A one week span in Barry County’s Fifth Circuit Court, from a Supreme Court order in one case to a new above guidelines sentence in another, shows why appellate reversal has stopped working as a check on this courtroom.
Clutch Justice has covered Judge Michael Schipper’s Barry County courtroom extensively. The author has a documented personal connection to a Barry County post-conviction case referenced anonymously in this piece and has disclosed that connection in prior Clutch Justice reporting. That case is described here without the defendant’s name or case numbers, consistent with this outlet’s standing practice for that matter.
This piece also references a separate, unrelated sentencing that took place this week. Clutch Justice is withholding that defendant’s name at his family’s request. The account of that hearing was relayed to Clutch Justice by a person who was present in the courtroom. It has not yet been checked against an official transcript, and is presented here with that limitation clearly disclosed.
This piece further reports an allegation from sources described as close to the matter concerning Barry County jail capacity and Schipper’s sentencing motives. Clutch Justice has not independently substantiated that allegation and does not present it as fact. It is included as a reporting lead whose credibility depends on supporting records, on-the-record testimony, or courtroom statements that have not yet been obtained.
Within the same seven day stretch in August 2026, Barry County’s Fifth Circuit Court produced a Michigan Supreme Court order reopening briefing in a post-conviction case, an order denying a separate defendant’s motions for relief that his family says they still have not been given a copy of, and a new sentence imposed well above the calculated guidelines, delivered with a comment from the bench that the defendant would probably appeal, because everyone does. Taken individually, none of these is unusual for this courtroom. Clutch Justice has documented departures, remand defiance, and service failures here before. Taken together, in one week, they describe a system where appellate correction has become a predictable cost of doing business rather than a check on it.
What Happened in a Barry County Courtroom This Week
On August 12, 2026, a defendant appeared before Judge Michael Schipper in Barry County’s Fifth Circuit Court for sentencing. According to an account relayed to Clutch Justice by a person present in the courtroom, his calculated sentencing guidelines were zero to nine months. Schipper sentenced him to a minimum of 24 months and a maximum of 60, a range that starts well above where the guidelines end.
Then, according to that same account, Schipper addressed the courtroom directly. He said he imagined the defendant would appeal his decision, because everyone else does.
Clutch Justice is withholding this defendant’s name and any identifying case information at his family’s request. The account of the guideline range, the sentence, and the judge’s comment was relayed by a person who was in the courtroom that day. It has not yet been checked against a certified transcript. If the transcript surfaces additional or conflicting detail, this piece will be updated.
A judge who tells a defendant that everyone appeals him is not making a joke about a difficult job. He is describing a track record. If that track record is accurate, the appropriate response is not resignation delivered from the bench. It is a question about why the appellate courts keep having to do the sentencing court’s job for it.
The Pattern the Numbers Already Show
This is not the first time Clutch Justice has documented an above guidelines sentence out of this courtroom. In People v. Velasquez, guidelines of zero to six months produced an initial sentence of 36 to 60 months, a departure the prosecution itself later conceded through a Confession of Error. On remand, Schipper resentenced Velasquez to 396 days plus two years of house arrest, still outside the guidelines, prompting the Michigan Court of Appeals to bar him from presiding over the case’s second resentencing. Clutch Justice has documented comparable departures in People v. Podbevsek, People v. Huggins, and People v. Arizola, where a 19 to 76 month range produced a sentence of 240 to 480 months plus a consecutive felony firearm term.
None of these numbers, standing alone, proves this week’s sentence was wrong. Sentencing guidelines are advisory in Michigan, and a court can depart from them where it articulates a substantial and compelling reason on the record. What the prior cases establish is a documented pattern of the same court departing upward, repeatedly, in ways that appellate courts have since found unsupported. That pattern is the context this week’s sentence lands in.
Schipper has also put his own view of incarceration on the record. In December 2023, he stated in open court that prison doesn’t work, that people come out worse. That statement stands next to a sentencing history that keeps sending people to prison anyway, often above the guideline range meant to constrain the decision.
The same record shows who tends to land on the harder end of that pattern. Clutch Justice has previously documented a case in which Schipper sentenced a wealthy defendant to six months in jail and a defendant who needed a public defender to fifteen years in prison for the same offense. In a separate pair of cases, a male defendant received ten to twenty years while an elderly female defendant, convicted under the same judge and the same prosecutor, received twelve months and served nine. Guideline departures in this courtroom have not landed evenly.
The Lab includes a plain language guide to Michigan’s sentencing guidelines grid, so you can check a guideline range and an imposed sentence against each other before you ever need a lawyer to tell you something looks wrong.
Explore The Lab ?The Same Week: Dean Myers
Dean Terry Myers was convicted in June 2022 following a jury trial on an alleged 2018 sexual assault. The Michigan Supreme Court previously granted Myers a remand to Barry County Circuit Court for a motion for new trial. Schipper denied that motion. On August 7, 2026, the Supreme Court granted Myers permission to add an issue and file supplemental briefing in his continuing appeal. His supplemental brief is due September 4, 2026, and the prosecution has 28 days after service to respond.
The Myers order is not a finding that Schipper did anything wrong in denying the new trial motion. It is the Supreme Court keeping a case alive that a trial court tried to close. That distinction matters, and it is also the same distinction that recurs across nearly every case in this courtroom’s appellate history. The correction keeps coming from above. It does not appear to be changing what happens below.
The Same Week: A Case This Outlet Has Covered Before
Clutch Justice has previously reported on a separate, anonymized Barry County post-conviction matter involving a defendant whose direct appeal was affirmed by the Michigan Court of Appeals on June 18, 2026. That affirmance came after a Barry County prosecutor filed an answer to the defendant’s Supreme Court application without verified service on him at his Michigan Department of Corrections facility. A proof of service cure was later submitted and accepted by the clerk’s office, but is contradicted by the Department of Corrections’ own mail records, obtained through a public records request. The reply period ran. No reply was filed on the defendant’s behalf, because he had never received the filing he was supposed to be replying to. An Attorney Grievance Commission complaint over that conduct remains open.
