authority had both:
- Documented evidence of a specific threat to safety, and
- Responsibility to assess and mitigate risk under established probation protocols.
Despite having that notice in hand, no protective intervention occurred. Instead, the situation continued to escalate, ultimately leading to repeated filings and proceedings targeting me. The failure to act on documented, verifiable risk did not merely reflect passive inattention; it allowed a known threat to persist across an entire household while the State retained enforcement authority over a reporting party.
From an institutional perspective, this sequence matters for two reasons:
- It transforms isolated threats into foreseeable harm once notice was given, and
- It strengthens exposure under civil rights and risk management frameworks because documented notice followed by inaction is exactly the pattern that creates state-created danger and duty-to-act risk profiles, not neutral supervisory discretion.
Under the Fourteenth Amendment, state officials can be held liable if they act in a way that makes a person (or in this case, persons) more vulnerable to danger. By refusing to intervene or redirect the situation after being notified of a death threat, and allowing it to continue for months, they created a “zone of danger.”
The Michigan Trial Court Employee Code of Conduct requires staff to “maintain relationships… to promote mutual respect and improve the quality of services.” Ignoring a police report regarding a death threat, and ignoring months of harassment, is a gross deviation from the standard of care.
Of three separate counties involved, Barry County is the only one that failed to act.
Supervision Conduct and Financial Harm
Throughout my supervision, the probation officer was fully aware of my financial difficulties and escalating hardship. Despite that knowledge, she did not offer referrals, resources, or any assistance commonly associated with rehabilitative supervision. Instead, she imposed repeated travel and compliance requirements that directly increased my financial strain, without any articulated rehabilitative purpose or individualized findings. Tellingly, her primary focus was policing what I said about Barry County.
When concerns were raised, the justification offered was the need to “stabilize” me. However, financial destabilization is not consistent with evidence-based supervision practices, nor does it align with any recognized rehabilitative framework. Requiring additional expenditures without support does not promote compliance, public safety, or successful reentry. It compounds risk.
I felt intentionally set-up to fail.
During this same period, the probation officer failed for months to meaningfully intervene in documented harassment directed at me. Despite this inaction, threats of probation violation were issued regularly. Those threats persisted even as the underlying safety concerns remained unaddressed.
Relevant mitigating factors were consistently disregarded. My status as a doctoral candidate, my work preparing testimony for House and Senate hearings, and my ongoing volunteer and community engagement were not acknowledged as stabilizing or pro-social conduct. Employment opportunities were lost during this period, directly tied to the conditions and uncertainty created by supervision.
At no point did the use of violation threats appear calibrated to rehabilitation, proportionality, or public safety. Rather, violation functioned as a standing pressure mechanism, applied irrespective of compliance, court findings, or demonstrated positive conduct. From an administrative perspective, this pattern reflects supervision practices that increase financial harm, elevate institutional exposure, and undermine the stated goals of probation.
Barry County’s Failure to Act
In fact, Barry County’s position is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the documented record. Two independent jurisdictions positioned across the state have treated the safety risk as credible (Macomb and Kalamazoo), while Barry County’s response included continued supervisory threats despite compliance. That contrast offers tremendous insight on their charging and supervision decisions being driven not by legitimate rehabilitative purposes, but for retaliation and credibility-management.
This isn’t rhetoric; it is the growing gap between objective external indicators and Barry County’s customs and practices. My children watched Barry County ignore people who wanted to hurt them, and instead chose to punish their parents for telling the truth.
Barry County’s mail servers now preserve six months of evidence documenting excused abuse and denied pleas for help. During that same period, Barry County leadership deliberately protected a documented, legitimate threat requiring a protective response to sustain the false narrative about me: that a mother who exposed Michigan Supreme Court-recognized sentencing errors and systemic record-keeping failures was the “threat.”
That narrative was further reinforced through degrading, dismissive language, including statements such as, “You know why people won’t believe you, right?” “Doesn’t feel nice, does it?” and “This is what happens when you say provocative things online.”
