Slumbering on Their Rights

James Galen Jr., the brother of the judge he was trying to help keep on the bench, and co-plaintiff Cindy Jakubiszen were told in writing which court and which state official could actually decide Richard Goodman’s eligibility. They sued the wrong people in the wrong court instead, ignored the warning for three months, and lost twice without a judge ever ruling on where Goodman actually lives.

Clutch Justice has previously reported on Judge Kathleen Galen’s pre-bench liquor license dispute and on the Court of Appeals reversal of her sentencing of Zsazsa Soward. This piece is about a different kind of record, not one of Galen’s own rulings, but the residency lawsuit her brother and a co-plaintiff brought against her general election opponent, and what happened to it once it reached courtrooms neither of them controlled.

What follows is drawn from two documents obtained by Clutch Justice: the certified transcript of an August 19, 2026 hearing in Oakland County Circuit Court, and the Michigan Court of Claims’ own Opinion and Order dismissing the underlying mandamus action. Together they show a challenge that two separate judges dismissed without either one ever reaching the question the whole case was supposedly about.

A Residency Question, Settled by Officials Who Weren’t Sued

Richard Goodman filed an Affidavit of Identity and nominating petitions on April 15, 2026, to run for the 38th District Court judgeship Galen currently holds. He had moved into a rented room on Boulder Road in Eastpointe in January and registered to vote there on January 14. On April 1 he signed a lease for a Kelly Road apartment, registered to vote at that address the next day, and voted from it in a May 5 local election.

On April 27, James Galen Jr. filed a formal objection to Goodman’s candidacy with the Board of State Canvassers. Cindy Jakubiszen filed a similar objection the following day. Both argued Goodman still lived at his own home in Fraser, where he and his wife have claimed a principal residence tax exemption and where his wife and child continue to live. Their evidence included an affidavit from private investigator Robert Eisenmann, who conducted what the Court of Claims order later described as limited, non-continuous surveillance between April 18 and April 26: a silver vehicle he identified as Goodman’s parked overnight in the Fraser driveway on several nights, two drive-by visits to the Boulder Road address that found no signs of occupancy, and a single visit to the Kelly Road apartment that appeared vacant.

The objections went first to the Board of State Canvassers, then to the Bureau of Elections, the office actually responsible for reviewing candidate paperwork. On May 14, 2026, Bureau of Elections Director Jonathan Brater rejected both objections. Brater checked Goodman’s AOI against the state’s qualified voter file, found he had been living and registered to vote in Eastpointe since January 14, and found the filing facially compliant with Michigan election law.

Suing the Wrong Court, Then Refusing to Leave It

Brater, not a county clerk, was the official who had just rejected the challenge. Galen and Jakubiszen did not sue him or the Secretary of State he works for. Five days later, on May 19, they filed suit in Macomb Circuit Court against Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini and against Goodman personally.

The problem surfaced almost immediately. On May 27, Macomb Assistant Corporation Counsel Molly Zappitell told plaintiffs’ counsel by email that the county clerk was not a proper defendant, since judicial candidacies are certified by the Secretary of State, and that any such challenge belonged in the Court of Claims. Plaintiffs did not agree to dismiss. They continued litigating in Macomb Circuit Court for nearly three more months.

Michigan’s own court system eventually intervened in a different way. Multiple Macomb Circuit judges recused themselves from the case, and the State Court Administrative Office reassigned it to an Oakland County judge sitting by assignment: Judge Martha D. Anderson.

What Judge Anderson Found

Anderson heard the case on August 19, 2026, in a hearing that lasted under twenty minutes. James Galen Jr. attended in person, listed on the transcript’s own cover page as an additional appearance alongside plaintiffs’ counsel, Raechel Badalamenti.

Two issues were on the table: an outstanding order to show cause tied to the original writ of mandamus, and a pending motion by plaintiffs to amend their complaint. On the first, Zappitell and plaintiffs’ counsel had already agreed Forlini should be dismissed, and Anderson entered that dismissal without objection. On the second, Goodman’s attorney Eric Doster argued that mandamus, a legal tool for compelling a government official to perform a duty, cannot be directed at a private citizen at all. Anderson agreed, and went further.

Anderson dismissed Goodman from the case and told plaintiffs they could still amend their complaint to remove him, but only on the condition that doing so in her court would trigger an automatic transfer to the Court of Claims, the forum Zappitell had identified three months earlier. She gave them until Friday to file the amendment or withdraw the motion.