In July 2026, that same defendant filed a motion for relief from judgment along with several companion motions, including requests to disqualify both the presiding judge and the Barry County Prosecutor’s Office. The filing appeared on the public docket on July 1, was briefly and inaccurately labeled as an extradition hearing, then disappeared from the docket entirely on July 8. It did not reappear until August 7, the same day the Supreme Court acted in the Myers case. An order denying the motions followed on August 11. As of publication, the defendant’s family says they have requested a copy of that order and have not received one.
Clutch Justice is not asserting that the docket gap or the delay in providing the order were deliberate. Both are documented facts. Whether they reflect ordinary administrative friction or something else is a question this outlet does not have the evidence to answer, and it is not answering it here. What can be said is that a five week disappearance from a public docket, followed by action on the same day as unrelated Supreme Court activity in a different case out of the same courthouse, is the kind of coincidence that warrants a public record, not a private shrug.
The Michigan Supreme Court grants Dean Terry Myers permission to add an issue and file supplemental briefing, after Schipper denied his motion for new trial on remand. Supplemental brief due September 4, 2026.
A separate defendant’s July 1 motion for relief from judgment reappears on the Barry County public docket after a five week gap, the same day the Myers order is entered.
An order denies the motions for relief from judgment, appointment of counsel, and disqualification. The defendant’s family says they requested a copy and, as of publication, have not received one.
A separate, unrelated defendant is sentenced to 24 to 60 months against a guideline range of zero to nine. Schipper tells the courtroom he imagines the defendant will appeal, because everyone else does.
Where This Fits, and Where It Might Not
A fair reading of this week has to hold two things at once. Judges are entitled to exercise discretion, guidelines are advisory rather than mandatory, and a defendant’s own conduct and record can justify a range the grid does not capture. Not every appellate reversal reflects misconduct. Some reflect ordinary disagreement about a close call, and Michigan’s appellate courts reverse trial judges across the state for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual judge’s reliability.
The count against that reading is repetition. One departure is a judgment call. A documented series of departures in the same courtroom, several of them corrected only after multiple rounds of appellate intervention, is a pattern. A single docket irregularity is an administrative hiccup. A five week disappearance that resolves on the same day as unrelated Supreme Court activity in the same courthouse is a fact worth a public record, whatever its explanation turns out to be. The question this piece asks is not whether any one of these events, alone, proves wrongdoing. It is whether a court that keeps generating the same kind of correctable error, year after year, is still functioning the way sentencing courts are supposed to function.
The Prosecutor’s Office Is Not a Bystander
A judge does not create this cycle alone. The prosecutor’s office chooses what charges to pursue, what evidence to test or ignore, what plea terms to offer, what sentencing position to advocate, whether to concede an error, whether to oppose relief, and whether to keep defending a decision after the law or record no longer supports it. When prosecutors repeatedly protect the outcome instead of correcting the process, they are not merely standing near the behavior. They are helping sustain it.
The record described in this article includes a prosecutor’s answer filed without verified service on an incarcerated defendant, the resulting loss of his opportunity to reply, continued opposition in post-conviction proceedings, and a history in which appellate intervention—not voluntary local correction—has repeatedly been required. An Attorney Grievance Commission complaint concerning the service issue remains open. That complaint is not a finding of misconduct, and this article does not claim every prosecutor participated in every disputed decision. It does support asking why the office so often appears on the side of preserving the result rather than ensuring the process was lawful.
Complicity does not require the prosecutor to wear the robe. It can look like defending an unsupported departure, resisting correction, failing to ensure service, remaining silent when the same legal problem returns, or treating the judge’s preferred outcome as more important than getting the case right. “Complicit” is this outlet’s editorial judgment about that institutional pattern; it is not a disciplinary finding against every employee of the office.
The Taxpayer and Family Bill for Repeatedly Getting It Wrong
Every avoidable appeal has a price. Taxpayers fund the trial court that produced the disputed decision, the prosecutors who defend it, the court-appointed lawyers required for defendants who cannot afford counsel, and the appellate judges and staff who must review it. When an appellate court sends a case back, taxpayers pay again for new hearings, new briefing, transportation, court staff, and sometimes an entirely new sentencing proceeding. When the same kind of error recurs after earlier correction, those costs stop looking like an unavoidable feature of a functioning justice system and start looking like waste.
Prison adds another public bill. Every month of incarceration above a guideline range requires taxpayers to pay for custody, food, health care, transportation, administration, and supervision. This article does not assign a dollar figure to Schipper’s decisions because a defensible total would require case-by-case records that have not yet been compiled. But the direction of the cost is not speculative: longer sentences cost the public more, and sentences that trigger repeated appeals and resentencings add litigation expense on top of incarceration expense.
Who Gets Paid While Families Lose Everything?
The economic damage is not shared equally. Incarcerated people lose freedom and earning capacity. Their families lose wages, savings, housing security, childcare, transportation money, and time. Taxpayers absorb the cost of incarceration, appeals, remands, repeated hearings, and public benefits needed after a household’s income collapses. The people and institutions paid to operate, defend, supply, and expand that machinery continue collecting salaries, fees, contracts, and appropriations. In financial terms, the system enriches the people earning money from its continued operation while billing everyone it destabilizes.
Michigan’s Senate Fiscal Agency lists the 2026 salary for a circuit court judge at $186,163.598—about $15,514 a month before taxes and deductions. That figure does not include the broader public cost of court staff, facilities, retirement contributions, appeals, incarceration, or proceedings required when a decision is sent back. The state does not pay a judge merely to occupy the bench. It pays for lawful, reasoned, reliable judgment that protects due process and uses public power responsibly.
That heading is an editorial judgment, and the documented record is why this outlet makes it. Michigan taxpayers provide a six-figure judicial salary for Schipper to get cases right the first time and follow the law. Instead, taxpayers repeatedly finance the same cases twice: once for the original proceeding, then again when appellate courts must review the decision, identify the problem, send the case back, and require the trial court to revisit work that should have been done lawfully and reliably the first time. Schipper continues receiving his salary while prosecutors, defense lawyers, appellate judges, court staff, corrections officers, and families spend more time and money retouching the consequences. Families pay in lost wages, damaged mental health, depleted assets, housing instability, and years they cannot recover. When repeated correction produces no meaningful improvement, taxpayers are not purchasing accountability or competence. They are paying him to generate repeat work because he does not get it right the first time or follow the law after higher courts explain it—and then paying the rest of the system to clean it up.
