Michigan’s Courts Asked the Public What’s Broken. Funding, Discipline, and a Denied Accommodation Topped the List.

A virtual public hearing on Michigan’s next three-year court strategy surfaced testimony on funding, judicial discipline transparency, and a disability accommodation denial, the same evening Clutch Justice was invited to discuss it live.

Why I Was on the Call That Night

On the evening of August 24, I joined the Justice for Betty Hayes podcast’s Voices in Probate livestream as a guest, at the invitation of Jody White, an elder-law advocate who is now a declared candidate for the Michigan Supreme Court. Cynthia Mifsud, the podcast’s namesake advocate, was also on that evening’s livestream. Justice for Betty Hayes takes its name from Mifsud’s own mother, Betty Hayes, whom Mifsud fought pro se to free from a Michigan guardianship, an experience she has since testified about before the Michigan House Judiciary Committee. I had actually been scheduled to give live public comment at that afternoon’s hearing myself. Instead, I spent the day driving five hours round trip to a hearing in Macomb, in an unrelated matter, after a judge in that case declined to accommodate a protected health condition that should have allowed me to appear by Zoom. My written comments to the council were still entered into the record. The invitation to join Jody and Cynthia that evening was to talk through what several probate families and a handful of attorneys had just told the council about access, transparency, and accountability in Michigan’s courts.

Thank you to Jody White and to the Justice for Betty Hayes podcast for that invitation. What follows is Clutch Justice’s own record of the hearing itself, drawn from direct attendance, not a recap of the podcast conversation.

What the Michigan Judicial Council Was Actually Asking

The Michigan Judicial Council is an advisory body that makes recommendations to the Michigan Supreme Court on the administration of justice statewide, including development of the judiciary’s multi-year strategic plan. Its current planning cycle covers 2026 through 2029, built around six stated priority goals: trial court funding, technology, public experience and effective problem resolution, fairness and accountability, public trust and understanding, and workforce excellence. The August 24 session was a virtual public forum conducted over Zoom, one of a series the council ran this year to collect public comment before finalizing the plan.

Multiple speakers addressed the council that day. A recurring theme across several of them, according to trade press coverage of the hearing, was that the technology to make Michigan’s courts more transparent already exists and some courts simply choose not to deploy it.

Kevin Bowling: Court Administration as Infrastructure, Not Paperwork

At the August 24 hearing, Bowling framed court administration itself as a capability question rather than a back-office one. His testimony, according to Clutch Justice’s own notes from the session, touched on court funding and technology as connected problems, cybersecurity as a structural risk rather than an IT afterthought, and timeliness as something closer to a component of due process than a scheduling metric. He also pointed to performance measurement and public reporting as the mechanism that lets a court demonstrate it is functioning, rather than simply assert it.

MiFILE carries filings across custody, guardianship, and protective order cases in courts throughout the state, which puts it in a different risk category than an ordinary courthouse website. Clutch Justice found no public statement from the State Court Administrative Office confirming that either gap has been addressed, and will update this reporting if one surfaces.

Jody White: “Membership Is Not Oversight”

At the hearing, White’s testimony centered on judicial discipline, according to Clutch Justice’s notes. She argued that losing a loved one inside the probate system is not just a personal loss but a structural one, and that State Bar of Michigan membership functions as a credential to practice law, not as oversight of how that practice is conducted. She characterized a lawyer’s oath as a professional commitment rather than a contract with an enforceable remedy attached, and said that in practice, accountability for attorney and judicial conduct tends to stop at the courthouse door once a complaint is filed.

Her central recommendation was to deanonymize Judicial Tenure Commission complaint reporting, so that patterns across judges and courts become visible to the public rather than buried in aggregate statistics. She framed that transparency as a matter of meaningful access to court, not just physical access to a courtroom.

Brandee Ritsema: Denied by Zoom While Others Weren’t

At the August 24 hearing, Ritsema told the council she had been denied a Zoom accommodation connected to PTSD in a court proceeding, while that same court permitted other participants to appear remotely. Trade press coverage of the hearing corroborates the substance of that account, reporting that Ritsema was one of two speakers, alongside an attorney also on the agenda that day, who raised what they characterized as unequal access to remote court appearances and court information.

According to Clutch Justice’s notes from the hearing, Ritsema also described being denied hearing readings. She did not identify which Michigan county was involved. This is her account, given under her own name to a state judicial body, and Clutch Justice reports it as such.

Ritsema framed the stakes plainly. Probate courts decide who cares for a parent, who has access to a child, and who controls a home or an estate. When accommodation and access to a hearing depend on which participant is asking, rather than on documented need, the promise of equal access collapses into something closer to equal access for some.

Michigan’s courts are not trauma-informed, and they should be. Trauma-informed practice means recognizing that the people appearing in court, as parties, witnesses, or family members, are often carrying documented psychological or physical health conditions that affect how they can participate, and building procedures around that reality instead of expecting everyone to perform calm compliance under adversarial pressure. Right now, whether a court accommodates that reality still depends on which judge happens to be on the bench that day.

Why This Matters Beyond One Hearing

I want to be direct about what connects these three accounts, because it’s easy to hear them as three unrelated complaints. Bowling is describing an administrator’s list of structural risks. White is describing a discipline system with no real teeth once a complaint leaves the intake form. Ritsema is describing a specific day when a court’s technology worked for everyone in the room except her. Different vantage points, same throughline: process only protects the public if someone outside the institution can see it, question it, and hold it accountable when it fails. That premise is what this publication runs on, and it’s why I said yes when Jody White asked me to join Justice for Betty Hayes that night.

There is a part of this that sits heavier with me than the rest. The three of us on that call that night, Jody, Cynthia, and I, each turned a negative experience into advocacy work none of us should have had to do. Jody didn’t set out to spend years testifying at the Capitol. Cynthia didn’t set out to build a movement named for her mother. I didn’t set out to make institutional accountability my beat. The Michigan court system should be transparent, fair, and an example for accountability on its own, not something families have to force it into becoming.

The Michigan Judicial Council is still building its 2026-2029 strategic plan. Clutch Justice will be tracking what, if anything, from that August 24 testimony makes it into the final document. Thank you again to Jody White and to the Justice for Betty Hayes podcast for the invitation to be part of that conversation.