A Barry County Order Appeared After My Amicus Brief. The Record Needs to Prove When.

A new order surfaced on a Barry County docket less than a day after I raised the county’s record-keeping problems with the Michigan Supreme Court. Here’s what the electronic record needs to prove.

At 3:42 p.m. on September 11, seven minutes after the Michigan Supreme Court accepted my amicus brief in In re Foley, I checked the docket in a separate Barry County matter I’ve tracked for months. The entry now sitting on that docket, backdated to the day before I filed, was not there.

I am not going to speculate about why. I am going to ask for the record that can prove when it actually happened.

The Filing and the Gap

On September 11, 2026, I filed a pro se amicus curiae brief, signed as editor of Clutch Justice, in In re Foley, Michigan Supreme Court Case No. 170670, supporting Mark Foley’s application for leave to appeal against Barry County. I argued that Barry County’s court records system has a documented pattern of record-keeping and service failures that affect litigants’ ability to receive notice in their own cases. I submitted the filing at 2:44 p.m., and the Court’s e-filing system accepted it at 3:35 p.m.

Seven minutes later, at 3:42 p.m., I checked the public docket of a separate Barry County matter I monitor as part of my ongoing record-integrity reporting. Docket Entry No. 135 was not listed. It hadn’t been listed earlier that day either, before I filed the amicus.

By the next morning, it was there.

The event date on the entry, September 10, is a day before I filed the amicus. I confirmed the entry was absent at 3:42 p.m. on September 11, and I confirmed it was present by roughly 9:49 a.m. on September 12: an eighteen-hour window in which the docket changed without any public record of when.

What Barry County’s Docket Has Done Before

A single new entry, on its own, wouldn’t be much of a story. My prior reporting on Barry County’s court system has already documented a pattern: filings that disappeared from the public register of actions and later reappeared, mismatches between the date printed on an order and the date it was actually mailed, and incarcerated litigants who never received court communications the docket says were sent to them. That’s why a new entry, appearing right after I put the county’s record practices in front of the state’s highest court, is worth documenting instead of dismissing as coincidence.

Michigan’s public docket software isn’t supposed to make that a moving target. Systems like MiCOURT generate metadata behind every entry: who created it, when, and what was changed afterward. That metadata either exists and matches the printed date, or it doesn’t.

Some of that pattern now has a direct answer attached to it. I obtained a Michigan Department of Corrections FOIA response that shows no record of any mail from Barry County arriving at the relevant facility on the timeline the county’s own filings claim it was sent. That absence is hard to explain away. Michigan prison mailrooms log incoming mail, including mail processed through digitization vendors like TextBehind for routine correspondence. If Barry County had sent something through the ordinary mail stream, some record of its arrival should exist even if it reached the recipient as a scan rather than a physical copy. I found none.

Here’s one possible explanation, and I want to be clear it’s a hypothesis, not a finding. If Barry County sent the filing as legal mail without routing it through the facility’s standard intake process, and the mailroom’s handling of noncompliant legal mail doesn’t generate a log entry, the filing could have been discarded before it was ever recorded as received. That would mean Barry County has been sending legal mail without the handling required to get it to the person it names. I’ve documented this same failure mode, mail the docket says was sent that the recipient never received, in multiple prior pieces on Barry County’s record-keeping.

I gave Barry County the FOIA response and MDOC’s mail-handling policies last week. The filings in question haven’t been resent, and the county’s process for getting mail to incarcerated litigants hasn’t visibly changed. This isn’t new information for Barry County either. The same underlying pattern, court records claiming service that never reached the person named, is what Mark Foley’s own case, the one now before the Michigan Supreme Court, has been raising since 2022.

What the Record Would Need to Show

There was no hearing on the underlying request. A status conference request dismissed entirely on the papers has no oral ruling and no transcript: nothing external I can check the date against. Whatever produced the September 10 date happened entirely inside the system.

For Entry No. 135 to hold up as a September 10 order, I need Barry County’s case management system to show when the entry was actually created and entered into the system, what modification history exists on the record, and which user account is associated with it. I also need to see what mailing record exists, what address was used, and when the entry became visible on the public docket. None of that is an unreasonable ask. It’s the baseline for any electronic record that a court expects the public, and the parties, to rely on.

What Court Rules Are at Stake

Three rules define what should have happened here, independent of any conclusion about why it didn’t.

MCR 2.602(A)(1) and (2) require every order to be in writing, signed by the court, and dated with the date it was signed, and state plainly that the date of signing is the date of entry. That is not a formality. It means the September 10 date on Entry No. 135 is supposed to be the day the order was actually signed. If it is not, the entry does not comply with the rule that defines what a date of entry is.

MCR 8.119 requires the clerk to maintain the register of actions as an accurate, complete, and reliable record, and establishes that register as the official basis for appellate review. When the record does not reflect what actually happened, an appellate court reviewing it is reviewing a constructed version of events rather than the case itself.

MCR 2.107(C)(3) requires that service on a party go to the address stated in that party’s pleadings, not to a generic last known address. That distinction has teeth here. I’ve already shown, through the MDOC FOIA response, that Barry County has no confirmed record of mail reaching the person it was addressed to.

Why Schipper’s Record Makes the Question Relevant

The judge named on Entry No. 135, Michael Schipper, is currently under review by the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission. His record already includes a JTC-confirmed 2014 misconduct finding and a Michigan Supreme Court remand, Docket No. 167549, connected to his sentencing practices. On September 12, the day after the Foley amicus was accepted, I filed a separate amicus brief in People v Arizola, Michigan Court of Appeals No. 377625, addressing Schipper’s pattern of above-guidelines sentencing and Barry County’s broader institutional record failures.

Two filings, one week, the same set of institutional questions. I was up until 2 a.m. writing the Arizola brief. The Barry County Prosecutor’s Office did not file a response brief of its own. It filed a one-line “Prosecutor Advisory, No Brief” instead. None of that proves what happened with Entry No. 135. It’s why I think the audit trail is worth requesting formally instead of letting the printed date stand on its own.

What Comes Next

I’m requesting the underlying record from Barry County’s court administration: the creation and modification timestamps for Entry No. 135, the user account associated with it, the mailing log, and the date the entry became publicly visible. As with the Foley and Arizola filings, I’ll update this piece as records are produced or withheld.

I filed the amicus brief because Barry County’s record system keeps generating exactly this kind of question, for exactly the people least equipped to fight it. I am not asking anyone to take my word for what Entry No. 135 means. I am asking Barry County to produce the record that would settle it, one way or the other. If it can, I will publish that too.