What work product are taxpayers receiving for that salary? People familiar with this courtroom allege that Schipper rarely produces substantive written orders, conducts few trials, and approaches cases with the outcome already decided. This article has not completed the docket-wide order and trial count required to state those allegations as quantified fact. The county should make that verification easy. Publish his number of trials, evidentiary hearings, oral rulings, substantive written opinions, adopted party-drafted orders, unresolved motions, appellate reversals, remands, and cases reassigned after correction.
Predetermination is difficult to prove from an unfavorable ruling alone. A pattern can make the question unavoidable: decisions announced without meaningful engagement with contrary evidence, the same position maintained after appellate instruction, outcomes repeatedly requiring correction, and little written reasoning for the public to examine. If the county believes Schipper is doing the job residents pay him to do, it should release the output and let the record answer. Public officials collecting six-figure salaries do not get to demand trust while withholding the measurements that would justify it.
What Are We Really Paying For?
Select a view. Every comparison uses published Michigan or Barry County figures; no avoided-cost estimate is presented as an audited loss attributable to one official.
Michigan’s Senate Fiscal Agency lists a 2026 circuit judge salary of approximately $186,164. Barry County’s proposed budget listed approximately $131,009 for the elected prosecutor in 2025. Together, those published compensation benchmarks total about $317,173 before benefits, staff, facilities, appeals, incarceration, or repeat proceedings.
That is a conservative payroll floor, not the cost of the entire nine-position prosecutor’s office and not a complete estimate of the court system.
In FY 2025, Barry County’s 5th Circuit Hybrid DWI/Drug Court spent $200,000 in state grant funds while serving 23 active participants. Its 56B District Sobriety Court spent $177,000 while serving 38. Combined: $377,000 for 61 active participants, or approximately $6,180 in grant spending per active participant.
The $317,173 salary benchmark equals roughly 51 participant-equivalents at that local grant-spending rate. This does not mean salaries can simply be transferred or that grants represent the programs’ entire cost. It shows the scale of the public choice: the compensation of two officials is comparable to the state treatment funding associated with approximately 51 people in Barry County’s own evidence-based programs.
Among all participants in Barry County’s 5th Circuit Hybrid DWI/Drug Court, 19 percent had any new conviction within three years of admission, compared with 49 percent in the matched comparison group. Among graduates, the difference was 10 percent versus 45 percent.
Barry County’s 56B District Sobriety Court reported 7 percent versus 18 percent for all participants and 2 percent versus 19 percent for graduates. These are measured public-safety outcomes. By contrast, the county has not published in this record a comparable productivity ledger showing how many substantive orders Schipper writes, how many trials he completes, how often his rulings require correction, how much repeat work those cases generate, or what the prosecutor’s office contributes by defending versus voluntarily correcting error.
To calculate what Schipper and the prosecutor’s office cost taxpayers versus what they contribute, Barry County should publish: compensation and benefits; office budgets; number of trials; substantive written orders; time from filing to decision; guideline departures; appellate challenges; reversals and remands; voluntary confessions of error; hearings repeated after remand; appointed-counsel fees; transcript and transportation costs; additional incarceration days; and outcomes for treatment-eligible defendants. Without those figures, anyone claiming the present system delivers value is making an assertion the county’s own public reporting does not allow residents to test.
Those additional prison months also land in a system already struggling to staff its facilities safely. As of May 27, 2026, the Michigan Department of Corrections reported a 14.4 percent officer vacancy rate statewide; approximately 11.5 percent of its facilities had vacancy rates of 30 percent or higher, and only about 31 percent had vacancy rates the department considered stable. MDOC says it is trying to reduce vacancies and mandatory overtime and is considering traveling staff units for its most understaffed prisons. Its own Safe Prisons Initiative identifies recruitment, retention, staff support, prisoner classification, and bed space as components of prison safety.
A circuit judge does not set MDOC staffing levels, and Schipper is not responsible for every unsafe condition inside a Michigan prison. He is responsible for the sentences he imposes. Every person he sends into that strained system, and every month he adds beyond a calculated guideline range, increases the population officers must supervise and the medical, programming, transportation, and security demands the state must meet. When an above-guidelines sentence is later found unsupported or requires repeated appellate correction, that burden was not merely expensive. It was imposed on officers and incarcerated people working and living inside facilities the state acknowledges are short-staffed. In that concrete sense, Schipper’s sentencing record directly contributes to the conditions that make Michigan prisons harder to operate safely.
The Jail-Capacity Allegation
Sources described to Clutch Justice as close to the matter allege that Barry County is so desperate for a new or expanded jail that Schipper has intentionally sent people to state prison, then justified those outcomes by pointing to the county jail’s inability to hold more people. If true, that would mean sentencing decisions are being shaped not only by the person and offense before the court, but by local pressure over jail capacity, with the human and financial burden transferred from Barry County to families and the state prison system.
Schipper is not an outsider to that planning process. In 2025, the Barry County Board of Commissioners named him to its Jail Stakeholders Committee, the group formed to advise the county’s jail study and future planning. Clutch Justice reported on his membership on August 28, 2025, warning that placing a sentencing judge inside the jail-planning structure creates at minimum an appearance problem: the official whose bond, jail, probation, and sentencing decisions help produce incarceration data was also given a role in the process evaluating the county’s asserted need for new incarceration capacity.
That documented role makes the present allegation more specific, but it does not prove it. Committee membership establishes Schipper’s access to and participation in jail-capacity planning. It does not, without meeting records, communications, sentencing transcripts, or comparative data, establish that he intentionally selected prison over jail to relieve crowding or help advance a new facility. The distinction is essential. The institutional overlap is fact; the alleged manipulation of sentences remains a claim requiring investigation.
That allegation now sits beside a documented piece of timing. The Barry County Board of Commissioners’ official packet scheduled a special meeting for 9:00 a.m. on August 4, 2026—the morning of Michigan’s statewide primary election—to interview construction managers for what the packet calls the Barry County Law Enforcement Facility Project. Six firms were assigned interview times from 9:00 through 11:50 a.m., followed by “Construction Manager Selection/Discussion.” The agenda allowed limited public comment, capped at three minutes per person; the first comment period was restricted to agenda items.
