Off the Record

A vacated 60-day jail sentence. An unrecorded $505 in costs the prosecutor agreed should never have appeared on a judgment. An attorney who told Judge Kathleen Galen, on the record, that he felt physically intimidated by his own client, and was asked to keep representing him anyway. Three separate court files from the same 38th District Court courtroom, and the same recurring gap between what the law requires be established on the record and what the record actually shows.

A Pattern in the Paperwork

Clutch Justice’s reporting on Zsazsa Soward’s reversal centered on a single documented failure: a jail sentence that rested on an assumption about her finances the Court of Appeals found unsupported by the record. Three additional court files from Judge Kathleen Galen’s own 38th District Court, obtained and reviewed separately, show that the Soward defect was not a one-time lapse. It is a pattern, and it shows up in different forms across different kinds of proceedings, a criminal sentence, a financial judgment, and an attorney’s request to be relieved from a case.

What follows is a direct account of what each record shows, what it does not show, and what would be required to confirm anything beyond what is already documented.

The Presumption She Didn’t Mention

Consergeria Wilson pleaded guilty and responsible to two nonserious misdemeanors, allowing an unlicensed person to drive and impeding traffic, after being stopped by police in Eastpointe in July 2023. At sentencing on August 30, 2023, Galen reviewed Wilson’s driving history at length. “Sir, your record is atrocious, atrocious,” the sentencing record shows her saying. “You don’t care if you follow the law. You get behind the wheel of a car without a license. You have two drunk driving’s and you jeopardize everybody on the road, everybody, right?” Galen then sentenced Wilson to 60 days in the Macomb County Jail, to be served on weekends, plus 12 months of probation.

Michigan law treats nonserious misdemeanors differently from more serious offenses. Under MCL 769.5(3), there is a rebuttable presumption that a defendant convicted of a nonserious misdemeanor should receive a nonjail, nonprobation sentence, a fine or community service instead. A court can depart from that presumption, but only if it states its reasons for doing so on the record.

Wilson appealed. The Macomb Circuit Court, applying an unpublished but persuasive Court of Appeals decision on point, found that the sentencing record “does not demonstrate that the district court necessarily recognized the statutory rebuttable presumption.” Galen had detailed Wilson’s driving history at length, the circuit court noted, but reciting a defendant’s record is not the same as engaging with the presumption the law requires a court to address before jailing someone for a nonserious offense. The circuit court vacated the sentence and remanded the case for resentencing.

The $505 Nobody Can Explain

Mazin Hermiz’s case took a different path to the same underlying problem. Hermiz’s Judgment of Sentence, entered February 14, 2023 in 38th District Case No. 22-9599, assessed financial obligations that went beyond what had actually been stated at the sentencing hearing. By April 2023, the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office and Hermiz’s defense counsel had reached agreement on the point without a contested hearing. Their stipulated order states plainly that “the court may not enter a Judgment which assesses financial obligations against the Defendant which were not placed on the record at sentencing.” The properly noticed total came to $350, itemized as $200 in fines and costs, a $25 special assessment, a $50 state fee, and a $75 crime victims rights fee. A separate $505 in “other costs,” appearing on the written judgment but never spoken at the hearing itself, was vacated outright.

Unlike Wilson, this was never litigated to a written opinion. The prosecutor’s office agreed the judgment was wrong once the discrepancy was raised, and the circuit court entered the stipulated order and closed the case. No judge wrote an opinion explaining how $505 ended up on a judgment without ever being said out loud in court, and the underlying district court record does not identify who added it or when. What the order proves: money that governed what Hermiz owed the court was never subjected to the basic due process requirement that a defendant hear, on the record, what he is actually being ordered to pay.

The Attorney Who Asked to Leave

The third record is not an appeal or a correction. It is a same-day transcript, and it involves neither a jail sentence nor a dollar figure, only a request that was not granted the way it was asked for.

