Two Attorneys With Personal Knowledge of a Barry County Plea Agreement Are Now Working Under the Same Kalamazoo County Prosecutor. Neither Is Talking.

Christopher J. Elsworth’s career trajectory is documented in public records. He practiced law in Hastings, Michigan for nearly 20 years, working as a Barry County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. His name appears on the Kalamazoo County Family Court Division’s public staff listing. The move to Kalamazoo County Family Court happened in January 2025.

One month earlier, in December 2024, Clutch Justice filed a complaint with the Michigan Supreme Court naming Elsworth and Judge Michael Schipper. Elsworth’s move from Barry County to Kalamazoo County followed that complaint by thirty days.

That timeline requires an explanation. Clutch Justice is not asserting that the complaint caused the move. What Clutch Justice is asserting is that the timing is documented, that the complaint is documented, and that the public is entitled to know both facts simultaneously and draw its own conclusions.

Benjamin M. Norg’s public record is straightforward. He graduated from Western Michigan University Cooley Law School in 2017. He worked at Sharp and Associates, the firm of Tara Sharp, before joining the Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. He is currently listed on Kalamazoo County’s Circuit Court Division page as a Circuit Court Assistant Prosecuting Attorney handling felony prosecutions under Jeffrey Getting.

Norg appeared in a Barry County matter in 2022 and 2023 as outside counsel through Sharp and Associates, working alongside Elsworth on plea negotiations and sentencing expectations. Communications between Norg and Elsworth related to that matter, as well as communications involving Tara Sharp and Anastase Markou, a second attorney connected to the same matter, have been formally demanded and not produced.

What is not in dispute, because it was told to me directly, is that those communications exist and what they concern. In March 2023, I spoke by phone with Tara Sharp, who was serving as Benjamin Norg’s supervising attorney in the Barry County matter. Sharp told me directly that Elsworth and Norg had exchanged email communications regarding the plea agreement and that Norg still had them. She characterized what had occurred as, in her words, new territory for her firm. She stated she had never had a prosecutor completely violate a plea deal like this. The prosecutor’s office she was referring to was Barry County. That conversation was recorded and notes were taken. Both are on file with Clutch Justice. Tara Sharp has been contacted for comment prior to publication of this article. She has not responded by deadline.

On June 20, 2026, Clutch Justice served a formal legal demand on Norg at the Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The demand requests the complete client file, all plea negotiation communications, all communications between Norg and Elsworth, all communications involving Tara Sharp and Anastase Markou, and any communication reflecting representations that sentencing would result in no jail time. The demand also serves as a formal preservation notice. Norg has fourteen days to respond. Civil remedy will be pursued if records are not produced.

The withheld plea agreement email is not the only thing Elsworth and Norg sat on. There is a second documented failure that runs parallel to it and compounds it at every stage of the underlying proceedings.

MSP Sgt. Bryan Fuller was the lead detective in the underlying Barry County criminal matter. At the time Fuller was conducting that investigation in July 2022, he was the named defendant in McCann v. Fuller, Case No. 1:19-cv-01032, Western District of Michigan, an active federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he fabricated evidence and violated constitutional rights in the wrongful perjury conviction of Ray McCann Jr. in connection with the 2007 murder of Jodi Parrack in Constantine. That lawsuit was filed in December 2019 and was in active federal litigation throughout the entirety of the underlying Barry County proceedings, from the investigation in 2022 through the plea hearing in October 2022 through sentencing in January 2023 through resentencing in November 2023.

On September 19, 2023, a federal jury awarded Ray McCann Jr. $14.5 million against Fuller, including $2 million in punitive damages specifically to warn other officers that Fuller’s tactics were not acceptable. Fuller acknowledged on the witness stand that he lied to witnesses during investigations and considered it a legitimate investigative tool. The Michigan Attorney General’s Office defended Fuller throughout. Michigan State Police settled for $11 million on October 17, 2023. As of August 2024, Fuller remained employed by MSP.

Fuller also has documented ties to Barry County specifically. He served at the Hastings MSP Post, which serves Barry County, and lives in Middleville, minutes from Barry County’s courthouse and from the home of the judge who presided over the underlying criminal matter. He was in direct communication with the complaining company’s internal HR personnel as the investigation was being built in June 2022, with that HR representative confirming she had spoken with Fuller directly and routing information between the company and the detective. Fuller confirmed the turn-in arrangement in his own texts and stated that the unauthorized arrest was not known to him or requested. MSP subsequently denied a FOIA request for turn-in documentation, claiming no such records existed. Fuller’s own texts contradict that denial.