The 318-page packet was not a preliminary conversation about whether Barry County might someday need a jail. It contained detailed construction-management submissions for a defined project. One proposal described the county’s current concept as a 72-bed facility with a $30 million to $35 million budget, reduced from an earlier 120-bed recommendation estimated at $45 million to $50 million. The same proposal said the county could not build without a successful vote and offered bond-campaign support, including informational materials and community presentations. Another submission assumed a $30 million construction cost, design work beginning in August 2026, a 2027 funding phase, and construction beginning in October 2027. These are statements and assumptions made by competing firms, not proof that the Board adopted every number or timeline, but they establish the seriousness and maturity of the planning underway that morning.
August 4 was also Election Day, when polls were open statewide and voters, election workers, candidates, and local news coverage were focused on the primary. Scheduling a special meeting about contractor selection for a major public facility on Election Day does not itself prove an effort to evade scrutiny. It does justify asking why that date was chosen for a consequential step in a project the proposals explicitly connect to a future public vote.
The special meeting, its Election Day date, its agenda, the contents of the proposal packet, and Schipper’s membership on the Jail Stakeholders Committee are documented. Clutch Justice has not independently verified the separate allegation about his sentencing motive and is not stating as fact that he intentionally uses prison sentences to relieve jail crowding. That allegation cannot be established from committee membership, sentence length, or the construction packet alone. Substantiation would require sentencing transcripts in which jail capacity was invoked, committee minutes or communications connecting jail planning to sentencing practices, consistent case-level data, or an on-the-record account from a person with direct knowledge.
The allegation nevertheless raises questions Barry County should answer with records: What meetings did Schipper attend as a Jail Stakeholders Committee member? What capacity, population, sentencing, bond, and transfer data did he receive? What recommendations did he make? Why was contractor selection for the proposed facility scheduled for statewide primary Election Day? Who attended, what did each firm present, which manager was selected, and what incarceration projections guided that decision? And how often has jail capacity been cited in Schipper’s courtroom when choosing among county jail, community sanctions, and state prison? A county’s desire for a different jail cannot lawfully or ethically become an unstated sentencing factor. Until evidence establishes Schipper’s intent, that part of the claim remains an allegation. His place inside the jail-planning structure does not.
Barry County Is Prioritizing Nicer Cages, Not People’s Freedom
Barry County is being presented with a choice about what public safety should mean. It can confront the charging, detention, sentencing, service, and appellate practices that keep taking people out of their homes and returning the same cases for correction. It can invest in fewer arrests, fairer pretrial decisions, treatment, housing, defense, restoration, and genuine opportunities for people to remain free. Or it can leave those practices intact and build a newer place to confine the people they continue producing. On the record described in this article, the county is moving full steam ahead with the second choice. It is prioritizing nicer cages rather than prioritizing—and fighting for—people’s freedom.
A newer facility may improve conditions for people who are confined there, and humane conditions matter. But replacing an aging cage with a cleaner, more modern cage is reinforcement, not transformation, when the institutions that fill it refuse to reduce the harm that sends people inside. A larger or nicer jail does not correct an unsupported sentencing departure, restore a lost opportunity to reply, repair a family separated by incarceration, or return the months and years taken by a decision that later requires appellate correction. Better amenities do not answer the prior question: why is the county continuing to cage so many people in the first place?
Barry County should not congratulate itself for improving the container while refusing to change the machinery that fills it. Freedom, due process, treatment, stability, and repair should be the priorities. A new jail that preserves the same punitive practices is not healing. It is mass incarceration with updated architecture.
The responsibility is institutional, not limited to one person. The Court decides bond, detention, probation, jail, and prison outcomes. The Prosecutor’s Office decides what to charge, what pleas to offer, what punishment to seek, and whether to defend an error or help correct it. The Board controls county budgets, approves expenditures, funds local justice operations within its lawful authority, and is advancing the law-enforcement facility project. These bodies have different powers, and the Board cannot lawfully decide an individual case. But each can see the practices and consequences documented here, and each has tools within its own authority to demand data, reduce incarceration, correct error, and invest in alternatives. When all three know about recurring harm and none uses its power to change course, they do more than fail to stop the system. Together, they sustain it.
That is how mass incarceration is perpetuated locally: not only through a single dramatic decision, but through a chain of officials who keep charging, confining, sentencing, defending, funding, and expanding while responsibility is passed from office to office. The Court can blame the Prosecutor. The Prosecutor can blame the Court. The Board can say it cannot interfere with either. Meanwhile, the jail project advances, prison terms continue, appeals multiply, and families carry the damage. Separate legal authority does not erase collective institutional responsibility for a result every office can see.
I have experienced this system personally. From that experience, and from four years of documenting what Barry County does after errors and harms are brought to its attention, my conclusion is blunt: this county would rather defend the institution and continue destroying people’s lives than admit it was wrong and change the practices causing the harm. That is my firsthand account and editorial judgment, not a court finding about every official or every case. But the refusal to correct course is visible in the public record: repeated appellate intervention, continued opposition, unresolved service and docket failures, additional incarceration, and a jail project moving forward without the transparent accounting residents have been asking for.
Healing a community would mean preventing harm, admitting error, repairing what government has damaged, and measuring success by how many people remain safely connected to their families, homes, work, and treatment—not by how efficiently the county can confine them. Barry County’s present direction does the opposite. It treats confinement capacity as the problem to solve while leaving the production of confinement largely unquestioned. Until the Court, Prosecutor, and Board choose accountability and freedom over institutional self-protection and expansion, they are not healing their community. They are helping harm it.
How the System Benefits Politicians—and Makes People Without Power Poorer
The benefits of this system flow upward while its costs flow downward. Barry County politicians and institutional leaders can present jail construction as decisive action, claim they are protecting public safety, announce a visible capital project, distribute public money through planning and construction contracts, expand departmental capacity, and campaign on being “tough on crime.” A building produces renderings, press releases, ribbon cuttings, contracts, and a physical monument an official can point to. Preventing incarceration by funding counsel, treatment, housing, transportation, mental-health care, or restorative programs is less politically theatrical, even when it does more to keep families stable and communities safe.
