Scio News Did the Work. Michigan Let It Happen.

Clutch Justice Recommends Scio News

Scio News describes itself as “Residents Informing Residents.” It is an independent accountability publication covering Washtenaw County, and its coverage of the Kerry case over two and a half years is the kind of sustained, document-grounded journalism that most local government accountability stories never receive. Clutch Justice readers who follow Michigan’s court and prosecutorial accountability landscape should bookmark scionews.com and check the Accountability section regularly.

Editor Jonathan Greenberg published two companion pieces on June 17, 2026, timed to the Kerry dismissal. The first is a forensic and institutional analysis of how the case made it this far. The second is Kerry’s first interview since the charges were dropped. Together, they document the full arc: the complaint that started with the complainant’s own uncertainty, the expert who was not one, the judge who should not have been there, and the personal cost to a sitting elected official who had no mechanism to compel any institution to examine what it was doing to her.

Every independent firm that reviewed the digital evidence and reached a conclusion found the emails transmitted automatically rather than by manual action. One could not determine the cause. None agreed with the prosecution. Greenberg, as an analyst, was part of that consensus. He did not hide it. He put it at the top of the article.

Readers should go to Scio News first: The People v. Kerry: How Did This Case Make It This Far? and EXCLUSIVE: Jillian Kerry on What It Cost. What follows here is Clutch Justice’s structural analysis of what their reporting reveals about how Michigan handles, and declines to handle, institutional accountability.

Three Failures, One Prosecution

Scio News’ forensic reporting identifies three institutional conditions that allowed a prosecution to run for two and a half years on evidence the prosecution’s own expert admitted was incomplete. Each failure is documented in the case record. None produced an automatic consequence. That is not an accident. That is the system functioning as designed.

The Investigation Reached Its Conclusion First

On November 18, 2023, three days after the incident, Detective Kevin Parviz of the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office received a call from the responding deputy. The deputy had told Parviz he was not technology savvy and had no formal training in investigating computer crimes. Based solely on that phone conversation, without examining a single device or reviewing a single log, Parviz told the deputy that criminal actions had been taken.

The complaint itself had not started with certainty. Hathaway told the deputy at the outset that he was unsure whether a crime had occurred or whether prosecution was warranted, and that he wanted the incident documented. The only eyewitness in the room, Ian Hubert, a software professional and RAC Vice Chair, told the deputy immediately that he did not believe Kerry sent the email, offered a technical explanation, and recalled Kerry saying repeatedly that Hathaway’s account kept opening when she was trying to get her Zoom authentication code. The IT director who investigated the incident replaced the laptop, removed the Office 365 application, and began implementing multi-factor authentication, treating it as a security failure he was responsible for fixing, not a crime he had witnessed.

Three people with direct proximity to the event said, in different ways, that it was not criminal. The detective concluded it was, before he looked at anything. The prosecution ran for two and a half years from there.

The Expert Was Not One

The Kerry case asked a fundamentally different question: whether Microsoft Outlook, upon launching and reconnecting to an Exchange server with cached credentials, automatically transmitted a queued email and calendar invitation without any human action. That is a question about email client behavior, Exchange Online synchronization protocols, MAPI processing, and Azure Active Directory authentication logging. It is not a question about hard drive forensics.

Parviz holds more than 70 training certifications. Under cross-examination on August 12, 2025, he confirmed that when asked whether any of them involved Microsoft Exchange Server forensics, the answer was: “Not as training. No.” Across 670 prior cases, he had never been required to determine whether an email was sent manually versus automatically through Outlook’s cached mode synchronization. He was qualified as an expert in “computer forensics.” No objection was raised. The subspecialty that actually governed the central factual question was never tested before the court.

He also failed to preserve the one record that might have resolved the factual dispute with finality. The Microsoft Purview Audit Log maintains a cloud-based record of all activity on Hathaway’s Office 365 account. Microsoft retains these logs for 90 days by default. Parviz was assigned the case on November 18, 2023, three days after the incident. He had 87 days to send a preservation letter. He never sent one. When asked under cross-examination whether he knew he could have done so, he confirmed he could have. His stated reason: he had the server logs, and they pointed to what he was looking for. The defense never had access to those cloud records. They expired.

Parviz also never obtained any of Hathaway’s personal devices, including the cell phone, despite the case file reflecting that Hathaway was cooperative and the responding deputy had noted Hathaway was receptive to a phone examination. In every hard drive case Scio News identified in his prior work, Parviz seized every available device. In the case where the central question was what a computer did versus what a person did, he left the complainant’s hardware untouched. His analysis of the one device he did examine rested on data he acknowledged in his own report was incomplete, from a machine with no security audit trail running, using forensic tools he admitted could not fully decode the database he was relying on. He requested charges anyway.

The Judge Who Should Not Have Been There

The 2013 JTC proceedings produced findings that went beyond procedural violations. A retired judge reviewing the matter found Simpson had acted improperly on all three counts. The JTC recommendation of removal was reaffirmed after new evidence was considered. The Supreme Court’s nine-month suspension was not unanimous. Chief Justice Stephen Markman dissented, writing that the record established Simpson had lied under oath on at least two occasions and questioning whether the court’s outcome was consistent with its stated standards for judicial fitness.

