Michigan’s DNA Bills Are Necessary. They Are Also Insufficient.

What the Bills Actually Do

House Bill 6092, sponsored by Representative Kara Hope (D-Holt) and co-sponsored by 16 state representatives, and Senate Bill 1035, sponsored by Senator Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), would update Michigan’s post-conviction DNA testing statute. The current law is approximately 25 years old. Testing technology has advanced considerably in that period. New techniques, including touch DNA and vacuum-extraction methods capable of pulling genetic material from fabric, have produced exonerations in cases where earlier-generation testing produced nothing. Michigan’s statute, as written, blocks access to those techniques even when the evidence is sitting in a property room and a judge agrees that testing is warranted.

The bills would remove outdated technological restrictions, give judges discretion to order testing where it serves the interest of justice, and extend access to individuals who pleaded guilty, a category currently excluded in ways that do not reflect how guilty pleas are actually produced in Michigan’s criminal courts. Advocates note that the legislation would bring Michigan in line with 45 other states and the District of Columbia.

Roderic Pippen, with the Organization of Exonerees, spent years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was denied DNA testing seven times before his conviction was overturned. His account is not exceptional. It is a process operating as designed under the current statute.

The 85 Percent the Bills Do Not Touch

The Innocence Project reports that DNA evidence played a role in approximately 15 percent of exonerations nationally. That figure is widely cited by advocates as evidence that DNA access needs to expand, and they are correct. It is also evidence that 85 percent of the wrongful conviction problem has nothing to do with DNA at all.

What produces wrongful convictions at scale is a set of structural conditions that have nothing to do with testing technology. Brady violations, the suppression of exculpatory evidence that the prosecution is constitutionally required to disclose, are among the most common documented drivers of wrongful conviction. Giglio failures, the nondisclosure of information that would impeach prosecution witnesses, follow the same pattern. Coerced pleas, in which defendants accept guilty verdicts for crimes they did not commit rather than risk maximum sentences at trial, account for an enormous category of wrongful convictions that DNA testing cannot reach because there is no biological evidence to test.

These are not aberrations. They are outputs of a system structured to maximize conviction rates with minimal accountability for the actors who produce them.

What a 99.9 Percent Conviction Rate Looks Like on the Ground

Barry County Circuit Court processed its criminal docket with a conviction rate of approximately 99.9 percent in 2021, taking approximately 0.06 percent of criminal cases to trial. Clutch Justice documented this pattern over multiple years of coverage and found it to be a product of structured plea coercion, not prosecutorial excellence. Defendants who declined plea offers were explicitly told they would face maximum sentencing exposure at trial. The pattern is now part of the filed record in multiple Barry County matters.

Two defendants whose cases were documented in Clutch Justice coverage received resentencing. A related Barry County matter received a Michigan Supreme Court remand on Docket No. 167549. These outcomes did not happen because the state identified a problem and corrected it. They happened because individual defendants, without attorneys, built records from filed documents and pushed them through a system designed to resist them at every step.

Prosecutorial Immunity and the Accountability Architecture

The Supreme Court’s decision in Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U.S. 409 (1976), established absolute prosecutorial immunity for conduct within the prosecutorial function. A Michigan prosecutor who fabricates a timeline, suppresses a lab report, coaches a witness, or declines to disclose that the state’s key witness had a deal on pending charges cannot be held civilly liable for the conviction that follows. This is not a gap in the law. It is the law.

The result is a system in which the actors most responsible for producing wrongful convictions face the least accountability for doing so. Brady violations that are eventually documented in post-conviction proceedings rarely result in bar discipline. The Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission processes complaints, but Brady failures as a disciplinary matter are addressed inconsistently and at low rates relative to documented incidence. No public registry of Brady-disclosed prosecutors exists in Michigan. The information is buried in individual case files, accessible only to the parties and those with the resources and knowledge to find it.

What Accountability Without a Registry Looks Like

In the absence of a state-maintained registry of prosecutors with Brady history, the documentation falls to defense attorneys filing Brady demands, wrongful conviction organizations building case archives, journalists filing FOIA requests, and individuals navigating a complex legal system without counsel. This is not a sustainable accountability infrastructure. It is individuals running a recall campaign because the manufacturer will not issue one.

The Clutch Justice Brady-Giglio-Santobello List, currently tracking more than 64 entries across more than 33 Michigan prosecutors, was built from court records, disciplinary filings, and filed case documents. Every entry is source-documented. The list exists because no state mechanism produces it. It is, by design, a public record audit of a system that has declined to audit itself.

Several entries involve prosecutors who remained active in Michigan courtrooms while carrying undisclosed Brady history. Defense attorneys in those counties who do not know to ask, or who lack access to the database, do not know what the prosecution’s file contains. Their clients go to trial or accept pleas under conditions of informational asymmetry the state has no interest in correcting.

The Bills Are a Floor, Not a Ceiling

None of this is an argument against passage. Roderic Pippen was denied testing seven times. That fact alone is sufficient justification for updating a statute that has not kept pace with testing technology. Expanding access to touch DNA and advanced extraction methods will produce exonerations that would not otherwise occur, and those are real lives returned to real people.

The question is what the Legislature signals by treating expanded DNA access as a comprehensive response to Michigan’s wrongful conviction problem. It is not comprehensive. It is not close. It addresses a narrow technical barrier while leaving intact the prosecutorial culture, institutional immunity structure, and accountability deficit that generates wrongful convictions at a rate no DNA bill can meaningfully reduce.

Representative Hope is correct. The question is whether the Michigan Legislature is willing to follow that statement to its structural conclusion, or whether DNA access reform becomes the ceiling of ambition rather than the floor. The prosecutors who suppressed Brady material in Barry County are not waiting for the DNA bills to pass. They are already in Kalamazoo and Hastings courtrooms. The accountability architecture that protected them is unchanged.