That political benefit does not require a secret agreement or cash in an official’s pocket. This article is not alleging bribery, kickbacks, or that every commissioner personally profits from the proposed jail. The benefit is structural: officials gain authority, budget, visibility, institutional support, and a simple campaign message, while contractors and system employees receive paid work and the public is encouraged to treat expansion as progress. The officials who approve, operate, and defend the machinery can then divide responsibility among themselves. The Court says it does not build jails. The Board says it does not impose sentences. The Prosecutor says the judge makes the final decision. Each office keeps its power while no office accepts responsibility for the combined result.
The county gets a project, officials get a platform, institutions get larger budgets, and private firms get contracts. People without power get jail debt, lost wages, missed rent, terminated employment, suspended licenses, transportation costs, phone charges, commissary expenses, legal bills, damaged credit, family separation, and years of recovery. The system converts their instability into institutional growth.
For a person with money, an arrest or accusation can be met with bond, retained counsel, expert witnesses, transportation, time away from work, and the ability to reject a bad plea while preparing a defense. A person without money faces a different system. Unaffordable bond can cost a job before guilt has been established. Missing work can mean eviction. A disconnected phone can mean missing a court notice. Lack of transportation can become a probation violation. Court debt, supervision fees, drug testing, electronic monitoring, telephone calls, commissary support, and travel for family visits take money from households already struggling to survive. Poverty becomes a reason a person cannot comply, and noncompliance becomes a reason to impose still more punishment.
It must be remarkably easy to send people to prison when the State pays you nearly $200,000 a year, your own paycheck arrives regardless of how many families lose theirs, and repeated appellate correction still produces no meaningful accountability. Schipper does not have to miss rent, lose a job, sell a car, ration groceries, pay for prison calls, or explain to a child why a parent is gone when he adds years to a sentence. He announces the punishment; people with far less money and power live inside it. Then, even when a higher court requires the work to be done again, his salary continues and the public pays the bill. Distance from the consequences is apparently one of the job’s most generous benefits.
Accountability Should Reach the Paycheck
Judges and prosecutors are paid to follow the law, protect constitutional rights, disclose evidence, ensure due process, and use the government’s power responsibly. Their compensation should reflect how reliably they perform those duties. The public should not continue providing raises, bonuses, benefits, promotions, expanded budgets, or automatic financial security as though performance were irrelevant when an official repeatedly violates rights, disregards controlling law, causes unlawful or excessive incarceration, withholds required evidence, fails to correct known errors, or forces families and taxpayers to finance the same case again.
Barry County and Michigan should create a lawful compensation-and-accountability system based on independently verified conduct. Repeated reversals, remand violations, untimely decisions, unsupported departures, disclosure failures, service failures, judicial-discipline findings, prosecutorial-discipline findings, and incarceration later determined to be unlawful should trigger review. When that review establishes serious or repeated noncompliance—after notice, evidence, and an opportunity for the official to respond—financial consequences should follow to the fullest extent permitted by constitutional and employment protections. Those consequences could include denial of raises or discretionary benefits, loss of performance-based compensation, personal contributions or assessments authorized by law, increased professional-liability costs, and in the most serious cases suspension without pay or removal through the appropriate disciplinary process.
When a public official’s documented failure to follow the law costs someone freedom, wages, housing, health, or years with their children, “the taxpayers will cover it” is not accountability. The person harmed should not be the only person whose finances change. Officials who repeatedly misuse public power should have to feel consequences in the same place everyone else does: their paycheck.
A portion of those assessments, forfeited discretionary compensation, institutional penalties, and county or state appropriations should finance an independent Family Repair Fund. That fund should compensate people and families for lost wages, housing instability, childcare, transportation, prison communication costs, commissary support, therapy, legal expenses, credit damage, and other documented losses caused by rights violations or incarceration later found unlawful. Payment should not depend on political connections, a private fundraising campaign, or surviving another decade of litigation. An independent claims process should publish standards, protect confidential information, issue written decisions, and provide meaningful review.
The fund should not replace a person’s right to sue, excuse official misconduct, or become another way for government to purchase silence. It should provide rapid baseline repair while preserving every other legal remedy. Nor should compensation be tied to conviction rates, sentence lengths, acquittals, or popularity. Those incentives would distort justice in the opposite direction. The measure must be fidelity to law and rights: whether evidence was disclosed, orders were obeyed, reasons were supported, deadlines and service rules were followed, errors were corrected, and people were not confined beyond what lawful process permitted.
This is an editorial proposal for legislation, compensation policy, insurance requirements, budgeting rules, and disciplinary reform. Existing constitutional and statutory protections may limit when a sitting judge’s salary can be reduced, and collective-bargaining or employment rules may constrain penalties for other public employees. Those limits should shape the mechanism, not erase the principle. Future compensation, discretionary benefits, professional discipline, employer contributions, liability coverage, and a publicly financed repair fund can be designed through lawful processes. Independence should protect officials from political retaliation for lawful decisions; it should not guarantee financial insulation from formally established, repeated violations of law and rights.
Incarceration then multiplies the loss. The confined person stops earning and may lose housing, employment, tools, a vehicle, professional credentials, health care, and contact with children. The family pays to keep that person fed, reachable, represented, and connected while also replacing the labor and caregiving the county removed. Children absorb instability the official budget never counts. When the person returns, criminal records, depleted savings, damaged credit, interrupted employment, and supervision requirements make recovery harder. The county calls the sentence complete; the household continues serving it financially for years.
This is why carceral expansion is not merely a criminal-justice policy. It is a transfer of wealth and security away from people with the least political and financial power. Public funds that could stabilize housing, treatment, defense, employment, and families are directed toward confinement and the institutions surrounding it. Families lose private wealth while government systems and contractors gain durable funding. The people most harmed are also the least able to hire lobbyists, purchase favorable coverage, attend a weekday meeting, finance a campaign, or survive years of litigation. Their absence from the room is then treated as consent.
