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 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.
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.
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.
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. It shifts people into an understaffed prison system, adds pressure to the officers and incarcerated people already inside it, and destabilizes families outside it. In practical terms, this courtroom operates like a one-man poverty-creation machine: public money goes toward defending and correcting decisions, while families absorb the lost wages, care, stability, and time those decisions leave behind. 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.
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.
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.
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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