Barry County Prosecutors Were Alerted of MSP Bryan Fuller’s Conviction Suit Four Days Before the Final Verdict

The Email Barry County Cannot Unsend

The record reviewed by Clutch Justice shows an email thread dated September 15, 2023, at 5:03 PM. The subject line was “BRYAN FULLER.” The recipients included Anastase Markou, Christopher J. Elsworth, and Julie Nakfoor Pratt. Elsworth and Nakfoor Pratt were reached at their Barry County government email addresses.

The visible message opened with: “Well look at this, BRYAN FULLER!” It included a shortened link. A second visible message in the thread connects Fuller to a botched turn-in and accused Barry County officials of continuing to protect him. It also contained article text and screenshots.

This is not an article about mind-reading. It is an article about a timestamp, a subject line, two county email addresses, and what that timestamp does to the timeline Barry County can plausibly claim.

Why September 15 Matters

By September 15, 2023, McCann v. Fuller was not a hypothetical future credibility issue. Ray McCann Jr.’s federal civil rights lawsuit against MSP Sgt. Bryan Fuller had been pending since December 2019. The case alleged that Fuller fabricated evidence and violated McCann’s constitutional rights in the investigation that helped send an innocent man to prison.

The McCann exoneration was not obscure local gossip. The Detroit News covered McCann’s exoneration from the perjury conviction in January 2018, years before the federal verdict. That matters because The Detroit News is part of the statewide press ecosystem visible to Barry County officials and court watchers. The point is not that any specific official can be proven to have read that article. The point is that McCann’s exoneration and the police conduct behind it were public before Fuller later appeared in Barry County matters.

WOOD TV8’s Target 8 had also publicly covered McCann’s civil-rights case before the verdict, including reporting that the exonerated man in the Jodi Parrack case was seeking $12 million from the cold-case detective and later reporting on the depression, paranoia, and personal fallout McCann described after his wrongful conviction. In other words, Fuller was not an obscure name buried in a sealed file. His role in a wrongful-conviction case was public, searchable, and serious before the jury ever returned its verdict.

The human cost was catastrophic. Target 8 reported that McCann said the wrongful conviction broke up his family, destroyed his reputation, caused continuing depression and nightmares, and left him paranoid at the sight of police cars. He testified that police arrested him while he was driving to see his newborn grandson for the first time. He met that baby through jail glass. He served 20 months in jail and prison. He was threatened on the prison bus. During his first week in state prison, inmates pulled him from his bunk and struck him in the head with a padlock. He dropped from 170 pounds to 117 pounds while incarcerated. The verdict number matters. But the number is not the story. The story is the hell Fuller and the McCann investigative team put an innocent man through, and the public institutions that treated that hell as a disclosure inconvenience instead of a warning siren.

Four days after the Barry County email, on September 19, 2023, a federal jury awarded McCann $14.5 million against Fuller, including punitive damages. Michigan State Police later settled with McCann for $11 million on October 17, 2023.

That means the September 15 email landed during the final stage of a federal civil rights case that would publicly confirm Fuller as one of Michigan’s most serious police credibility problems. It also landed after Fuller had already touched Barry County casework that Clutch Justice has been documenting for months.

By mid-2026, the timeline is even worse. McCann v. Fuller was filed in December 2019. That means Barry County has spent nearly seven years with Fuller either under active federal civil-rights litigation for alleged fabricated evidence and constitutional violations, or under the public consequence of a federal jury verdict and state settlement arising from that wrongful-conviction record. For a county prosecutor, a judge, and a court system using or reviewing Fuller-touched cases, there is no credible “we did not know this mattered” defense left.

Fuller, Criger, and the Perjury Trap

The Fuller problem also cannot be isolated from Shane Criger. Prior Clutch Justice reporting has already documented the connection: Prison Legal News reported that Fuller and Det. Shane Criger worked together in the McCann investigation, including in the process that produced McCann’s sworn statement before the perjury charge. Public reporting also places Criger as the person who brought Fuller into the McCann investigation. The federal docket in McCann v. Fuller identifies Criger among the defendants.

