The 2025 JTC Annual Report: What 698 Grievances and Five Public Complaints Reveal About Judicial Accountability in Michigan

Michigan’s judicial discipline agency logged its biggest grievance spike in a decade, closed 99 percent of cases without a misconduct finding, and quietly confirmed a pattern Clutch Justice had already documented.

A Grievance Spike With No Official Explanation

Michigan’s Judicial Tenure Commission received 698 requests for investigation in 2025, naming 401 judges across the state. That is a 32 percent increase over 2024, when the Commission logged 530 grievances, and it is the largest single-year jump the agency has recorded in the past decade. The Commission’s own report does not offer a firm explanation. It notes that seven public complaints were pending or initiated during the year, and speculates that publicity around those cases may have driven public awareness of the complaint process itself. That is an offered theory, not a documented cause.

What the report does document is where those 698 complaints came from and what happened to the 556 the Commission resolved during the year.

Where 556 Grievances Went in 2025

Of the cases the Commission closed in 2025, 540 ended without any action against the judge, either because the alleged conduct would not have constituted misconduct even if true, the allegations were unfounded or unprovable, or the judge’s explanation satisfied the Commission. Fourteen more grievances resolved through confidential private discipline: two admonitions, seven cautions, and five explanatory letters. Two additional judges retired mid-investigation rather than face a likely non-dismissal outcome. Only five grievances, out of 698 filed and 556 resolved, produced a public complaint, the first step toward a formal disciplinary record the public can actually see.

The subject matter of the grievances helps explain why so few advance. More than 80 percent of the 2025 filings, 580 of them, asked the Commission to review the merits of an underlying legal ruling. The Commission has no authority to act as an appeals court, so those grievances were dismissed unless they also alleged actual ethical misconduct. Another 107 grievances alleged bias, though the report notes that in many of those cases the only evidence offered was disagreement with the judge’s rulings. Criminal, domestic relations, and general civil cases together generated 70 percent of the year’s grievances, with circuit court judges, who handle the bulk of that docket, named in 43 percent of all filings.

The Five Cases That Went Public

Public complaints are rare, and each one filed in 2025 involved conduct serious enough that a confidential resolution was judged insufficient. Two additional complaints filed before 2023, against Judges Demetria Brue and Debra Nance, also remained pending at year end, illustrating how long the public track can run once a case is filed.

What Happens Behind the Confidential Wall

The five public complaints are the visible fraction of the Commission’s work. Section V of the report also summarizes non-public dispositions, cases resolved through private admonitions, cautions, or explanatory letters that never generate a docket number the public can search. Those summaries describe a judge who imposed 558 days of incarceration for contempt when the law caps such sentences at 93 days and bars consecutive terms. Another summary describes a judge who took three and a half years to issue a final disposition in a child protective proceeding, in violation of a court rule requiring prompt resolution. A third describes a judge admonished for treatment of a court administrator so severe the administrator resigned.

Each of these resulted only in a private letter. The grievant who filed the underlying complaint is told that some action was taken, but Michigan Court Rule 9.261 bars the Commission from disclosing what that action was. A judge can accumulate multiple confidential cautions across a career, as the pattern in Judge Wilson’s case suggests happened for years before his conduct became a public complaint, and the public has no mechanism to see that record forming.

The Racial Equity Question the JTC Still Can’t Fully Answer

In 2023, the Association of Black Judges of Michigan raised concerns about the racial composition of judges named in Commission public complaints. The Commission responded by commissioning an independent review from the National Center for State Courts. Phase I, released in August 2024, found statistically significant racial disparities in three parts of the grievance process without identifying a cause. Phase II, completed in August 2025, added interviews with staff, commissioners, and judges, plus a factor the raw statistics had missed: whether a judge resigned during an investigation rather than face an expected public sanction.

Once that factor was included, the disparity in public outcomes disappeared. Grievances against Black respondents were initially more likely to end in a public outcome than a dismissal compared to grievances against white respondents, but the difference ceased to be statistically significant once white judges who resigned ahead of expected sanctions were counted. A second disparity proved harder to resolve. When a “full investigation” is defined broadly enough to include cases where the Commission’s only action was requesting a court transcript, a statistically significant racial disparity remains. Narrow the definition to exclude transcript-only cases, and the disparity disappears. The Commission has not resolved which definition is the right one to use, and a Phase III review is now underway to examine how requests for investigation are filed, processed, and resolved against Black judges compared to their white counterparts.

What the Report Doesn’t Say Out Loud

Read against its own numbers, the 2025 Annual Report describes an accountability system that is structurally built to produce dismissals. Litigants, prisoners, and their friends or family filed 91 percent of all grievances in 2025. Other judges filed 1 percent. The Commission itself opened 0 percent on its own motion. Court personnel filed 1 percent. The people positioned to observe judicial misconduct in real time, colleagues on the bench and court staff, almost never file the complaint that starts the process. The people who file are, overwhelmingly, the litigants who lost.

That matters because 83 percent of 2025 grievances sought review of a legal ruling, a category the Commission is constitutionally barred from acting on regardless of merit. A losing litigant who believes a judge got the law wrong has, structurally, filed a complaint the Commission cannot use even if every word is accurate. The report does not frame this as a design flaw. It presents it as a routine filtering step. Whether it also functions as a filter that keeps genuine misconduct concentrated in the confidential track, visible only after it accumulates into a pattern serious enough for a public complaint, is a question the report’s own numbers raise without answering.

I want to be transparent that I do not believe any of this is a staff problem; the JTC staff works incredibly hard. What it is, is a process problem and antiquated legislation that desperately needs an update reflective of modern times rather than the 1960’s. It is my sincerest hope is that meaningful change is on the horizon and that we will see the below institutional report card improve.