The Law Works When Someone Uses It. Michigan Institutional Accountability, May 10, 2026

On May 6, 2026, I filed a special motion under Michigan’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. The statute did the rest automatically. Every proceeding in the case against me, including the May 15 show cause hearing, is now stayed. Not stayed pending a ruling. Stayed by operation of law from the moment the motion was filed.

The attorney who sued me spent months arguing a legal position in a parallel Saginaw County case. That position is now the foundation of my motion against him. That is what judicial estoppel does. He built the argument. I used it.

I was a named supporter of HB 4045, the legislation that became UPEPA. I supported it because I cover courts and I understood what SLAPP suits do to people who cannot afford to fight them. I now understand that from the inside. This week’s featured piece is the full account, sourced to public court records, with editorial transparency about my role as a party.

What the Record Shows: UPEPA, Judicial Estoppel, and the Automatic Stay

Michigan’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act took effect March 24, 2026. It was designed to address what advocates had documented for years: that the cost of defending a lawsuit, even a meritless one, is itself the punishment. A strategic lawsuit filed against someone exercising protected speech does not need to succeed at trial. It needs to cost enough that the target cannot afford to keep going.

UPEPA’s two core mechanisms address that problem directly. The automatic stay provision under MCL 691.1854(1)(a) halts all proceedings the moment a special motion is filed, before any court rules on its merits. The mandatory fee-shifting provision requires that a prevailing moving party receive attorney fees, costs, and sanctions, without judicial discretion to withhold them. Both mechanisms are non-discretionary. The legislature built them that way deliberately.

The judicial estoppel element in this case is not incidental. Philip L. Ellison, a licensed Michigan attorney and the principal of Outside Legal Counsel PLC, filed a UPEPA special motion in a separate Saginaw County case arguing that the Act applies to post-effective-date claims arising in lawsuits filed before the effective date. He filed that position twice. That is the identical legal argument advanced in the Williams motion. A party cannot argue a legal position in one proceeding and then argue its opposite in another. That is the doctrine. He is bound by his own filings.

The case has not been adjudicated on the merits. All claims about the litigation are allegations. What is not an allegation is the statutory text, the motion record, or the judicial estoppel doctrine. Those are in the public record.

What the Record Shows: Claude McCollum and Ingham County’s Culture of Investigative Immunity

Claude McCollum was convicted of a murder he did not commit. The case against him had no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, and no blood evidence linking him to the crime scene. What it had was a statement obtained from a man with documented cognitive deficiencies, investigators who were told by a forensic scientist that they had the wrong person and proceeded anyway, and video evidence that was not disclosed to the defense.

The 50-page civil complaint filed in Ingham County Circuit Court documents each element of that pattern in detail. Detectives manipulated McCollum’s statement. Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. James Young wrote a report in March 2005 concluding McCollum was not near the scene when the crime occurred. Trial prosecutors said they received the report and immediately turned it over to the defense. The defense attorney said he never received it and was never told of its conclusions. The complaint alleges the prosecutors knew he did not have it and hoped it would not be uncovered.

The piece examines what the McCollum case documents as a pattern rather than an isolated failure, and what the culture of investigative immunity in Ingham County has cost.

What the Record Shows: The Oakland County Child Killer as Institutional Failure

Four children were murdered in Oakland County, Michigan, between 1976 and 1977. No one has ever been charged. The case is treated in true crime media as one of the great unsolved mysteries. The RRE installment this week treats it as something else: a documented institutional failure with a traceable record of choices.

Martin Smartt, the primary suspect, was questioned and allowed to leave Plumas County within days of the murders. He allegedly confessed to a VA counselor weeks later. A letter exists that investigators and journalists have characterized as reading like a murder admission. A recorded tip was not pursued to resolution. The forensic evidence that existed was not fully preserved. None of those outcomes required the killer to be untouchable. They required institutions to decide, repeatedly, that the case was not worth the cost of solving.

What the Record Shows: EquiAlt and the Broadway Avenue Insider Sale

The Broadway Avenue property is a 47-unit mobile home park generating more than $30,000 per month in revenue. It was sold inside the EquiAlt federal receivership through a transaction structure that, according to Clutch Justice’s review of the receivership record, involved phantom debt instruments and a buyer with insider relationships to the receivership proceedings.

Receivership oversight is designed to protect defrauded investors by ensuring that asset sales occur at arm’s length and reflect genuine market value. The Broadway Avenue sale raises specific questions about whether that standard was met and what the receiver’s accounting of the debt instruments used to structure the transaction actually shows.

What This Issue Establishes

Three of this week’s stories document institutions that avoided accountability by controlling what reached the court or the record. The fourth documents what happens when someone uses the record to fight back. The UPEPA motion works because the opposing attorney’s own filings contain the argument he cannot now disavow. The McCollum wrongful conviction persisted because investigators controlled what evidence reached the defense. The OCCK case went cold because agencies decided what leads were worth pursuing. The EquiAlt insider sale was possible because receivership oversight did not catch what the debt record showed.

The record either protects or exposes. The difference is who is reading it.

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