That matters because the McCann case was not simply a bad hunch. It became a machine. McCann was first cast as the monster, then interrogated through lies, then pushed into sworn-statement terrain, then charged with perjury when the murder theory could not be proved. While McCann sat in prison, the actual killer, Daniel Furlong, confessed to the murder and sexual assault. The institutional posture was not truth-seeking. It was target-building.

Notice Changes the Disclosure Question

Prosecutors are not required to agree with every complaint that lands in their inbox. They are required to take seriously information that may affect the credibility of a lead investigator, the integrity of evidence, or the fairness of a criminal proceeding.

That is why this new record matters. The Fuller issue was not merely sitting somewhere in a federal docket. It was not simply available to someone willing to run a PACER search. It was not discovered years later with the benefit of hindsight. Fuller was put in front of Barry County’s elected prosecutor and a long-serving Barry County APA in writing days before the federal verdict.

Every Barry County case touched by Fuller now deserves a case-by-case review. That review should ask whether Fuller collected evidence, arranged a turn-in, communicated with a complainant, shaped probable cause, made representations to prosecutors, or created records the defense relied on. It should also ask whether his federal civil rights exposure was ever disclosed to the defense.

MSP’s Own Brady/Giglio Policy Confirms the Category

Michigan State Police now has a written procedure that says the quiet part in official language. MSP Procedure Manual 14-05, “Disclosure of Potential Impeachment Information Related to Member Misconduct,” effective October 23, 2024, establishes department procedures for disclosing potential Brady information related to member conduct to prosecutors. It expressly recognizes that Brady/Giglio obligations include information that may impeach government witnesses, including police officers, and that MSP and its members are part of the prosecution team with a constitutional duty to make material case information, including Brady information, available to prosecuting officials.

The policy’s listed misconduct categories map directly onto the Fuller problem. Potential Brady information includes final department determinations involving intentional false statements, misstated facts in reports or forms, omitted material facts, perjury or judicial findings of intentional false or misleading court statements, material work-related false statements to supervisors, untruthfulness during Internal Affairs, mishandled evidence, intentional failures to follow forensic protocols, intentional failures to secure or document evidence, intentional destruction of department records material to a criminal matter, intentional violations of search, seizure, or arrest law, and any other member conduct that could reasonably affect credibility or reliability as a witness.

The date has to be handled precisely. Procedure Manual 14-05 is effective October 23, 2024, after the Barry County investigation at issue, the plea, sentencing, the Fuller verdict, and resentencing. This article does not claim MSP violated this specific written procedure in 2022 or 2023 without first obtaining older versions. The point is narrower and still powerful: MSP’s current written policy confirms the department’s own understanding that police misconduct affecting honesty, evidence integrity, constitutional compliance, and witness reliability is Brady/Giglio material that must be made available to prosecutors.

That makes the unanswered institutional question unavoidable. Did MSP ever notify Barry County, the Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council, the Michigan Attorney General, or any prosecutor that Bryan Fuller carried potential Brady/Giglio impeachment material? If MSP did notify them, Barry County’s nondisclosure problem gets worse. If MSP did not, MSP’s failure-to-notify problem gets worse. Either way, the policy confirms that Fuller-touched cases require review.

The State Knew at Multiple Levels

The Fuller impeachment issue was known within the State of Michigan. MSP employed Fuller. The Michigan Attorney General’s Office defended Fuller. Barry County prosecuted cases using Fuller without disclosing the federal civil-rights exposure in the affected case record. Once Rita Williams gave written notice directly to Barry County on September 15, 2023, any remaining claim of ignorance collapsed.

The Attorney General angle makes the “who should have notified whom” question unavoidable. Because the Michigan Attorney General’s Office defended MSP Sgt. Bryan Fuller in active federal civil-rights litigation alleging fabrication of evidence, the State had actual institutional knowledge of Fuller’s potential impeachment exposure. Barry County’s later written notice only made the failure to disclose more direct. The issue is no longer whether Fuller’s misconduct was discoverable. The issue is why the State’s own knowledge did not result in Giglio disclosure, case review, or correction of the record.