Goodman’s other attorney, Richard J. Goodman of Goodman Sheikh PC, no relation to his client beyond a shared last name, used his final turn at the podium to argue for something more: attorney fees. He told Anderson plaintiffs had known Goodman’s actual address the entire time and had kept the case alive for months at his client’s expense. “They’ve had them under surveillance for the last five months,” he told the court, calling the amend-and-transfer maneuver bad faith timed to cost his client money. When the attorneys could not agree on which subsection of the applicable court rule, MCR 2.227, actually governed, Anderson checked her own copy of the 2026 Michigan Court Rules and read the current language aloud. “It says ‘may’ not ‘shall,'” she told them, meaning the rule left the fee decision to her discretion rather than requiring it. She declined to award fees that day and told Goodman’s attorney he was free to file a separate motion.

The Same Week, a Different Filing

The transfer Anderson described never had to happen. Plaintiffs had already filed a new mandamus action, this time against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, in the Michigan Court of Claims the day before Anderson’s hearing, on August 18. What ultimately became of the motion to amend in Oakland County is not confirmed in the record Clutch Justice obtained, but plaintiffs’ actual path forward ran through the case they had separately filed on their own, not through a court-ordered transfer out of Macomb Circuit Court. That distinction matters practically: the fee-shifting question Goodman’s attorney raised, whether mandatory or, as Anderson’s reading of the current rule found, discretionary, is typically triggered by an actual transfer order. A separately filed complaint does not carry the same requirement, whatever the parties argued about who was avoiding what.

Two Versions of “Surveillance”

The word plaintiffs’ attorney used at the Oakland hearing and the word the Court of Claims order uses to describe the same underlying evidence do not describe the same thing. Goodman’s attorney told Anderson plaintiffs had kept Goodman “under surveillance for the last five months,” framing it as proof they knew exactly where he lived and sat on that knowledge before suing. Riordan’s later order, drawing on Eisenmann’s own affidavit, describes something considerably narrower: non-continuous observation across nine days in April, three drive-by visits total, and no coverage at all of the thirty-day window that actually determines residency under Michigan election law.

Neither characterization is necessarily false. An investigator hired in April and never redeployed after April 26 could fairly be described, months later in August, as evidence plaintiffs had known Goodman’s whereabouts for that whole stretch. But the word “surveillance” implies ongoing monitoring, and the actual record Riordan reviewed describes a single nine-day window that ended nearly four months before the Oakland hearing where the phrase was used, one that never touched the specific thirty-day period Michigan law says matters, and that nothing in the record shows was ever repeated after April 26.

Slumbering on Their Rights

Riordan’s August 31 order did not need to resolve any of that to dismiss the case. He granted summary disposition to Secretary of State Benson on two independent grounds: plaintiffs had not established the elements required for mandamus relief, and separately, under the doctrine of laches, they had waited too long to ask for it.

Plaintiffs had been on notice since May 14, when Brater rejected their objections, that the Secretary of State’s office, not a county clerk, held the authority they were trying to invoke. Zappitell told them the same thing in writing on May 27. Riordan’s own order states they did not file the mandamus action Michigan law actually required until August 18, three months later and seventeen days before the state’s own September 4 ballot-printing deadline. A case filed in May, Riordan noted, could have gone to an evidentiary hearing with witnesses and a ruling on Goodman’s actual residency. A case filed in August, with two weeks left before ballots went to print, could not.

What This Doesn’t Decide

Riordan was careful to say what his ruling did not settle. Plaintiffs’ own counsel told him at the August 27 hearing she believed residency had been established “significantly enough,” not conclusively, and Riordan’s order does not find otherwise in either direction.

That path stays open after the election through a quo warranto action, a separate and disfavored but available proceeding to remove a sitting officeholder found to have been ineligible from the start. Riordan cited a 2011 Michigan Court of Appeals case in which a Highland Park school board member was unseated by exactly that mechanism, after falsely claiming residency. Whatever plaintiffs believe about where Goodman actually lives, that question never reached a judge in this case, and the delay that caused it is on the record of plaintiffs’ own making.

Why This Matters Now

Kathleen Galen is not a plaintiff in either lawsuit, and nothing in the Oakland transcript or the Court of Claims order establishes what role, if any, she played in a residency challenge her own brother filed against her general election opponent. That question is what the confidential Judicial Tenure Commission and Attorney Grievance Commission complaints Goodman has filed against Galen and her brother are asking investigators to determine, not something these court records touch.

What the records do establish is narrower and does not depend on anyone’s motive. A challenge Michigan’s own election officials rejected on the merits turned into two separate lawsuits, filed against the wrong defendants in the wrong court, kept alive for months after being told exactly how to fix it, and ultimately dismissed without a single evidentiary hearing on the question that supposedly justified all of it. Clutch Justice has previously reported on Galen’s own campaign committee finances and on a documented pattern of gaps between what her courtroom’s record is supposed to show and what it actually shows. This is a different kind of gap: between what a lawsuit claimed to be urgently about, and how urgently the people who filed it actually treated it.