Livingston County Judge Pulled From Juvenile Cases: The Fourth Michigan Judge Sidelined Since 2024

Chief Judge Matthew McGivney pulled Susan Longsworth off cases involving minors after complaints of bias, five months after a resident told Livingston County commissioners in a public meeting that the judge had insulted her and ordered her children removed. She is at least the fourth Michigan judge sidelined from part of her docket since 2024, and none of the four cases moved through the same accountability door.

What the Order Actually Does

The reassignment came from the top of Livingston County’s bench, not from a state oversight body. Chief Judge Matthew J. McGivney, who leads both the 44th Circuit Court and the 53rd District Court, issued an updated docket order on June 9, 2026, pulling Longsworth, the Circuit Court’s Family Division judge, off cases involving minors. The order applies only to matters filed after June 22, 2026, which means cases already assigned to her before that date are apparently unaffected. The stated basis was complaints against Longsworth alleging bias and unequal treatment, according to reporting relayed by The Livingston Post, which cited MLive.com’s original coverage.

What the order is not: a finding. Chief judges in Michigan hold broad administrative authority to assign and reassign cases within their courts, and that authority does not require a hearing, a published record of the complaints, or a determination that a judge actually did anything wrong. It is closer to a scheduling decision than a disciplinary one, even when the practical effect looks identical to what happens after a judge is formally found to have crossed a line.

Who Is Susan Longsworth

Longsworth was appointed to the bench by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in March 2024, filling the partial term left vacant when 44th Circuit Court Judge Michael Hatty resigned. She won election to a full term that November. Before taking the bench, she spent roughly a decade as an assistant prosecuting attorney in the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office, where she trained police officers and served as the office’s lead domestic violence prosecutor, and she was later a solo practitioner focused on criminal defense at the time of her appointment. She earned her law degree from Notre Dame Law School in 2002 and began her legal career as a law clerk in the Family Division of the 43rd Circuit Court, the same docket area she now presides over and has partly been removed from. She belongs to the Livingston County Bar Association, the Oversight Policy Board for Substance Use Treatment and Prevention, and the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

Clutch Justice has tracked Michigan judges losing part of their caseload before, and the mechanisms rarely match. In 2025, Oakland County’s 52-4 District Court Judge Kirsten Nielson Hartig was barred from presiding over felony cases through an administrative order, a decision that predated any public misconduct finding. A Judicial Tenure Commission complaint followed. By January 2026, an amended JTC complaint disclosed a dementia diagnosis, confirming that cognitive decline, not simple bias, sat at the center of that case the entire time. The administrative order came first. The public record came later, and only because the JTC eventually filed formal charges.

Oakland County produced a second case in the same window. Probate Judge Kathleen Ryan was pulled from her docket on August 27, 2024, after the court’s administrator turned over recordings in which Ryan made racist and homophobic remarks about county residents and the county’s openly gay executive. Chief Probate Judge Linda Hallmark ordered her off the bench and referred the recordings to the JTC. What followed was roughly fifteen months of paid leave and no formal public complaint. The commission is barred from confirming or denying an investigation until it files formal charges, and it never did. Ryan’s attorneys announced her voluntary retirement in early January 2026. She kept her pension. There was no public hearing, no published findings, and no formal discipline on the record, only an administrative removal that never escalated.

Wayne County’s 23rd District Court Judge Joseph Slaven took a different path entirely. He faced a 14-count JTC complaint detailing conduct that ranged from mocking the chief judge on the bench to recording conversations with her and lying about it, and from promoting a political candidate using court resources to driving for years with expired registration. Courthouse camera footage caught him flipping off a camera nine times. He resigned in late 2025 rather than continue fighting the complaint, which meant Michigan never got a full public hearing on the record, only the JTC’s written allegations and his own answer to them.

A fifth Michigan judge appears in Clutch Justice’s judicial misconduct database over the same general period. Wexford County’s 84th District Court Judge Corey J. Wiggins was flagged there for conduct captured on video during a remote hearing, categorized under impropriety, impartiality, and diligence. That entry documents the incident. It does not document a docket reassignment, and none has been publicly reported for Wiggins, which is worth naming plainly rather than folding him into a pattern the record does not yet support.

What County Boards Do With What They Hear

Livingston County commissioners heard directly from a resident alleging judicial misconduct five months before any administrative response followed. That timeline matters beyond this one case. County boards of commissioners are not judicial oversight bodies and cannot discipline a sitting judge, but they control courthouse funding, they hear public comment first in many counties, and they are frequently the only public body a litigant can walk into without hiring a lawyer or filing with the JTC. What a board does with a public comment about a judge, whether it is logged, referred, or simply allowed to pass into the meeting minutes and nowhere else, shapes whether a pattern gets caught early or gets caught after months of additional cases move through the same courtroom.

Clutch Justice has documented what happens when a county board treats that responsibility as optional. Barry County’s Board of Commissioners received formal accountability correspondence regarding its circuit court and prosecutor’s office and the pattern there took years, not months, to surface publicly, in part because the institutional actors involved in local governance share overlapping relationships that make self-certified impartiality difficult. Livingston County is not Barry County, and nothing here suggests the same relationships are at work. But the structural lesson travels: a board that hears a specific, named allegation against a sitting judge in open public comment has a choice about whether that becomes a matter of public record beyond the minutes, or whether it waits for someone else, a chief judge, a reporter, a Commission, to act first. Other Michigan county boards watching this case play out in Livingston County have the same choice in front of them before, not after, a similar complaint reaches their own podium.

The Accountability Gap Between Reassignment and Discipline

Administrative reassignment exists for good reasons. Chief judges need the ability to move cases quickly when a docket problem surfaces, without waiting months for a state commission to act. The tradeoff is transparency. A JTC complaint is a public document with a case number, a set of numbered allegations, and eventually a public answer from the judge. An administrative reassignment order is, in most reporting like this one, a single paragraph: who, what date, what’s changing. The underlying complaints that triggered it, who filed them, what specifically was alleged beyond the two words “bias” and “unequal treatment,” none of that is required to appear anywhere public.

That gap matters most for the families whose cases are currently sitting in front of Longsworth, or who appeared before her prior to June 22. They have no equivalent of a JTC docket to check. They have a news story summarizing an order, and little else.

What to Watch

Three things determine whether the Longsworth reassignment stays a quiet docket adjustment or becomes something with a public record attached to it. The first is whether anyone involved in the underlying complaints, including Suds, escalates to the Judicial Tenure Commission, which would put allegations, dates, and specific conduct into a document the public can actually read. The second is whether the reassignment is permanent or temporary, something the June 9 order as reported does not specify. The third is whether the Livingston County Board of Commissioners does anything further with what it heard in January beyond the meeting minutes, or whether that public comment remains the extent of the record. Chief judge orders can be revisited, extended, or quietly allowed to lapse, and without a JTC file or continued board attention attached, there is no public mechanism forcing an update either way.