A separate June 3, 2022 Court of Claims complaint adds another notice brick. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf and the Barry County Sheriff’s Office sued Dana Nessel, Jocelyn Benson, MSP, MSP Trooper/Sgt. Bryan Fuller, MSP Detective Sgt. David Geyer, and others. Fuller was named in both his official and individual capacity. This article does not rely on that lawsuit to prove the truth of the election-investigation allegations, and it does not treat the Dar Leaf dispute as the point. The point is narrower: public court records placed Fuller directly inside a Barry County governmental conflict months before the plea, sentencing, and post-conviction issues documented here.

In the Barry County Case at Issue, Fuller Was Not Background

The documented record in the Barry County case at issue makes Fuller central, not incidental. Fuller was working directly with the complaining company from the beginning of the case in May 2022. Text-message records then show that attorneys repeatedly identified Fuller as the detective connected to the matter, reported that Fuller confirmed the case was at the prosecutor’s office for review, and later confirmed after the arrest that “Fuller is the lead detective.”

The same records document a planned turn-in arrangement that was not collateral to the case. It was part of the case-management record involving Fuller, the defense, and Barry County timing. The defendant asked about timing after the arrangement was made. Additional text records with Fuller show discussion of the defendant turning himself in, the expected timing in Barry County, and Fuller saying he would get with the court to find the best time for “in and out.”

Then the arrangement failed. MSP came to the defendant’s home and arrested him in front of his family. The defendant reported that the troopers said there was no turn-in arrangement and that Fuller was no longer on the case. The defense attorney’s response was direct: Fuller “had no idea,” was “in shock,” and said he had updated the records. The attorney also told the defendant the arrest was “unprofessional and incredibly mismanaged,” that it should not have happened because there was an assigned turn-in date and time, and that MSP likely violated its own policy and procedures.

That is why the disclosure problem is so serious. If a prosecutor knows the lead detective in a case is also the subject of an active wrongful-conviction and fabricated-evidence lawsuit, and that same detective is documented in the case’s botched turn-in record, the office cannot treat Fuller as background noise. Fuller becomes Brady/Giglio material tied directly to the defendant’s case.

Michigan Comparators Show Why Lead-Detective Credibility Matters

Michigan has already seen what happens when an officer’s credibility problem is treated as peripheral even though the officer was central to the case. The closest comparator is Kelley v. Burton, the Oakland County case involving Detective Mark Ferguson. Kelley argued that the State failed to disclose credibility and misconduct evidence about Ferguson, the officer in charge. The Brady/Giglio issue mattered because Ferguson was not a minor witness. He was the lead detective and coordinator of important parts of the investigation.

That is the conceptual match to Fuller. The withheld or undisclosed misconduct evidence is not peripheral when the officer is not peripheral. A lead investigator can become the credibility bridge between the evidence, the charging decision, the prosecution theory, and the defense’s ability to evaluate the case. If that bridge is compromised, the problem cannot be isolated to one witness box or one line of testimony.

The broader Oakland County fallout from Ferguson is also instructive. After Ferguson’s misconduct became known, prosecutors reviewed roughly 100 pending drug cases involving him and dismissed cases where he was central to the investigation. That is the kind of institutional review Barry County and MSP should have initiated once Fuller’s fabrication litigation, the written notice, the verdict, and the settlement became known.

The same principle appears in other Michigan wrongful-conviction and misconduct cases. In the LaVone Hill matter, Wayne County later acknowledged that testimony from Detroit Sgt. Walter Bates tainted the conviction once Bates’s serious misconduct came to light. In the Darell Chancellor and Darrell Richmond cases, convictions were vacated after fraudulent search-warrant affidavits and compromised narcotics-officer misconduct surfaced. Dwayne Provience is another Michigan Brady example involving police and prosecution knowledge of exculpatory information that was not disclosed.

