A criminal case can end without anyone deciding what happened. The devices that produce those endings are technical, unglamorous, and almost never reported, and they determine more outcomes in Michigan than any argument about evidence ever will.
Procedural mechanisms decide how a case moves rather than whether an allegation is true. A defective charging instrument, an error found harmless, a claim raised too late, or a rule that does not apply retroactively can each dispose of a case entirely. This series examines those mechanisms in Michigan, centered on the one-person grand jury, a charging device that ended the Flint water prosecutions in 2022 and that the Michigan Supreme Court held in 2026 will not disturb anyone whose conviction was already final.
Is this series arguing that procedure is illegitimate?
No. Procedure is what separates a legal system from an outcome someone preferred. The argument is narrower: mechanisms distribute their benefits by position rather than by merit, and that distribution is rarely examined because the mechanisms themselves are rarely visible.
Why focus on the one-person grand jury?
Because Michigan is one of a small number of states that codified it, because it produced the most consequential prosecution collapse in recent state history, and because in 2026 the Supreme Court decided what it means for everyone else. The full sequence is available in public documents.
Does a dismissal on procedural grounds mean someone was innocent?
No, and the series will not suggest otherwise. It means no adjudication occurred. That is a distinct outcome from acquittal and it is frequently reported as though it were the same thing.
Who is this written for?
Readers following Michigan courts who want to understand why cases end the way they do, and researchers, advocates, and journalists who need the procedural history in one place with citations.
Why I Am Starting With Machinery
The stories that get told about criminal cases are stories about evidence. A witness identified someone or did not. A laboratory found something or did not. The jury believed one account over another.
Those stories are real, and I have spent a great deal of time on them. But they describe a minority of what actually determines outcomes, and I want to be direct about why I think the majority goes unexamined.
Mechanisms are boring. A charging instrument is boring. Whether a claim was preserved for appeal is boring. Retroactivity doctrine is so boring that it functions as a reliable way to end a conversation. And that quality is not incidental to how these devices operate. A rule nobody reports on is a rule nobody contests.
What makes them worth a series is that they are also decisive, and their effects are wildly uneven in a way that has nothing to do with the strength of anyone’s case.
What a Mechanism Is
A mechanism, as this series uses the term, is any rule or device that determines how a case proceeds rather than whether the underlying allegation is true.
Some are structural. The charging instrument determines how a prosecution begins and what the defense sees before trial. Venue determines the community from which a jury is drawn. Jury selection procedures determine who ends up in the box.
Some are corrective. Standards of review determine how much deference an appellate court gives a trial judge. Harmless error doctrine determines whether an acknowledged mistake changes anything. Preservation rules determine whether a claim can be raised at all.
Some are temporal, and these are the least visible and the most powerful. Statutes of limitation, filing deadlines, finality rules, and retroactivity doctrine determine whether a legal principle that exists today reaches a case decided yesterday.
Mechanisms share a structural feature that distinguishes them from evidentiary questions. An evidentiary ruling is about the case in front of the court. A mechanism is about the relationship between that case and every other case, which means its effects are distributional. Someone always benefits and someone always does not, and the sorting is done by position rather than by merit.
The Sequence This Series Follows
Michigan has produced, in the past four years, the clearest illustration of that sorting available anywhere in American criminal procedure. It is a complete story with a beginning in 1917 and an unresolved present.
In 1917 the Michigan Legislature enacted what became known as the one-man grand jury law, now codified at MCL 767.3 and MCL 767.4. It authorizes a judge to investigate criminal offenses, subpoena witnesses, and issue arrest warrants. Michigan is one of a small number of states that codified such a procedure.
The statutes do not say that a judge sitting as a one-person grand jury may issue an indictment. For decades, that power was exercised anyway. The Michigan Supreme Court would later describe it as an unchallenged assumption, and note that judges acting under the law sometimes issued indictments without providing defendants a preliminary examination.
In 2022, in People v Peeler, the court held unanimously that the statutes do not authorize a judge to issue an indictment initiating a criminal prosecution. The Flint water prosecutions against nine former officials, including a former governor, collapsed. In 2026, in People v Robinson, the court held that Peeler announced a new rule of law, that the defect is not jurisdictional, and that it does not apply retroactively to cases already final on collateral review.
The Attorney General’s office has said the process was used across Michigan for over a century and produced thousands of prosecutions and convictions.
One charging defect, established by a unanimous court. A former governor’s case ended because it was pending in 2022. A man convicted of first-degree murder by the same defective mechanism remains convicted because his case was not. Nothing about the two indictments differed. Only the calendar did.
The Lab holds free Clutch Justice resources on Michigan court structure, jurisdiction, and how to locate a docket, built for readers working from public records without legal training.
Explore The LabWhat a Preliminary Examination Does
One mechanism recurs throughout this series and deserves defining now, because its absence is what made the one-person grand jury consequential.