The proposed facility, public planning process, county funding authority, published compensation figures, incarceration costs, and predictable financial effects on families support an examination of who institutionally benefits and who pays. They do not, without additional evidence, prove an illegal quid pro quo or improper personal enrichment by any named official. The documented indictment is already serious: the political system rewards visible punishment and institutional expansion while dispersing the resulting poverty among families with the least power to resist it.
Families pay a separate bill that never appears in a court budget. A person sent away cannot earn wages, care for children or relatives, pay rent, or contribute to the household. The family left behind absorbs lost income, childcare, travel, telephone charges, commissary support, and the cost of trying to understand or challenge a sentence. For families already living close to the edge, an unnecessarily long or legally unsustainable sentence can become eviction, debt, food insecurity, and another generation growing up in poverty.
The Data Shows What These Sentences Do Outside the Courtroom
The harm is not rhetorical. Essie Justice Group’s 2018 Because She’s Powerful study surveyed 2,281 women with incarcerated loved ones across 46 states and Puerto Rico. Eighty-six percent reported significant or extreme strain on their emotional and mental health, rising to 94 percent when the incarcerated person was a partner. Thirty-two percent lost their household’s primary source of income; nearly 70 percent became the family’s only wage earner; 64 percent saw household assets shrink; and 35 percent experienced homelessness or housing insecurity, rising to 56 percent when the incarcerated loved one had been the primary earner.
Those national findings do not, standing alone, prove that Schipper caused every hardship experienced by every Barry County family. They do establish that incarceration predictably produces mental-health injury, lost income, depleted assets, and housing instability among the people left behind. When a judge chooses additional incarceration beyond the calculated guideline range—especially when the departure later requires appellate correction—the resulting family harm is not unforeseeable collateral damage. It is a documented and predictable consequence of the decision.
That consequence also exposes a political contradiction. Michigan judicial elections are nonpartisan, and this article does not claim to know Schipper’s private party affiliation. But to the extent he or his defenders invoke values commonly marketed as Republican or fiscally conservative—limited government, lower public spending, family stability, job creation, a functioning free market, personal independence, and reduced reliance on welfare—his sentencing record works against every one of them.
Nothing about unnecessarily removing wage earners from the labor force creates jobs or strengthens a free market. It destroys productive labor, household income, consumer spending, savings, credit, housing stability, and the ability to start or sustain a business. Employers lose workers. Families lose purchasing power. Landlords and local businesses lose paying customers. Taxpayers lose twice: first by financing incarceration and repeated appellate correction, then by financing the public assistance families may need after the court has removed their income and depleted their assets. That is not economic conservatism. It is state-created market destruction followed by state-funded dependency.
In contemporary Republican language, a politician or public official who claims the label while expanding government costs, weakening families, removing people from productive employment, and increasing dependence on public programs would predictably be attacked as a “Republican in Name Only”—a RINO. The label is political rhetoric, not evidence of Schipper’s party registration. But measured against the principles Barry County Republicans claim define their party, the contradiction is unavoidable: his record does not shrink government, protect taxpayers, create jobs, reward work, or strengthen the free market. It produces the opposite result.
“Pro-family” is meaningless when the policy in practice removes wage earners, separates parents and children, destroys household income, depletes savings, threatens housing, damages mental health, and leaves the state to support the family the courtroom destabilized. Schipper cannot be measured by a conservative label, a Barry County Republican association, or pro-family rhetoric. He must be measured by outcomes, by data. The Party claiming to be of “facts and logic” is letting their judge do some significant damage to their credibility. The outcomes documented here are bigger government, higher taxpayer costs, fewer workers, weaker local markets, more families in crisis, and greater dependence on public assistance. After years of appellate correction, those consequences cannot credibly be dismissed as unknown or accidental. Continuing the same pattern after being shown what it does is the institutional equivalent of intentionally holding people down: blocking their work, draining their resources, destabilizing their homes, and making recovery harder at every step. That is not pro-family. It is pro-destruction—with families forced to carry the wreckage.
Calling that contradiction hypocrisy—and saying Barry County Republicans would recognize it as RINO conduct—is an editorial judgment, yes. But the documented point is harder to dismiss: repeated punitive decisions produce the very government expansion, lost employment, family breakdown, market damage, taxpayer waste, and state dependence that Republicans and fiscal conservatives claim to oppose.
No reporter can prove what Schipper feels. The public record can show what he does after correction. When appellate courts repeatedly identify problems, cases return, taxpayers pay again, families absorb the fallout, and the same pattern continues, the defensible conclusion is not that this article has read his mind. It is that correction has produced no meaningful change in his conduct. Whatever concern he may privately feel has NOT translated into restraint, learning, or a different result for the next family.
Viewed against the repeated appeals, resentencings, and above-guidelines prison terms documented here, Judge Michael Schipper’s record is blatantly wasteful of taxpayer dollars. Whether he feels remorse is known only to him; what the public record shows is no meaningful change despite repeated correction. This is not community safety, fiscal responsibility, family stability, limited government, job creation, or support for a free market. It removes workers from the economy, destroys household purchasing power, shifts people into an understaffed prison system, destabilizes families, and pushes some of those families toward court-created dependence on public benefits. In practical terms, this courtroom operates like a one-man poverty-creation machine: public money goes toward imposing, defending, and correcting decisions, while families and the local economy absorb the mental-health strain, lost labor, lost wages, depleted assets, housing insecurity, care burdens, and lost time those decisions leave behind. If this is supposed to represent Republican governance, Republicans have a term for an official whose conduct betrays the principles attached to the label: RINO. The full measure of that harm cannot be captured in a sentencing transcript or corrections budget.
This is an editorial judgment about the documented consequences of Schipper’s record, not a claim that an appellate court has found financial misconduct or that every appeal from his courtroom is meritorious. A complete fiscal accounting remains to be done. The public should demand one: the number of above-guidelines sentences, the incarceration time added beyond those ranges, the appeals and remands they generated, and the public cost of defending, correcting, and carrying them out.
