Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors No. 03: Stuart Dunnings III
Stuart Dunnings III served as Ingham County’s top law enforcement officer for 19 years. During that tenure, he built a public identity around aggressively prosecuting prostitution, sex trafficking, and sexual assault. The FBI discovered in 2015, while investigating a human trafficking ring in Lansing, that the county’s prosecutor was a regular customer of the networks he was prosecuting. He had paid women for sex hundreds of times across three counties. His office had also declined to prosecute Larry Nassar the year before. This is the documented record of what happened, what was known, who knew it, and what the system ultimately decided it was worth.
Dunnings paid women for sex hundreds of times across Ingham, Clinton, and Ionia counties between 2010 and 2015, while simultaneously prosecuting others for the same category of offense and publicly positioning himself as a sex trafficking opponent.
In 2014, a sexual assault complaint against Larry Nassar was referred to Dunnings’ office after an MSU investigation. Dunnings declined to prosecute. Nassar abused athletes for two more years before charges were brought under a different prosecutor.
The original charges included pandering under MCL 750.455, a 20-year felony with mandatory Tier 2 sex offender registration for 25 years. Attorney General Schuette’s office dropped that charge and 12 others. Dunnings served approximately 10 months. He was not placed on the sex offender registry.
The Ingham County Sheriff stated publicly that rumors of Dunnings’ conduct had circulated for at least a decade. Investigative records show county employees and police were aware of his conduct before the criminal investigation. Gretchen Whitmer’s post-resignation report said otherwise. The records contradicted her.
Dunnings’ brother Steven pleaded guilty to the same misdemeanor and kept his law license. Their sister Shauna Dunnings is currently an Ingham County Probate Court judge.
Was Dunnings convicted of sex trafficking?
No. The pandering charge, the most serious count and the one most closely connected to trafficking conduct, was dismissed as part of the plea agreement. He was convicted of misconduct in office and a misdemeanor solicitation charge.
What happened to cases Dunnings prosecuted for prostitution-related offenses?
No systematic review of his prosecutorial record in that category of offense was publicly initiated or completed. The question of whether his personal conduct corrupted his charging decisions in prostitution and trafficking cases was raised by the sentencing assistant attorney general and not resolved.
Why did he serve his sentence outside Ingham County?
Because he had prosecuted and sent defendants to the Ingham County Jail throughout his 19-year tenure. He served his time at the Clinton County Jail to avoid safety conflicts with people his office had prosecuted.
Who prosecuted Dunnings?
Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office handled the prosecution because of Dunnings’ role as the county’s top law enforcement officer and because the conduct crossed into Clinton and Ionia counties. Ingham County judges recused themselves from sentencing. A Genesee County Circuit Court judge presided at the sentencing hearing.
The Public Record and the Private Conduct
Dunnings was first elected Ingham County Prosecutor in November 1996, defeating incumbent Donald Martin. He was, at the time, a notable figure: the second African American elected to such an office in Michigan, following his father Stuart Dunnings Jr.’s legal career, and a product of the family firm Dunnings and Frawley. He had served on Michigan’s Standing Committee on Character and Fitness from 1987 to 1996. He understood professional responsibility standards. He had taught at Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He was reelected to a fifth term in 2012.
His prosecutorial identity was built on specific pillars: prostitution enforcement, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Those were not incidental priorities. They were the public face of his office. He was publicly aggressive about them. He used them to build and sustain his political profile across nearly two decades.
A prosecutor who is personally and repeatedly violating the laws he is charged with enforcing is not merely a hypocrite. He is corrupting the institutional integrity of every charging decision he makes in that category of offense. Every case in which he decided to prosecute, every plea he negotiated, every sentence he sought against individuals engaged in conduct he was simultaneously engaged in himself, carries a question that was never formally resolved: was the enforcement decision made on the merits, or did something else shape it?
The FBI surfaced Dunnings’ conduct in 2015 while investigating a human trafficking network operating in Lansing. The agency stated it could not ignore what the investigation produced about a sitting public official. Authorities determined he had paid women for sex hundreds of times across three counties between 2010 and 2015. In at least one documented instance, he paid one woman three to four times a week over a five-year period. Another woman had sex with him more than 200 times. His office had resources, staff, and county employees. Investigative records showed that some of those employees assisted Dunnings in facilitating access to women, though those employees may not have known the nature of the relationships.
Ingham County Sheriff Gene Wrigglesworth, in public statements following Dunnings’ arrest, said rumors of his conduct had circulated for at least a decade.
Dunnings was arrested March 14, 2016, outside a coffee shop in Lansing. He was charged with 15 crimes: one count of pandering under MCL 750.455, ten counts of engaging a prostitute, and four counts of willful neglect of duty. The pandering charge alone carried a maximum of 20 years in prison. A pandering conviction under Michigan law also triggers Tier 2 sex offender registration for 25 years.
He was placed on “medical leave” following the charges. He resigned effective July 2, 2016, approximately six months before the end of his fifth term.
The Nassar Declination
In 2014, a sexual assault complaint involving Larry Nassar was investigated by Michigan State University and referred to Dunnings’ office. At the conclusion of that investigation, MSU allowed Nassar to return to work. Dunnings’ office declined to prosecute.
Nassar continued abusing athletes for two more years. It was not until the Indianapolis Star published the first public allegations in fall 2016 that the university terminated him and law enforcement sought charges. By then Dunnings had resigned. Gretchen Whitmer was interim prosecutor. Schuette’s office ultimately handled the case.
Dunnings declined to prosecute Nassar in 2014. During that same period, he was personally engaged in conduct that directly overlapped with the category of offense MSU had reported. Whether that personal situation shaped his judgment on the Nassar matter is not established in the public record. What is established is the timeline: his office passed, Nassar continued, and the eventual prosecution did not come from Ingham County.