That was 2013. Simpson remained on the bench. He remained on the bench through 2026, when he decided that a felony prosecution built by a detective who had not yet looked at the evidence, grounded in expert testimony outside the expert’s documented subspecialty, deserved to go to trial.

In the Kerry proceedings, Simpson denied a Motion to Compel Discovery that would have required the prosecution to produce evidence the defense had requested. Without that order, defense attorney R. Michael Bullotta, a former Assistant U.S. Prosecutor with significant trial experience, was left pursuing evidence through FOIA. Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act is a public records mechanism with law enforcement exemptions. It is not a substitute for a criminal defendant’s constitutional right to see the evidence being used against her. When Bullotta raised concerns about political motivation behind the prosecution, Simpson described the suggestion as insane. He left the courtroom during proceedings on multiple occasions. Before binding the case over for trial, Simpson asked whether the defense had all the discovery it needed, then became annoyed when Bullotta pointed out that the court had denied discovery.

What a Nolle Prosequi Does and Does Not Mean

Michigan law permits the prosecution to file a nolle prosequi, a declaration of intent not to proceed, at any point before a verdict is entered. The court signs the order. The charges are removed from the defendant’s record. No verdict is entered. No finding is made about the evidence, the constitutionality of the proceedings, or the conduct of the parties. It is, functionally, the prosecution’s exit with no explanation required.

Kerry walked out of Washtenaw County Circuit Court on June 2, 2026, without a criminal record from this matter. She also walked out without a legal finding that the prosecution was inappropriate, that her Sixth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated, or that the expert who testified against her lacked the qualification the case required. Two and a half years, and the system’s final word is that it declines to continue.

The man who started the case asked for it to stop. That is not a vindication of Kerry, because Michigan’s nolle prosequi process does not produce vindication. Kerry’s attorney has called her factually innocent. A nolle prosequi does not say that. It does not say anything at all.

The Township’s Financial Record

While the criminal case ran, Kerry was simultaneously fighting her own township board over the legal fees she was incurring to defend herself. The outcome of that fight is fully documented in board resolutions and attorney-reviewed invoices.

Scio Township’s indemnification ordinance, Chapter 2, Section 2-42, used the word “shall” when describing the township’s obligation to pay for a charged officer’s legal defense when the charge arises from conduct in the course of employment. Clerk Jessica Flintoft located this ordinance in September 2024, ten months after charges were filed. The township began paying. Then it stopped. Then it started again. Then it stopped again.

During 2025, with trial approaching, the Board changed the ordinance language from “shall” to “may.” Payments went unreturned for stretches that Kerry’s documented account stretches across multiple months. When she raised the gap directly, she was told her attorneys should negotiate their rates down, a conversation Kerry, after reviewing the relevant meeting minutes and video, said never occurred as described. The Board also attempted to limit her to a single attorney and a single invoice submission, positions the Clerk ultimately clarified were not consistent with Kerry’s actual legal rights under the ordinance.

By December 2025, the township had reimbursed $357,750.49 across four board resolutions, each reviewed by the township’s own attorneys before payment. Kerry signed a release settling all claims through that point. The case ran another six months after December 2025. Those legal costs are hers. Per Scio News’ reporting on the interview, the township also agreed to pay $9,825 in back fees and has not paid them.

What Michigan Is Allowed to Get Away With

The Kerry case is not an isolated failure. It is a demonstration of what Michigan’s institutional accountability infrastructure permits when every actor in a prosecution chain makes choices that harm a defendant and no external check intervenes.

A detective reaches his conclusion by phone before he reviews evidence. The case moves forward. An expert testifies in a technical subspecialty he has never trained in, in 670 cases, and is qualified without objection. The case moves forward. A judge whose fitness for the bench the JTC already questioned denies a constitutional discovery motion, leaves the courtroom during proceedings, and binds the case over. The case moves forward. The prosecution drops the charges two and a half years later, days before trial was scheduled to begin. The case ends. No review of any actor is automatically triggered. No finding is entered. No institution is required to examine what it did.

Kerry’s account of those two and a half years, documented by Scio News, reflects what this process costs the human being inside it: an inability to leave the state without court permission for more than two years, a granddaughter who was two years old when the case began and will turn five before summer ends, sustained health impacts she attributes to the stress of the proceedings, and a financial fight with her own board conducted simultaneously with the obligation to prepare for a criminal trial that could have sent her to prison.

Clutch Justice has covered the structural conditions that make all of this possible: JTC dispositions that consistently stop short of removal, expert qualification practices that treat forensic subspecialties as interchangeable, and nolle prosequi as a clean exit that asks nothing of the prosecution. The Kerry case assembles all three in the same record. Scio News documented them with the precision they required.

Read Scio News. Then ask what Michigan is going to do about any of this. The answer, absent deliberate action to change these structures, is nothing.