The Barry County PO’s comments were the institutional equivalent of saying: you wore a short skirt, so what happened to you is your fault. Her suggestion was that I stop writing, make myself small, and essentially disappear. Even as I reminded her that my children had been through enough.
A third party made demonstrably false allegations of an exceptionally serious and damaging nature against my family. After hearing it, Probation took no action to investigate, correct, or mitigate those claims, effectively converting a complete falsehood into County-sanctioned character-assassination while my husband was incarcerated on a error-riddled Barry County conviction under active appeal.
The situation escalated further when I was required to defend myself in court against the harassment-related proceedings she refused to intercept, resulting in approximately $3,000 in attorney fees. Macomb Court ultimately found that I had committed no wrongdoing. That finding did not resolve the matter. Instead, supervisory pressure continued, including renewed threats of violation despite the absence of misconduct.
And she did all of this, ignoring the Michigan Supreme Court remand we prevailed on; one subjecting Barry County’s First Amendment violations to direct judicial review at the state’s highest level.
All of this came after her intercepting the March 2025 Motion to Transfer Probation. Curiously, a little over a month later in April 2025, the court updated their Local Administrative Order regarding court record removal.
The clerk may not permit any case record to be taken from the court without the order of the court.
Retaliation During a Pending Appeal Compounds Institutional Risk
One additional factor materially elevates the significance of the conduct described above: these actions occurred while a related appeal remains pending.
When a case is under appellate review, particularly one already flagged for record accuracy and sentencing concerns, any retaliatory or punitive conduct directed at a family member who raised record issues carries heightened risk. Appellate courts assess not only legal error, but institutional credibility, procedural fairness, and the integrity of the underlying record.
Actions taken during this period are not evaluated in isolation.
From a governance and risk perspective, retaliatory supervision measures, threats of violation, or refusal to accommodate documented safety and disability concerns during an active appeal raise serious questions, including:
- Whether advocacy and record challenges were met with punitive response rather than neutral administration
- Whether supervision decisions were influenced by efforts to manage credibility or suppress scrutiny
- Whether institutional actors exercised discretion consistent with rehabilitative and safety-based standards, or instead escalated pressure during appellate oversight
This matters because appellate courts are uniquely sensitive to post-conviction conduct that appears to chill advocacy, undermine witnesses, or retaliate against individuals connected to an appellant. Even absent explicit reference to the appeal, timing alone can establish a troubling inference: that corrective scrutiny prompted defensive enforcement rather than corrective review.
Here, the contrast is particularly stark. While two separate counties treated the identified safety risk as credible and acted accordingly, Barry County continued supervisory pressure despite compliance, protective orders, and ongoing appellate proceedings. That divergence is not merely factual; it implicates reasonableness, proportionality, and institutional intent.
From an administrative standpoint, the concern is straightforward:
If corrective review triggers escalation rather than restraint, the resulting record reflects not neutral governance, but institutional defensiveness under scrutiny. That posture increases exposure not only in the underlying appeal, but across insurance, civil rights, and oversight frameworks that evaluate patterns rather than isolated acts.
Administrative notice exists precisely to interrupt that trajectory before it hardens into precedent.
Why This Matters
There are a million different ways that the system manages to infringe on people’s rights, and none of them should be accepted.
First, any claim from Barry County that supervision, violations, or speech throttling were about “safety” are deeply flawed. The narrative collapses when two other counties sought to shield me from the same threat and Barry County chose again and again to do nothing.
Second, from a strictly systemic perspective, when courts and probation departments rely on accurate records, neutral supervision, and verified information, everyone benefits:
- Defendants
- Families
- Court staff
- Counties
- Taxpayers
When those systems drift, the cost is rarely immediate. It shows up later as:
- Appeals
- Civil rights exposure
- Insurance disputes
- Loss of public confidence
Administrative notice is how institutions are given the chance to correct course before those costs materialize.
Publishing it simply ensures the opportunity was real.
Sources & References
- Michigan Court Rule 8.119 (Court Records)
- MCL 750.491 (Public Records Protections)
- State Court Administrative Office correspondence (Dec. 22, 2025)
- Formal Notice Requesting Administrative Review, Feb. 16, 2026