The 2014 complaint also triggered a federal Title IX investigation of MSU. Federal investigators found the university had failed to properly and timely investigate allegations. Dunnings’ declination was one component of the institutional failure that allowed Nassar to remain in practice.
Additionally, Dunnings’ office declined to bring charges following a separate 2014 complaint in which MSU football players were alleged to have sexually assaulted a student. A criminal complaint was filed, investigated by MSU, and turned over to Dunnings. He declined to prosecute, and released portions of the interview transcript. The survivor filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Federal investigators found MSU had failed to investigate in a timely manner.
Two separate sexual assault referrals. Two declinations. One office. The same year.
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Explore The LabThe Plea Deal and What It Meant for Anyone Else
Dunnings faced 15 charges. He pleaded guilty to two. The math matters.
The most consequential charge dismissed was the pandering count under MCL 750.455. Pandering in Michigan is a 20-year felony. A conviction carries mandatory Tier 2 sex offender registration for 25 years. It is not a charge prosecutors routinely dismiss in plea negotiations with defendants who do not have the resources, connections, and institutional relationships of a 19-year county prosecutor.
AG Schuette’s office justified the charge reductions publicly on the grounds of protecting victims from re-victimization through trial. That is a legitimate prosecutorial consideration. It is also the same reasoning that prosecutors across Michigan have used to explain away deals that look, from the outside, like preferential treatment. The argument is not necessarily wrong. It is worth noting that it was made, in this case, on behalf of a man who spent 19 years making prosecutorial decisions that affected defendants who had no comparable leverage.
Dunnings was sentenced to three years of probation, with the first year to be served in jail. He received credit for good behavior and was released approximately two months early, on September 24, 2017. He served roughly 10 months. He was not placed on the sex offender registry. His law license was suspended at plea and he was formally disbarred by the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board on July 11, 2017. The U.S. District Court and U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan banned him from practice on July 18, 2017.
The assistant attorney general who appeared at sentencing told the court directly: when a person of such public stature commits crimes while deceiving the public by making self-serving and misleading statements about those same crimes, the abuse of public trust becomes more significant, not less.
The sentencing judge gave him a year.
What Was Known and When
Sheriff Wrigglesworth’s public acknowledgment that rumors had circulated for a decade before the arrest is not a minor detail. It is the most significant institutional failure in this record that has received the least scrutiny.
If rumors of the county prosecutor’s conduct with prostitutes were known to law enforcement leadership for a decade, the question of why no formal inquiry occurred before an FBI human trafficking investigation surfaced the information is not a rhetorical question. It is an institutional accountability question that was never formally answered.
When Dunnings resigned in July 2016, Ingham County judges selected Gretchen Whitmer to serve out the remainder of his term. Twenty days after assuming the role, Whitmer issued an 11-page report concluding that Dunnings’ crimes did not infect the office and that none of his remaining subordinates were aware he had paid prostitutes.
In October 2016, the Lansing State Journal published investigative records that Schuette’s office had fought to withhold from public release until after sentencing. Those records directly contradicted Whitmer’s conclusion. They showed that county employees and police were aware of questionable conduct by Dunnings before the criminal investigation began. Some employees had been recruited by Dunnings to assist women he was involved with, though those employees may not have known the nature of those relationships. The records also indicated Dunnings had used the power of his office to coerce at least one woman who was not a prostitute to accept payment for sex, the conduct underlying the pandering charge that was ultimately dropped.
Whitmer did not revisit or amend her report following the release of those records. She went on to serve as Michigan Governor. The question of what her office’s rapid clearance of Dunnings’ subordinates was based on, given what the records subsequently showed, was not publicly resolved.
The Family
Stuart Dunnings III did not come to this alone. His brother, Steven Dunnings, was also implicated in the same investigation. Steven pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of engaging the services of a prostitute. The Michigan Attorney Discipline Board issued him a formal reprimand. He was assessed fines and community service hours. He kept his law license.
Their sister, Shauna Dunnings, is currently serving as an Ingham County Probate Court judge. She ran unopposed. She has publicly and explicitly distinguished her record from her brothers’ conduct. That distinction is noted here. Her record is her own. Her name appears in this section because the Dunnings family’s position within Ingham County’s legal and judicial infrastructure is a documented institutional fact, not because her conduct is in question.
The Dunnings case is not primarily a story about a corrupt individual. It is a story about an institutional environment that allowed a county prosecutor to spend nearly two decades personally violating the laws he was paid to enforce, while rumors of his conduct circulated among law enforcement leadership, while a sex abuse investigation at the state’s flagship university was declined, and while the eventual resolution of that conduct was managed in a way that produced approximately 10 months of jail time and no sex offender registration for a man who faced a 20-year felony. The gap between those two outcomes is the size of the accountability failure. The question this series is designed to document is not whether individual prosecutors are bad people. The question is what systems allow them to operate, and for how long, and what it takes to stop them.
Bluebook: Williams, Rita. Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors No. 03: Stuart Dunnings III, Clutch Justice (June 27, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/27/michigans-worst-prosecutors-stuart-dunnings-iii/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, June 27). Michigan’s worst prosecutors no. 03: Stuart Dunnings III. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/27/michigans-worst-prosecutors-stuart-dunnings-iii/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors No. 03: Stuart Dunnings III.” Clutch Justice, 27 June 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/06/27/michigans-worst-prosecutors-stuart-dunnings-iii/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors No. 03: Stuart Dunnings III.” Clutch Justice, June 27, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/27/michigans-worst-prosecutors-stuart-dunnings-iii/.
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