None of this was disclosed to the defense at any stage of the proceedings. Not during the investigation. Not at the plea hearing. Not at sentencing. Not at resentencing. Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to disclose material information bearing on the credibility and integrity of the lead investigator. A federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the lead detective fabricated evidence, active throughout every proceeding, is precisely that category of material.

Elsworth knew Fuller. Fuller served at the Hastings Post that serves Barry County. He lived in the county. He was not an unfamiliar detective from another jurisdiction. He was a known professional contact of nearly twenty years of Barry County prosecution practice. The non-disclosure of his active federal civil rights litigation cannot be attributed to ignorance of his identity or his exposure. Elsworth knew. He said nothing.

Norg had Fuller’s own texts confirming the turn-in arrangement was violated. He texted the defendant on July 25, 2022: “That’s fucking bullshit. I’m so sorry.” He knew something was wrong with how Fuller operated. A basic PACER or CourtListener search on the name of the detective whose conduct he was already questioning would have returned the active McCann federal civil rights lawsuit. He ran no such search. He raised nothing about Fuller’s civil rights exposure at any proceeding. He then moved to the Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, where he is now handling felony cases, while holding a plea agreement email he has never produced and having conducted no due diligence on a detective a federal jury would later find had a documented pattern of fabricating evidence.

The Barry County plea agreement communications are not the only matter in which Christopher Elsworth’s conduct as a Barry County APA has been documented by Clutch Justice. In January 2026, Clutch Justice published an investigation into the case of Megan Moryc, a former Michigan State Police trooper identified as the victim in a domestic violence and sexual assault investigation involving another trooper. The warrant request in that case was presented to Barry County for prosecutorial review in July 2023. It was denied by Christopher Elsworth.

The investigative record in that matter reflects that no recorded interview of the victim was conducted as part of the criminal investigation. Despite the seriousness of the allegations, the file documents no formal recorded statement taken from the person identified as the victim. Moryc was not contacted directly by the prosecuting office when the charging decision was made. She later learned of the declination through law enforcement rather than from prosecutors, despite Michigan law recognizing the right of crime victims to receive notice of significant prosecutorial decisions.

The Spencer matter adds another data point to Elsworth’s documented declination record. Richelle Spencer, a former Barry County Sheriff candidate, stalked a Hastings-area pediatrician beginning in 2023. Per dialogue at a Barry County Board of Commissioners meeting documented by Clutch Justice, charging decisions in that matter were in the hands of an Assistant Prosecutor. The Barry County Prosecutor’s office knew about the stalking and declined to pursue charges. Spencer went on to stalk a second victim. Kent County arrested her in October 2024. She was subsequently found not competent per a competency examination, with an insanity defense filed in her Kent County aggravated stalking case, Case No. 25-03128-FH. Barry County’s declination did not stop the harm. It deferred it to a second victim in a different county. The pattern across the Moryc declination and the Spencer matter is consistent: the Barry County Prosecutor’s office, with Elsworth as a key actor in charging decisions, declined to pursue charges in matters involving identifiable harm, and other jurisdictions bore the consequences.

Moryc subsequently sought Elsworth’s personnel records through a FOIA request. Barry County obstructed that request. The FOIA was ultimately approved, but only after that obstruction. The pattern is consistent across both matters: Elsworth declines to act, records are sought, Barry County resists producing them, and the people seeking accountability are forced to fight for documentation that should have been available.

The question raised by Norg and Elsworth’s presence in Getting’s office is not only about what happened in Barry County. It is about what is happening in Kalamazoo County right now.

If two attorneys are permitted to withhold personal knowledge of a plea agreement from a prior matter, to deny on the court record the existence of communications that multiple parties confirm exist, and to do so without consequence while continuing to handle active prosecutions, that raises a direct question about the integrity of their current casework. What are they permitted to conceal in matters they are prosecuting today? What discovery obligations are being met, and which are being managed the same way the Barry County communications have been managed for years?

These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the logical extension of a documented pattern. Elsworth’s December 2023 denial is on the court record. The communications he denied the existence of have been confirmed by multiple actors. That is not a misunderstanding. That is a prosecutor making a false representation on the court record. He then moved jurisdictions one month after a formal complaint naming him was filed with the Michigan Supreme Court. He is now in a family court handling matters involving children and families. That context matters.

Norg is handling felony prosecutions. Defendants in those cases have a right to prosecutors who meet their discovery obligations in full. The documented record of withholding in the Barry County matter is relevant to whether that standard is being met.

