Michigan abolished the felony murder rule in 1980. Approximately 100 people remain incarcerated under pre-Aaron convictions obtained under a standard the court declared indefensible. The legal pathway to resentencing exists. Senate Bill 89 sits in committee. The reason it stays there is not legal complexity — it is economic. Michigan prisons are engines of local employment, and the people in them are the fuel.
Today, someone turns 61. He has spent 30 years behind bars for being present when a crime turned fatal. He never pulled a trigger. No jury was ever asked to find that he intended to kill anyone. No jury was ever asked to find that he acted with malice. The prosecution was not required to prove those things. Under the felony murder rule Michigan applied before 1980, they did not have to. The death plus the felony was enough.
The Michigan Supreme Court abolished that standard in 1980. It has been the law of Michigan for 45 years that malice is an essential element of murder, and that intent to commit a felony is not a substitute. His conviction predates that ruling. The ruling did not reach him. He is still in prison.
The question is why.
The Legal Answer Is Not the Whole Answer
The legal argument for Aaron retroactivity is detailed in the companion analysis published April 7, 2026, at Clutch Justice. The short version: the 1980 court’s one-sentence prospectivity ruling was never subjected to the formal retroactivity analysis its own precedent required. The Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan documented this gap in amicus briefs filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in December 2024 and November 2025. The constitutional dimension — a Sixth Amendment argument that juries never made the factual finding of malice the sentence depends on — layers onto the statutory framework. The procedural model for resentencing already exists in Michigan’s juvenile lifer framework, developed after Miller v. Alabama.
The legal case is complete. The legal obstacle is thin. The 1980 court’s one sentence did not grapple with the question it was dismissing. That is the opening. The Michigan Supreme Court, currently considering retroactivity in active litigation, has the authority to close a 45-year procedural error.
So why hasn’t it been closed legislatively? Why has Senate Bill 89 not moved? Why, given a universe of approximately 100 people and a ready procedural framework, does the legislature sit on its hands every session?
Follow the incentives.
What Prisons Actually Are in Michigan
Michigan operates 28 correctional facilities. They employ approximately 15,000 people directly in corrections roles, plus thousands more in contracted services: healthcare vendors, food service, maintenance, programming providers. The facilities are not distributed evenly across the state. They are concentrated in rural and semi-rural areas where the prison is frequently the largest employer in the county.
Ionia County. Baraga County. Chippewa County. Crawford County. These are not areas with diversified economies. They are areas where the corrections facility is the anchor institution, where the guard’s salary buys the groceries at the local store, where the healthcare contract funds the county clinic, where the prison complex is the reason the motel on Route 2 stays open. The economic footprint of a single facility in a small county is not marginal. It is structural.
At $2.1 billion in annual corrections spending, Michigan’s prison system funds an employment and vendor base with direct representation in the legislature. Legislators from prison-adjacent districts represent corrections officers, union members, and business owners whose revenue depends on sustained facility occupancy. These constituencies are not abstract. They show up in district offices and at constituent nights. Their interests are in opposition to any policy that reduces the incarcerated population.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a constituency. Corrections officers have a union. The union has political action capacity. Local business owners who depend on prison-adjacent revenue have relationships with their state representatives. The economic argument against reducing incarceration is not made in the abstract — it is made in the specific, district-by-district, job-by-job, budget-line-by-budget-line calculus that drives legislative inaction.
A legislator representing a district with a major correctional facility is not a neutral actor on criminal justice reform. They represent people whose livelihoods depend on a sustained head count. That conflict of interest is never disclosed in floor debate. It shapes every vote.
The Finality Argument Is Not Principled. It Is Convenient.
The legal argument against Aaron retroactivity is finality. Courts are reluctant to reopen convictions that are decades old. Witnesses are dead. Evidence has been lost or destroyed. The argument goes that retroactivity would destabilize settled outcomes, burden an already stressed court system, and undermine the public interest in the resolution of criminal cases.
The 2025 amicus brief answered the flood argument in one paragraph: the universe is approximately 100 people. The court system manages dockets of that scale routinely. This is not an argument about capacity.
Finality is a principle the state applies selectively. It defends old convictions with vigor. It shows no comparable interest in correcting the legal errors those convictions were built on. Finality runs in one direction: toward keeping people incarcerated. The approximately 100 people who would benefit from retroactivity cannot invoke finality. They are still waiting for a hearing that the 1980 court never gave them.
There is a deeper problem with the finality argument as applied to pre-Aaron convictions. The question is not whether those convictions should be re-litigated on the facts. It is whether individuals who were convicted without any jury finding of malice — under a legal standard the court subsequently declared indefensible — are entitled to a proceeding in which malice is actually evaluated. That is not destabilizing the system. That is correcting a documented error in how the system was operated.
Finality as a principle is defensible when it protects against the endless relitigating of cases that were correctly decided. It is not defensible when it is invoked to prevent the correction of cases that were decided under a standard the court has since called wrong. Those are different categories. Treating them as the same is not principle. It is convenience dressed as principle.
Who the Invisibility Serves
The approximately 100 people still incarcerated under pre-Aaron convictions are predominantly elderly Black men who have been in prison for nearly five decades. This is documented in the amicus briefs. It is not a characterization. It is a description of who is in these facilities, for these convictions, at this age.