A preliminary examination is a hearing at which a judge determines whether there is probable cause to believe a felony was committed and that the defendant committed it. Under MCL 767.42(1), an information may not be filed until a defendant has had or waived one.
Its screening function is the part usually described. The part that matters more in practice is informational. The preliminary examination is where the defense first sees the prosecution’s case in structured form, first hears witnesses testify under oath, and first has an opportunity to cross-examine. Everything that follows, including plea negotiation, is shaped by what happens there.
A defendant charged by grand jury indictment does not get one. The Michigan Supreme Court held in People v Glass in 2001 that there is no constitutional or statutory requirement of a preliminary examination on top of a grand jury indictment, overruling People v Duncan, a 1972 decision in which the court had exercised its inherent power to require exactly that.
| The preliminary examination thread | |
|---|---|
| 1972, People v Duncan | Michigan Supreme Court requires a preliminary examination for a person indicted by grand jury, describing it as a fundamental right in most criminal cases |
| 2001, People v Glass | Court overrules Duncan, holding there is no federal, state constitutional, or statutory requirement for a preliminary examination following indictment |
| 1917 to 2022 | Judges sitting as one-person grand juries issue indictments, sometimes without a preliminary examination, under what the court later calls an unchallenged assumption |
| 2022, People v Peeler | Court holds the statutes never authorized a judge to issue an indictment, and that these defendants were entitled to a preliminary examination |
| 2026, People v Robinson | Court holds Peeler announced a new rule, is not jurisdictional, and does not apply retroactively on collateral review |
Read as a sequence, that is a protection created in 1972, removed in 2001, restored in 2022 through an entirely different legal route, and then in 2026 confined to people whose cases had not yet become final.
Three Things Mechanisms Do
The benefit of a favorable ruling flows to whoever is procedurally situated to receive it, which is a function of filing dates and appellate posture rather than of the equities.
Illustrated in Parts III and IV, where the same defect produces opposite outcomes.
A case ended on a mechanism generates no determination about the underlying conduct. Both the accused and the people affected by the alleged conduct are left without one.
Illustrated in Part III, where a prosecution ended with no adjudication of the allegations.
No system records how many convictions rest on a given charging mechanism. When the mechanism is invalidated, the affected population cannot be identified because it was never enumerated.
Illustrated in Parts IV and V, where a century of proceedings cannot be audited.
What This Series Will Not Argue
Three clarifications, because this material is easy to misread in both directions.
This series does not argue that the Flint prosecutions should have succeeded. Whether those charges were provable was never determined, and nothing in the procedural record speaks to it. That is precisely the point of a mechanism disposition.
It does not argue that Peeler was wrongly decided. A unanimous court read two statutes and found they do not say what practice had assumed. The reasoning is available and it is not obviously wrong.
It does not argue that retroactivity doctrine is illegitimate. Finality serves real purposes, and a rule that reopened every conviction touched by every new decision would be unworkable. The question this series raises is narrower: what happens when a mechanism used for a century is found to have been unauthorized, and the answer for nearly everyone affected is nothing.
Michigan has no record of how many convictions were obtained through one-person grand jury indictment, which counties issued them, or which are still being served. The Attorney General’s office has described the practice as producing thousands of prosecutions over a century. That figure is an estimate offered in litigation, not a count, because no count exists.
What Is Still Moving
Two threads in this story are unresolved as this series begins.
The first is legislative. House Bill 4434, sponsored by Representative Luke Meerman, repeals the one-person grand jury sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure. It passed the Michigan House on June 11, 2025 and moved to the Senate Committee on Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety. Thirty-three Democrats opposed it in the House, and Representative Tyrone Carter of Detroit framed the objection in terms worth taking seriously: that dismantling the entire mechanism proceeds as though the Flint prosecutions had never been attempted.
The second is evidentiary. MCL 767.4 makes it a misdemeanor to disclose information presented to a one-person grand jury. The material gathered in the Flint proceedings remains under that restriction. Whatever a century of these proceedings contained is not available for examination by anyone outside them.
Why This Matters
I want to end on the thing that made me want to write this series rather than a single article.
When a case ends on a mechanism, the reporting almost always describes it as a technicality, and the word does real work. It tells the reader that nothing important happened, that the substance is elsewhere, and that the correct response is mild frustration and then moving on.
But for the person whose case it was, nothing else happened. The mechanism was the case. And for the people on the other side of the allegation, the mechanism is the reason there will never be a finding about what occurred.
Nine officials had charges dismissed with no adjudication of the allegations against them. A man convicted of first-degree murder by an indictment the Supreme Court has since held the issuing judge had no power to enter will serve his sentence. Both results follow from the same rule, correctly applied. Neither has anything to do with what either person did.
That is not a technicality. That is the machinery, doing exactly what it is built to do, in public, where almost nobody is looking.
Part II goes back to 1917 and traces how a statute that never mentioned indictments came to be understood as authorizing them, through Duncan in 1972, Glass in 2001, and five decades of practice that no defendant successfully challenged until 2022.
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