A System Like This Repels the People It Should Want to Hire
This culture also helps explain why Barry County is struggling to attract and retain the kind of employees a trustworthy justice system needs. “No one wants to work here unless they are desperate” is an intentionally blunt editorial conclusion, not a literal claim about every applicant or employee. But the underlying recruitment problem is easy to understand. Ethical, skilled professionals generally do not enter public service because they want to spend each day converting poor police work, incomplete evidence, unaffordable bond, and prolonged custody into pressure for plea agreements.
Most people do not want a job where success means helping beat someone into a plea based on a thin investigation. “Beat” is used here figuratively to describe institutional pressure, not physical violence: hold a person in jail, restrict contact and work, exhaust the family, make release contingent on resolving the case, and present a plea as the only practical exit. When weak policing is not corrected before charging, prosecutors, defense lawyers, court staff, and judges are left to process its consequences. If the institutional expectation is to defend the file rather than test it, conscientious employees face a choice between participating, remaining silent, or leaving.
That is a terrible workforce strategy. It selects for compliance over judgment and endurance over integrity. It burns out employees who still care about accuracy, deters applicants who have other options, and makes institutional desperation self-reinforcing: vacancies increase pressure on the people who remain, pressure makes shortcuts more likely, shortcuts generate more appeals and public distrust, and the county becomes even less attractive to qualified candidates.
A county cannot build a credible justice workforce around the expectation that employees will turn questionable policing into pleas, defend predetermined narratives, and absorb the moral injury in silence. Qualified people have choices. Barry County should ask what kind of workplace it has created—and who that workplace drives away.
The answer is not to insult every county employee. Some are undoubtedly trying to do careful work inside a structure that punishes dissent and rewards institutional loyalty. They are another group harmed by this system. The answer is independent review, enforceable evidence and disclosure practices, manageable caseloads, protection for employees who report misconduct, and leadership that treats correction as professional responsibility rather than betrayal.
Four Years of Watching This Courtroom
I have covered Judge Michael Schipper’s courtroom for four years. I want to be direct about what that adds up to, because softening it every time I write around it instead of through it does a disservice to the record.
A reasonable judge, corrected once by the Court of Appeals, adjusts. Corrected twice, he starts asking his own staff what keeps going wrong. Schipper has been corrected on sentencing departures, on remand compliance, on service and reply periods, and on docket handling more times than this outlet can list in a single article, and the pattern has not moved. Velasquez was corrected twice before a different judge had to finish the job. Myers is still waiting on relief the Supreme Court has now kept alive twice. A defendant with a guideline range of zero to nine months left this courtroom this week with a sentence of 24 to 60 months and a comment about how everyone appeals him anyway.
That is not what a reasonable person does when the appellate courts keep telling him he is wrong. It is what happens in a system where being told he is wrong carries no real cost.
Four years of documented coverage keep arriving at the same finding. This is a courtroom operating on what one person believes the law should be, not on what the law actually says. The mechanisms built to check that, the Court of Appeals, the Michigan Supreme Court, the Judicial Tenure Commission, have corrected individual cases without changing the pattern behind them. Correction is not the same as accountability. Accountability changes future conduct. Four years of correction without changed conduct is its own finding, and it belongs in this record next to the case numbers.
When the Only Courtroom Press Is Institutionally Captured
This is not a new inference appearing for the first time in this article. Clutch Justice has previously investigated both sides of the relationship: the Hastings Banner’s preferential access to Schipper’s courtroom and the public subscription payment tied to his court. This section brings that prior reporting into the broader accountability record.
Appellate courts are not supposed to be the first outsiders who learn what happens in a local courtroom. That is one reason independent local reporting matters. In Barry County, however, there is no routinely present media institution operating as a meaningful check on Schipper’s court. The Hastings Banner is the only traditional local outlet that regularly covers these proceedings, and Schipper has reportedly said from the bench that it is the only newspaper allowed in his courtroom.
Clutch Justice reported that statement on March 9, 2026, after a journalist submitted a formal media-coverage request. The statement has not yet been confirmed against a filed transcript and remains reported rather than established fact. Separate court records reviewed in prior Clutch Justice reporting showed that the Banner photographed a 2025 resentencing without filing the media-coverage request that the court required from Clutch Justice. If the reported restriction is accurately reflected in the transcript, this is not ordinary courtroom administration. It is preferential access: one outlet receives routine entry while an outlet documenting the judge’s conduct faces a different rule.
The financial relationship is not limited to one modest purchase. As Clutch Justice has previously documented from Barry County Board of Commissioners packets, those records contain recurring Hastings Banner payments and subscriptions across county accounts. A March 2026 claims list identified a one-year Banner subscription paid through the Trial Court Criminal and Civil account with a line reference to Schipper. Other county packet records show Banner payments by public bodies and departments, including the Road Commission, while county offices also rely on the newspaper for required notices and public-information advertising. Clutch Justice’s packet review found subscriptions spread across much of county government. A complete office-by-office total should be published so residents can see how much public money flows to the outlet and from which accounts.
Government offices commonly purchase local newspapers and pay them to publish legal notices. A subscription or advertising payment, standing alone, does not prove favorable coverage, editorial interference, or corruption. The concern arises from the combined structure: broad financial dependence on county institutions, reported preferential courtroom access, and the absence of another routinely present local outlet willing and able to scrutinize those same institutions.
That is what media capture looks like at the local level. It does not require a written agreement to suppress a story. It can operate through dependence, access, familiarity, and the knowledge that challenging the courthouse risks losing the relationships on which routine reporting relies. When the judge can reportedly decide which newspaper is “allowed,” and the selected newspaper receives recurring public payments from the institutions it is supposed to scrutinize, the public does not have an independent watchdog. It has an information loop controlled by the same courthouse and county offices that need watching.
Barry County residents should not have to depend on a newspaper financially intertwined with county government, and favored with courtroom access, to tell them whether that government and courtroom are functioning lawfully. Without equal press access, disclosed public payments, and genuinely independent coverage, Schipper’s court is left to narrate its own record.
The remedy is concrete. Barry County should publish all payments to local media by department and purpose; the Trial Court should disclose and apply one written media-access policy equally to every outlet; all media-coverage requests and rulings should be retained; and proceedings of significant public interest should be recorded or streamed whenever court rules permit. The Banner should also disclose county-derived subscription and legal-notice revenue when reporting on the officials and institutions that supply it. Transparency cannot substitute for independent reporting, but it can expose the relationships readers need in order to judge that reporting for themselves.