That demographic profile is not incidental to the political calculus. It is the political calculus.
Criminal justice reform advocates who successfully moved public opinion on juvenile sentencing, mandatory minimums, and cash bail did so in part by centering stories. Human faces on documented injustices. The Miller v. Alabama campaign that produced Michigan’s juvenile lifer resentencing framework was decades in the making, funded and organized and visible. It generated public pressure that the legislature could not entirely ignore.
A man who has been incarcerated for 30 or 45 years has limited capacity to generate public advocacy. He has no social media presence. His family may have aged out of active organizing. His case is not recent news. There is no documentary. There is no viral campaign. The people most harmed by the 1980 court’s failure to address retroactivity are the people with the least institutional power to demand that the failure be corrected. That is not a coincidence. It is the structure of the problem.
The invisibility of pre-Aaron cases is compounded by the framing problem the companion analysis identifies: felony murder cases frequently involve violent underlying crimes, and the policy debate about retroactivity gets collapsed, in public narrative, into a debate about releasing violent offenders. That collapse obscures the actual question. Presence during a robbery is not the same as intent to kill. The felony murder rule treated them as equivalent. Aaron said that was wrong. Retroactivity is about whether that wrong gets corrected, not about whether robbery is an acceptable predicate crime.
What the Legislature Has Been Told and What It Has Done
Senate Bill 89 exists. The Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration has named Aaron retroactivity as a 2025-2026 legislative priority. The Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan have submitted detailed amicus briefs to the Michigan Supreme Court documenting who is still incarcerated, what the procedural gap looks like, and what relief would require. The record is not incomplete.
Senate Bill 89 has not advanced out of committee. Republicans retook majority control of the Michigan House after the 2024 elections. Cash bail reform is dead. Second Look sentencing is dead. Juvenile justice changes have stalled. The new majority has made clear that the criminal justice reform agenda of the prior session is not its agenda. Aaron retroactivity — which would require the legislature to acknowledge that approximately 100 people have been incarcerated under an abolished legal standard for 45 years, at a cost to the state that has never been reckoned — has found no path.
This is a choice. Inaction is a choice. Allowing approximately 100 elderly people to remain incarcerated under a legal standard the court abolished in 1980 — because correcting the error would require reducing a head count that local economies depend on, because the people most harmed have the least political power, because finality is a convenient principle when it runs in the right direction — is a choice the Michigan Legislature makes actively, every session it fails to move this legislation.
Calling that a labor camp strategy is not hyperbole. It is a description of the structure. Bodies are kept in facilities. The facilities employ people. The employment creates political constituencies. The constituencies resist reform. The bodies remain. The structure perpetuates itself. The legal error that put those bodies there in the first place is beside the point, institutionally, because correcting it would cost something the system is not willing to pay.
What the Michigan Supreme Court Can Do
The Michigan Supreme Court is the last institutional actor in this chain with both the authority and the insulation to act on the merits. Justices are elected in Michigan, which introduces its own political pressures. But the court is not subject to the direct constituency pressure that shapes legislative behavior. It is not asked to protect prison jobs in its district. It is asked to apply the law.
The Michigan Supreme Court is currently considering Aaron retroactivity in active litigation. The argument is direct: the 1980 court’s one-sentence prospectivity ruling was not a formal retroactivity analysis and is not entitled to the deference that a reasoned holding would command. If the court agrees, it has the authority to hold that pre-Aaron convictions are eligible for resentencing under the malice standard Michigan has applied for 45 years. The procedural framework exists. The docket is manageable. The legal basis is sound.
The argument is not that the people convicted before Aaron are necessarily innocent. It is that they were convicted without a jury ever finding the element the law now requires. Whether malice is established in any individual case is a question for resentencing proceedings, not a question that can be answered in advance by keeping everyone incarcerated until they die. Due process requires the hearing. The 1980 court’s failure to provide for one is the error that needs correcting.
If the court concludes that the one-sentence prospectivity rule is insufficient — and the documentary record of its own amicus briefs supports that conclusion — it can do what the legislature has refused to do. It can provide the remedy that 45 years of institutional inaction has denied.
The man who turns 61 today has been in prison since before most people reading this piece were born. He was convicted under a legal standard that no longer exists. He has never had a hearing in which malice was evaluated. He has waited 30 years. The court fixed the law in 1980. Michigan has never fixed the people it broke with the old one.
That is the record. The record doesn’t lie.
Sources and Documentation
Rita Williams, The Economic Engine Running on Imprisoned Bodies: Why Aaron Retroactivity Stays Blocked, Clutch Justice (May 4, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/04/aaron-retroactivity-economic-incentives/.
Williams, R. (2026, May 4). The economic engine running on imprisoned bodies: Why Aaron retroactivity stays blocked. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/04/aaron-retroactivity-economic-incentives/
Williams, Rita. “The Economic Engine Running on Imprisoned Bodies: Why Aaron Retroactivity Stays Blocked.” Clutch Justice, 4 May 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/05/04/aaron-retroactivity-economic-incentives/.
Williams, Rita. “The Economic Engine Running on Imprisoned Bodies: Why Aaron Retroactivity Stays Blocked.” Clutch Justice, May 4, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/04/aaron-retroactivity-economic-incentives/.