The governing rule is not exotic. In People v. Chenault, the Michigan Supreme Court recognized that Brady material includes impeachment evidence, that the State is responsible for evidence within its control, and that Michigan does not require a defendant to satisfy a defense “due diligence” hurdle before raising a Brady violation. PAAM’s own Brady/Giglio guidance likewise instructs prosecutors to disclose Brady/Giglio material even without a defense request, to identify potential impeachment evidence about witnesses, and to err against the backdrop of ensuring a fair trial.

The Judicial Proximity Question

The judge question has to be framed with precision. The fact that Fuller and Judge Michael Schipper lived minutes from each other does not, by itself, prove bias, friendship, communication, or misconduct. But geography is not the whole concern. Fuller and Schipper also spent years operating inside the same small Barry County legal community, where MSP, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation, and the court repeatedly intersect in the same courthouse ecosystem. A public Hastings Banner post from January 9, 2020 identified Fuller as Detective Sgt. Bryan Fuller of the Michigan State Police detachment in Hastings in connection with an armed-robbery investigation. MiCOURT records for State of Michigan v. Jacob Braddum, Case No. 2020-0000000193-FH, show the resulting 5th Circuit Court case was assigned to Judge Michael Schipper, with a plea hearing on March 25, 2020, and sentencing on June 17, 2020.

Public reporting from May 22, 2020 also identified MSP Detective Sgt. Bryan Fuller speaking about a multi-county storage-facility burglary investigation involving multiple Barry County locations, including Hastings, Middleville, Dowling, and Delton. MiCOURT records for State of Michigan v. Eric Morgan, Case No. 2020-0000000482-FH, show another 5th Circuit Court case arising from that storage-facility investigation assigned to Judge Schipper. That docket does not prove that defense counsel identified a Fuller problem. But the sequence is notable: a demand for discovery, exhibit list, and witness list were filed on August 11, 2020, followed by nolle prosequi dismissal on August 19, 2020, under a related plea file. In hindsight, given Fuller’s later constitutional-liability verdict, that docket should be reviewed for what discovery contained, what Fuller’s role was, and whether any defense attorney, prosecutor, or court actor had reason to question the integrity of the investigation. None of that proves personal bias. It does document that Fuller had a repeated public footprint in Barry County criminal investigations and that Fuller and Schipper were operating in the same small Barry County criminal-court ecosystem before the later case at issue.

That matters because Fuller was not a random outside witness. He was the lead detective connected to the botched turn-in record in a Barry County case, and his credibility was tied to an active wrongful-conviction and fabricated-evidence lawsuit. In a small legal community, a judge presiding over a case involving that detective should disclose any personal, professional, or informal familiarity that could reasonably cause a defendant or the public to question neutrality.

That question becomes sharper when the court record is viewed alongside the prosecutor record. Because the prosecutor’s office had written notice of Fuller, Fuller was documented in the defendant’s turn-in failure, and the judge was operating in the same close legal community, the public is entitled to know whether anyone in the court system treated Fuller’s role as a disclosure issue before plea, sentencing, resentencing, appeal, or post-conviction proceedings moved forward.

Schipper Had Due Process Duties Too

A judge’s obligation is not identical to the prosecutor’s Brady/Giglio duty. The prosecutor has the constitutional duty to disclose favorable and impeachment evidence, and People v. Chenault makes clear that Brady covers favorable evidence suppressed by the government without requiring the defense to prove it could not have found the evidence through diligence. A judge does not personally become the prosecutor’s discovery officer.

But once a judge is on notice that a case may involve undisclosed Giglio material about a lead investigator, the judge’s role changes. The court has to protect the fairness, integrity, and reviewability of the proceeding. That can mean ordering disclosure, allowing discovery, holding an evidentiary hearing, conducting in camera review if privilege or confidentiality is claimed, appointing counsel, appointing a special prosecutor if the prosecutor’s office is conflicted, or granting relief if nondisclosure undermined confidence in the result.

