Barry County’s Prosecutor’s Office Is Hiring. Here’s the Record the Posting Won’t Show You.

An open Assistant Prosecutor position, a confirmed disciplinary admonishment, a state-confirmed falsified proof of service, and a circuit court next door with one of Michigan’s lowest trial rates. New 2023 comparison data shows Barry County’s criminal trial output was due process anemic among similarly sized counties.

The Posting

Let me tell you what stands out the moment you read this job posting. The person an applicant would send a resume and cover letter to, Julie Nakfoor Pratt, is the same elected prosecutor who carries a confirmed private admonishment for a Rule of Professional Conduct violation involving candor toward a tribunal.

The posting itself, published May 26, 2026 through the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, lists one open Assistant Prosecutor position in the Barry County Prosecutor’s Office, salary range $71,219.20 to $96,844.80. Applicants are instructed to send a resume and cover letter to Nakfoor Pratt directly, along with office staff member Suzi Hinga-Zeeryp, at the office’s address on West County Street in Hastings. The posting states resumes will be accepted until the position is filled. It does not mention who currently holds the other chairs in that office, what those attorneys have been connected to in litigation and disciplinary filings, or what the circuit court next door looks like on the numbers. That context does not belong in a job posting. It belongs in the public record, and Clutch Justice has spent multiple years building that record.

Brady and Giglio: The Obligation the Posting Doesn’t Mention

Every assistant prosecutor sworn into a Michigan courtroom carries a constitutional obligation under Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States to disclose material that could undermine the credibility of the state’s witnesses or exculpate the defendant, particularly material bearing on the credibility of law enforcement witnesses. Clutch Justice’s BGS List, tracking Brady, Giglio, and Santobello related failures across more than 30 Michigan prosecutorial offices, documents a specific Barry County instance connected to Michigan State Police Sgt./Det. Bryan Fuller.

Fuller is the named defendant in McCann v. Fuller, federal civil rights litigation carrying Brady and Giglio exposure that contributed to a $14.5 million settlement in a related wrongful prosecution matter. Clutch Justice has documented that written notice regarding Fuller’s exposure reached the Barry County Prosecutor’s Office before the office proceeded in at least one matter without disclosing that history, and separately, that the office did not pass that information to its own assistant prosecutors handling related casework. An assistant prosecutor accepting this position inherits that disclosure obligation. On the documented record, they also inherit an office that has not reliably met it.

The Proof of Service Nobody Checked

In a separate matter, Clutch Justice identified a Barry County appellate filing carrying two different dates of service for the same document. The individual the brief was purportedly served upon never received it. The Michigan Department of Corrections has no record of receiving it either. Clutch Justice filed its own complaint with the State Court Administrative Office. SCAO investigated and confirmed the discrepancy in writing in an inquiry that closed in December 2025. A copy of that letter is on file with Clutch Justice. The attorney who filed the appellate answer, identified in Clutch Justice’s reporting as Allie Rouse, did not independently verify service before submission. Clutch Justice’s broader reporting on the office’s procedural chain, which also names Tracie Gittleman, documents that this was not an isolated clerical slip but part of a recurring pattern in how the office handles service and notice. No public disciplinary action has followed for anyone involved.

Selective Prosecution and the Protection Pattern

Clutch Justice’s reporting on former Assistant Prosecutor Christopher Elsworth’s Barry County tenure documents a charging pattern that moved inconsistently across matters involving Bartlett, Moryc, Bukala, and Spencer, a pattern the reporting characterizes as protective toward some parties and aggressive toward others under comparable facts. Elsworth has since left Barry County for a position with the Kalamazoo County Family Court. No public disciplinary record accompanies that transition.

Selective prosecution, applying charging discretion inconsistently based on who a defendant is rather than what the evidence supports, is difficult to prove in any single case and easier to see across a pattern. Clutch Justice’s multi-year documentation of Barry County’s charging decisions is the pattern.

Retaliation Is Not Written Into the Job Description

Here is what nobody puts in a job description. Report the office. Watch what happens next. Clutch Justice has SCAO complaints on file. Correspondence on file. A documented pattern connecting complaints about the office’s conduct to retaliatory posture against the people who filed them. Not speculation. Documentation.

This is not a claim that every complaint results in retaliation, or that retaliation is official office policy. It is a claim, supported by the specific documented instances in Clutch Justice’s Barry County archive, that reporting misconduct in this jurisdiction has not reliably been safe, and that the pattern is consistent enough to document rather than dismiss as coincidence.

The Judge Next Door

Assistant prosecutors in Barry County appear before Circuit Judge Michael Schipper of the Fifth Judicial Circuit. Schipper carries a Judicial Tenure Commission confirmed misconduct finding from 2014, and cases out of his court have generated multiple appellate remands from the Michigan Court of Appeals and Michigan Supreme Court. Clutch Justice’s separate analysis of Barry County’s criminal trial rate found that the county took just 0.06 percent of criminal cases to trial in 2021, with defendants in the underlying case records facing documented threats of maximum sentencing exposure if they declined plea offers. That investigation’s evidentiary record supported two defendants’ resentencing motions and fits within the broader appellate-remand pattern now documented out of Schipper’s courtroom.

The 2023 State Court Administrative Office caseload reports do not soften that picture. They give it a neighboring-county comparison. Using criminal categories only and counting jury verdicts plus bench verdicts as trial verdicts, Barry County produced only six criminal trial verdicts across District and Circuit Courts combined in 2023. Ionia produced 15. Eaton, a better neighbor comparison than Kalamazoo because it is closer in size and court structure, produced 18.

The Circuit Court comparison is still the sharp edge of the data. Barry’s 5th Circuit Court shows three criminal trial verdicts, zero criminal jury verdicts, and 219 guilty pleas out of 232 criminal dispositions in 2023. Ionia’s Circuit Court produced eight criminal trial verdicts. Eaton produced thirteen. Kalamazoo produced thirty-eight. Allegan produced twenty-seven.

That is why Barry stands out. Not because every neighboring county has a robust trial culture. They do not. Barry stands out because even when the comparison set stays conservative, Barry’s criminal trial output remains due process anemic.

An assistant prosecutor does not choose the judge. They choose the office, and the office chooses which courtroom they work in every day.

Why This Matters Beyond One Job Posting

I have spent years building the record this article draws from, and I did not build it because Barry County is unusual. I built it because Barry County is legible: small enough that the same names recur, public enough that the filings exist, and consistent enough that the pattern holds up.

The concern here is not that any specific applicant will do harm. It is that institutional culture is inherited, not chosen, and an assistant prosecutor stepping into this office inherits disclosure obligations the office has not reliably met, a proof of service failure the state has already confirmed, a charging pattern under documented scrutiny, a retaliation pattern connected to the office’s response to complaints, and a courthouse next door where the trial data suggests plea pressure did most of the work before anyone reached a courtroom. None of that appears in the posting. All of it is public record now.