Michigan’s Rules of Professional Conduct are not suggestions. They govern every licensed attorney in the state, including attorneys who have changed employers, changed counties, and changed the zip code where they practice. The obligations that attached to Norg and Elsworth’s handling of the Barry County matter in 2022 and 2023 did not expire when they left Barry County. They are still attached. They will be attached until the records are produced or a disciplinary body decides otherwise.

MRPC 1.15 requires attorneys to safeguard client property, including files and records. MRPC 1.16 governs the obligations that attach when representation ends, including the duty to surrender papers and property to which the client is entitled. MRPC 3.4 prohibits attorneys from unlawfully obstructing another party’s access to evidence and from concealing documents having potential evidentiary value. MRPC 8.4 defines professional misconduct to include conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. Elsworth’s December 2023 denial of the existence of communications that multiple actors with direct personal knowledge confirm exist sits squarely in that territory. A denial made on the court record is not a misunderstanding. It is a representation to the court.

Three years is not an oversight. Three years of withholding documentation of a plea agreement, across a change of employers, a change of counties, and a Michigan Supreme Court complaint, is a choice made repeatedly and deliberately. Every month that passed without production was another month that choice was renewed. The documentation did not disappear. The obligation to produce it did not disappear. What disappeared was the willingness to meet it.

The denial did not happen only on the court record. Elsworth also denied the existence of the plea communications to the Attorney Grievance Commission, again despite multiple people having direct personal knowledge that those communications exist. A denial made to the AGC is not a procedural technicality. It is a representation made to the body responsible for licensing and disciplining Michigan attorneys. Making a false representation to that body, while other actors with direct knowledge can confirm the communications exist, is conduct that goes to the core of what professional licensure is supposed to mean. The AGC has that representation in its file. It has the complaint. What it has not done is act on it.

Brady v. Maryland established that prosecutors must disclose material exculpatory evidence to the defense. Giglio v. United States extended that obligation to evidence bearing on the credibility of witnesses, including the prosecutor’s own witnesses. Both are constitutional obligations. They attach to every prosecution Benjamin Norg is currently handling in Kalamazoo County. They do not expire. They do not have a jurisdictional limit. And they are directly implicated by what the documented record shows about Norg’s prior conduct.

There is a pattern in how Michigan’s legal system handles officials with documented misconduct exposure that stops short of formal discipline. It does not fire them. It does not publicly sanction them. It moves them sideways. Away from the most visible cases. Away from the scrutiny that accumulates in criminal court. Into roles where the caseload is different, the oversight is lighter, and the paper trail starts fresh.

Elsworth’s trajectory follows this pattern with striking precision. Nearly 20 years as a criminal APA in Barry County. Documented declinations in the Megan Moryc matter, where no recorded victim interview was conducted. Documented declination in the Richelle Spencer matter, where the failure to act deferred harm to a second victim in a different county. Denial of plea communications on the Barry County court record in December 2023. Denial of those same communications to the AGC. Michigan Supreme Court complaint filed December 2024 naming him and Judge Schipper. Move to Kalamazoo County in January 2025, one month later. Not criminal prosecution. Family court.

Christopher Elsworth and Benjamin Norg are not the only people connected to Barry County’s documented misconduct who have moved to other jurisdictions. When complaints accumulate, when JTC filings land, when Supreme Court complaints are filed, officials move. The record control infrastructure documented in Part 2 of this series ensures that the conduct that prompted the complaints does not follow them in any official form. The Barry County record stays in Barry County. The officials leave. What they take with them is knowledge.

At the November 25, 2025 Barry County Board of Commissioners meeting, a FOIA appeal regarding former prosecutor Christopher Elsworth’s personnel records was on the agenda. Barry County Prosecutor Julie Nakfoor-Pratt responded defensively to the appeal, claiming she did not keep personnel records for her office. That claim is wrong under Michigan law. The Bullard-Plawecki Employee Right to Know Act, MCL 423.501 et seq., defines a personnel record as a record kept by the employer that identifies the employee and is used or has been used relative to that employee’s qualifications for employment, promotion, transfer, additional compensation, or disciplinary action. The Act applies to any employer including an agency or a political subdivision of the state. A county prosecuting attorney’s office is a political subdivision of the state.

The FOIA request for Elsworth’s personnel records was filed by Megan Moryc, whose domestic violence and sexual assault case Elsworth declined to prosecute in July 2023. The FOIA appeal was ultimately approved. Nakfoor-Pratt’s false claim about record-keeping obligations is documented in the public record of the November 25, 2025 board meeting.