Michigan’s criminal discovery rule, MCR 6.201, gives trial courts authority over mandatory discovery and additional discovery on good cause. That matters here because the Fuller issue is not a vague complaint about a witness. It goes to whether the lead detective’s impeachment material was known, whether prosecutors disclosed it, whether the defense could litigate it, whether the plea and sentencing record were reliable, and whether post-conviction review was meaningful.

For Judge Michael Schipper, the problem is larger than an ordinary discovery dispute because the allegations place him near the factual record too. Clutch Justice has documented concerns involving the plea-hearing record, alleged chambers discussions, selective recusal from Rita Williams’ case while retaining Ryan’s, and later handling of post-conviction issues. If the motion turns on who knew what, when they knew it, what was disclosed, what was concealed, and why the record was not corrected, the judge cannot simply deny factual development on paper while the implicated prosecutor’s office controls the response.

MCR 2.003 requires judicial disqualification not only for actual bias, but also when impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including circumstances that create a serious risk of actual bias under objective and reasonable perceptions. Michigan judicial ethics guidance also recognizes that a judge should raise disqualification when the judge has cause to believe grounds may exist, and Michigan’s disqualification procedure allows either the judge or a party to raise the issue.

Once Schipper was on notice that Fuller had undisclosed Giglio material, that Barry County had written notice, that the Attorney General defended Fuller, that the prosecution may have failed to correct the record, and that Schipper himself may be a witness to disputed plea facts, the responsible judicial move was not to bury it. It was to step back from any issue touching his own conduct, appoint counsel where needed, remove the conflicted prosecutor from controlling the response, preserve the record, and send the factual disputes to a neutral evidentiary process.

Correction Was the Duty. Retaliation Was the Tell.

A prosecutor who learns that a detective on a case is simultaneously part of a wrongful-conviction suit has a responsibility that runs in several directions at once. The office must protect the defendant’s right to a fair process. It must protect the court from a misleading record. It must protect the public from convictions built on undisclosed police credibility problems. And it must protect its own files from becoming a mechanism for hiding state misconduct.

That responsibility does not depend on whether the prosecutor likes the person raising the alarm. It does not disappear because the warning arrives in an angry email. It does not become optional because the detective is MSP, because the case is politically inconvenient, or because disclosure would make a prosecution harder to defend.

Once Fuller was put in writing to Nakfoor Pratt and Elsworth, the responsible path was obvious: stop, audit, preserve, disclose, and notify. If Fuller touched the case, defendants and defense counsel needed to know that the detective was facing a federal civil rights suit alleging fabricated evidence. After the verdict, they needed to know that a jury had found against him and awarded $14.5 million. After the settlement, they needed to know that the state paid $11 million to resolve it.

That duty becomes sharper because, according to Nakfoor Pratt’s own statements, Elsworth was responsible for charging decisions in the office at that time. If that is accurate, then Fuller-touched cases did not merely pass through MSP. They passed through the charging-approval function of an assistant prosecutor who had been alerted in writing that Fuller was tied to a wrongful-conviction case and, days later, a federal verdict for constitutional violations. Every Fuller-touched charging decision after that notice required disclosure analysis, not silence.

And the knowledge chain did not begin with a private citizen’s research. MSP had the detective. The Attorney General defended him. Barry County used him. Then Barry County received direct written notice. This was state knowledge moving through state institutions, and the record still did not get corrected.

Remorse would have looked like a file review. Remorse would have looked like notice to defense counsel. Remorse would have looked like a written Brady/Giglio analysis, preservation letters, and a public commitment to identify anyone whose case Fuller touched. Remorse would have looked like saying Ray McCann’s life mattered enough that the same pattern would not be allowed to move through Barry County unchecked.

Retaliation does not cure a disclosure problem. It compounds it. When the person raising a police-credibility warning is met with charges instead of a transparent review, the institutional message is not “we investigated this.” The message is “we punished the person who forced the issue into writing.” That is the choice now documented here: Fuller was raised, the McCann harm was public, Criger’s connection to the McCann investigation was part of the broader credibility record, Fuller was not corrected into the affected case record, and the people with prosecutorial power chose punishment over repair.