Michigan Has Disciplined Judges for Conduct That Makes the Public Pay Twice
Michigan judicial-discipline decisions do not ordinarily label taxpayer waste as a freestanding offense. The governing rules draw a critical line: an erroneous decision made in good faith and with due diligence is not judicial misconduct, and the Judicial Tenure Commission cannot act as another appellate court. But Michigan judges can be censured, suspended, retired, or removed for misconduct in office, persistent failure to perform judicial duties, or conduct clearly prejudicial to the administration of justice. Past cases show that repeated reversals, failure to follow remand orders, unlawful sentencing, and persistent delay can cross that line.
Judge Bruce U. Morrow: Unlawful Sentencing and Failure to Follow a Remand
In In re Morrow, the Michigan Supreme Court imposed a 90-day suspension without pay and a public censure after misconduct across multiple criminal cases. The findings included failing to sentence defendants according to law and failing to follow the Court of Appeals’ instructions for an evidentiary hearing on remand, followed by a ruling unsupported by the trial record. The Supreme Court had rejected an earlier proposed public censure as too lenient. Morrow matters here because Michigan did not treat a course of unlawful case handling as an endless series of isolated appellate disagreements. It treated the pattern as discipline-worthy conduct.
Judge James M. Justin: Removal for a Pattern of Acting as Though the Law Did Not Apply
In In re Justin, the Michigan Supreme Court removed a district judge after numerous acts that included failing to follow the law, failing to dispose of cases promptly, and interfering with another judge’s case. The Court described a common theme across the misconduct: repeated failure to follow the law. The sanction did not rest on a bookkeeping calculation of wasted dollars. It rested on the institutional damage caused when judicial power repeatedly generates proceedings that lawful, diligent judging should not have required.
Judges James M. Moore and Dennis C. Jelsema: Reversals, Remand Failure, and Delay
The Michigan Supreme Court suspended Judge James M. Moore for six months without pay in 2001 after a pattern of conduct that frequently resulted in appellate reversal and included failure to follow a remand order. In a separate case that year, the Court publicly censured Judge Dennis C. Jelsema for unwarranted delay and persistent neglect, including a ruling issued more than three years after a Supreme Court remand. Michigan’s Judicial Tenure Commission has also admonished a judge specifically for failing to follow a Court of Appeals remand order. These precedents establish that delay and remand noncompliance are not harmless administrative imperfections. When persistent or sufficiently serious, they are judicial-conduct issues.
These judges were disciplined on their own records, which included conduct not alleged against Schipper here. The cases do not establish that Schipper has committed misconduct, and appellate reversal alone is not enough. They do establish that Michigan’s disciplinary system recognizes a point at which repeated unlawful rulings, remand failures, delay, and disregard of judicial duties stop being insulated as ordinary error.
The public should not have to wait for one more family to finance an appeal, one more appellate panel to repeat an instruction, or one more unsupported prison term to consume scarce corrections resources before this pattern receives institutional scrutiny. Four years of documented correction without changed conduct are enough to justify a formal investigation and administrative intervention now.
That is a call for investigation, not a declaration of guilt or a demand for a predetermined sanction. The appropriate authorities can examine complete transcripts, sentencing data, remand histories, jail-capacity references, and the resulting public costs in a way one article cannot. What is no longer defensible is treating every new case as though the cases before it never happened.
Contact the Barry County Board of Commissioners
The Board of Commissioners does not sit as an appellate court and should not be asked to overturn a conviction, change a sentence, direct a prosecution, or punish an official based on an allegation. It does control county budgets, approve expenditures, oversee county administration, fund the Prosecutor’s Office and court operations within its lawful authority, and decide whether taxpayers will be asked to finance a new law-enforcement facility. Residents therefore have every right to tell commissioners that they do not approve of the blatant and unnecessary public waste documented in repeated appeals, remands, avoidable litigation, incarceration, inaccessible records, and the continued defense of recurring failures.
Ask the Board to place these costs on a public agenda; commission an independent fiscal and process audit of sentencing departures, appeals, remands, jail use, outside counsel, prosecutor operations, and media payments; require transparent departmental reporting as a condition of county-controlled funding; preserve all relevant records; and postpone any request for new-jail funding until the county publicly accounts for what is driving detention and prison use.
Barry County Courthouse
220 W. State Street
Hastings, MI 49058
County Administration: (269) 945-1284
Commissioner emails:
bteunessen@barrycounty.org · cgetty@barrycounty.org · djackson@barrycounty.org · jsmelker@barrycounty.org
mcallton@barrycounty.org · mabassett@barrycounty.org · bcampbell@barrycounty.org · dhatfield@barrycounty.org
Commissioner: I am asking the Barry County Board of Commissioners to place the public cost of recurring court and prosecutorial failures on a public agenda. I do not approve of county funds being consumed by avoidable appeals, remands, repeated proceedings, excessive incarceration, outside legal defense, inaccessible records, or jail expansion without a transparent accounting of what is driving those costs. Please support an independent fiscal and process audit, publish the findings and underlying data, require corrective reporting from every county-funded office within the Board’s authority, and do not advance new-jail funding until residents receive that accounting. I am not asking you to interfere in any individual case. I am asking you to protect taxpayers through lawful oversight, budgeting, records preservation, and public transparency.
The Chief Justice’s Office Oversees Michigan’s Trial Courts
Two accountability channels exist for concerns about a Michigan judge’s conduct. The Judicial Tenure Commission investigates formal misconduct complaints against sitting judges and can be reached through its own complaint process. Separately, the Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court holds administrative supervisory authority over the state’s trial courts under Article VI of the Michigan Constitution. That office can be written to directly by anyone, including people without a pending case of their own, who want the Court to be aware of a documented pattern in a specific courtroom.
A letter to the Chief Justice is not a legal filing and does not substitute for a motion in any pending case. It is a record. If you have a documented, factual account of how Barry County’s Fifth Circuit Court has handled a case you have personal knowledge of, consider putting it in writing.
Michigan Supreme Court
Michigan Hall of Justice
P.O. Box 30052
Lansing, MI 48909
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