Barry County has had nearly three years since the Fuller issue was first raised in the case record, almost three years since the September 15, 2023 written notice, and nearly seven years since McCann v. Fuller made Fuller’s alleged fabrication record an active federal civil-rights issue. It could have reviewed Fuller-touched cases. It could have notified defendants. It could have corrected the record. It could have acknowledged the harm. It could have said, plainly, that what happened to Ray McCann was intolerable and that no Barry County defendant would be forced to litigate blind around the same detective. It chose not to. Instead, the documented response was retaliation.

Where the Conduct Became Criminal

The criminal line is not simply that Barry County mishandled a Brady/Giglio issue. A prosecutor can be wrong, careless, defensive, or slow without every error becoming a crime. The line changes when the facts show knowledge, official power, and corrupt purpose moving together: public officials are on notice of a due-process problem, have a legal duty to preserve and disclose it, and then allegedly use the machinery of prosecution to keep the problem buried or punish the person who forced it into writing.

Michigan law gives that conduct several possible criminal frames. MCL 750.478 makes willful neglect of a legal duty by a public officer or person holding public trust a misdemeanor when no more specific punishment applies. MCL 750.122 criminalizes intimidation, interference, obstruction, and certain retaliation connected to witnesses and official proceedings. And MCL 750.505 preserves indictable common-law offenses not otherwise punished by statute, which is where Michigan’s common-law misconduct-in-office doctrine matters. In People v. Coutu, the Michigan Supreme Court described misconduct in office as corrupt behavior by an officer in the exercise of official duties or while acting under color of office.

That is why the September 15, 2023 email matters so much. Before that notice, an official might try to claim Fuller was hidden in a federal docket or floating somewhere outside the local case file. After that notice, the problem was in the prosecutor’s inbox. After the September 19 verdict and October 17 settlement, the problem was even louder. At that point, every later charging, plea, sentencing, resentencing, appellate, and post-conviction decision touched by Fuller had to be handled as a disclosure and conflict issue.

The alleged criminality sits in the response. Did officials preserve the records, notify the defense, correct the court, and screen conflicted actors? Or did they keep Fuller’s credibility problem out of the case record while using prosecution pressure against the person who documented it? The first path is lawful correction. The second path is the alleged crime: willful neglect, obstruction of truthful information in an official proceeding, and misconduct in office by public officials acting under color of their authority.

The Elsworth Problem Did Not Stay in Barry County

Clutch Justice previously reported that Christopher J. Elsworth and Benjamin M. Norg are now both working under Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeffrey Getting. Both had personal knowledge of a Barry County plea-agreement dispute. Both are connected to records that have still not been produced. Elsworth denied the existence of plea communications on the Barry County court record in December 2023, despite multiple actors with direct knowledge confirming those communications exist.

The Fuller notice record adds a second lane to the same institutional question. Elsworth was not only an APA involved in the plea-agreement record. He was also one of the Barry County recipients of a September 15, 2023 written notice about Bryan Fuller, four days before the federal verdict against Fuller.

Elsworth was not a new lawyer passing through Barry County. Clutch Justice has previously documented that he had 19 years of criminal prosecution experience in Barry County before moving to Kalamazoo County’s Family Court division in January 2025. That matters because Fuller was not an unfamiliar outside officer to that local system. Fuller served at the Hastings MSP Post, the post serving Barry County, and Barry County prosecutors working criminal cases with Hastings Post detectives over years of practice had every reason to know the detectives whose investigations they presented in court.

If Elsworth was the office actor responsible for charging decisions, as Nakfoor Pratt has stated, then the Fuller notice record is not merely informational. It is operational. It means the person approving charges had direct written notice that a detective working Barry County matters was tied to an active wrongful-conviction suit and then to a $14.5 million constitutional-liability verdict. That is exactly the kind of information that should trigger review before charges, pleas, sentencing, appeals, or post-conviction proceedings move forward.

That matters in Kalamazoo because prosecutor credibility does not reset when an attorney changes counties. If a prosecutor has a documented history tied to undisclosed plea communications and a separate written-notice record tied to a lead detective with a fabrication verdict, that is relevant to the public’s understanding of the cases that prosecutor handles now.

Nakfoor Pratt Owns the Barry County Mess

Julie Nakfoor Pratt is not a bystander to this record. She was the elected Barry County Prosecutor. The September 15, 2023 Fuller notice went to her county email address. If Elsworth was handling charging decisions under her authority, that does not distance her from the problem. It places the problem inside the office she was responsible for supervising.

An elected prosecutor’s duty is not simply to win cases or defend the office after misconduct is exposed. The duty is to seek justice, protect due process, disclose material impeachment evidence, correct false or incomplete records, supervise assistant prosecutors, prevent retaliation, and make sure the court is not relying on a misleading factual record. Once Fuller was put in writing to Nakfoor Pratt and Elsworth, the office’s job was to preserve, review, disclose, and notify. It was not to punish the person who forced the issue into the record.

The clean response from a prosecutor in Nakfoor Pratt’s position would have been immediate conflict screening, written Brady/Giglio analysis, notice to defense counsel, preservation of all communications and records, review of every Fuller-touched case, and referral to a neutral authority for any matter in which the Barry County Prosecutor’s Office itself was implicated. The opposite approach, silence followed by retaliation, is what makes the office’s responsibility so serious.

Jeffrey Getting Has a Responsibility Now

Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeffrey Getting did not create the Barry County record. But once attorneys connected to that record are working under his authority, he owns the Kalamazoo response to what is now known. Prosecutor credibility does not reset at the county line, and supervisory responsibility does not disappear because the misconduct trail began somewhere else.

Getting’s responsibility is to determine whether Elsworth’s Barry County record creates disclosure, conflict, supervision, or case-assignment concerns in Kalamazoo County. That includes Elsworth’s December 2023 denial of plea communications on the Barry County court record, his receipt of the September 15, 2023 Fuller notice, his alleged role in charging decisions, and his connection to unresolved records that still have not been produced. It also includes Benjamin Norg’s personal knowledge of the disputed plea-agreement record and his role in the defense file.

This is the Kalamazoo question now: did Getting’s office knowingly absorb Barry County’s unresolved due-process problems without review, or did it conduct a meaningful conflict and integrity analysis? If no review occurred, then Kalamazoo has not merely hired attorneys from another county. It has imported an accountability problem and placed it inside a new prosecutor’s office.

What Needs to Happen Now

Barry County should identify every case in which Fuller participated from December 2019 forward, including investigations, turn-ins, evidence handling, witness contacts, probable-cause submissions, and post-conviction proceedings. The review should not be limited to cases where Fuller was the named lead detective. Any meaningful investigative involvement matters.

For each case, the county should determine whether the defense was told about McCann v. Fuller, the September 19, 2023 verdict, the October 17, 2023 settlement, and any known internal or external complaints concerning Fuller’s conduct. Where no disclosure was made, defense counsel and affected defendants should be notified now.

That notification cannot be limited to pending cases. Defendants who pleaded, were sentenced, abandoned appeals, or accepted probation terms without knowing the detective’s active wrongful-conviction exposure were deprived of information that could have changed litigation strategy, plea posture, sentencing advocacy, or post-conviction review. The office’s obligation was not only to avoid future harm. It was to correct the harm already built into the record.

The first honest institutional response is remorse. Not branding. Not defensive silence. Not a threat. Not another charge. Remorse, followed by repair. Barry County cannot claim to care about public safety while treating a documented wrongful-conviction detective as a manageable embarrassment and treating the people who raise the alarm as the real problem.

Kalamazoo County should answer a separate question: whether its prosecutor’s office has reviewed Elsworth’s Barry County record, including his December 2023 denial of plea communications and this September 15, 2023 Fuller notice record, before allowing him to continue handling matters involving children, families, records, and state power.

Sources and Records Reviewed