On April 29, 2026, attorney John Gerlach appeared before Galen for a pretrial hearing on behalf of his client, Franklin Eugene Dyer II. Gerlach told the court his client wanted new counsel, and Galen adjourned the matter a week so Dyer could hire someone else, with Gerlach remaining on the file in the meantime. Gerlach then asked for something more immediate. “Your Honor, may I ask to be relieved as of today?” he said, according to the transcript, before explaining why: “I would like the record to be clear that today during my discussions with Mr. Dyer, I felt physically intimidated by him and his physical reaction toward me. That’s why I’m asking for the extraordinary relief of asking to be withdrawn from today. I even asked your Court Officer to be present today.”

Galen’s response did not grant that request. “Okay. All right, so I’m going to have you a file a motion to withdraw,” she said. “You’re going to adjourn one week to hire your own attorney and I will hear your motion next week, Mr. Gerlach.” Gerlach remained counsel of record. The transcript ends there; what happened at the following week’s hearing is not part of the record obtained for this piece.

What Connects Them

Here is what these three records show. A nonserious misdemeanor sentence that a circuit court found showed no recognition of the statutory presumption against jail. A financial judgment carrying $505 that the prosecutor’s own office agreed should never have been entered, because it was never placed on the record. And a defense attorney’s stated safety concern that did not result in the immediate relief he asked for. Three separate proceedings, three separate outcomes, and the same missing step in each one: whatever needed to be established on the record for the law to apply the way it’s written, wasn’t.

Two of the three required a formal appeal or stipulation to correct after the fact. The third is not a correction at all, only an account, on the record, of a request that was made and not granted as asked. What connects all three, and what connects them to the Soward reversal Clutch Justice reported previously, is a documented, recurring gap between what Michigan law requires be established on the record before it governs a defendant’s outcome, and what the record in each of these cases actually shows.

The same gap shows up one level up, in the courthouse’s own personnel. Clutch Justice’s separate reporting on Galen’s Cork Wine Pub dispute documents that Heather Froias, the person who now serves as the official court reporter keeping the record of what happens in Galen’s courtroom, was named the Designated Record Keeper on Galen’s own 2020 campaign committee filing. The person responsible for the accuracy of the record examined throughout this piece is not a stranger to Galen’s political operation.

A Court Built Past Capacity

Michigan’s State Court Administrative Office released its 2025 Judicial Resources Recommendations report this year, the state’s own weighted-caseload analysis of how much judicial time each Michigan trial court actually requires. For the 38th District Court, the number is stark. Based on three years of filing data, 2022 through 2024, the report calculates that Eastpointe’s single courtroom needs the equivalent of 1.87 judges to handle its docket. It has one. SCAO’s report puts the current average workload per judge at 187 percent, the highest workload percentage recorded among the courts flagged statewide for additional resources. Filings rose from 14,517 in 2023 to 17,240 in 2024.

This is not the first time SCAO has flagged the problem. In 2017, the agency recommended consolidating the 38th District Court with the neighboring 39th District Court, which serves Roseville and Fraser. The Michigan Legislature acted on that recommendation, authorizing the consolidation in 2018 contingent on local resolutions passing before January 1, 2020. The 2025 report states what happened next: “The consolidation did not occur.” Nearly six years later, SCAO is recommending essentially the same fix, adding a judgeship or consolidating the two courts, because whichever local bodies needed to pass those resolutions never did. Clutch Justice has not yet established what happened in Eastpointe, Roseville, or Fraser between 2018 and the lapsed deadline, or whether anyone connected to the 38th District Court took a public position on it. SCAO’s own two alternatives make the stake concrete: add a second judgeship to the 38th District Court, which preserves the bench Galen currently holds, or consolidate it out of existence into a merged court with the 39th. Whoever holds that seat has an obvious institutional interest in the court looking too overwhelmed to merge.

What Attorneys Describe Off the Record

Several attorneys, interviewed separately, describe matters being handled at sidebar rather than placed on the record, including during proceedings conducted over Zoom, where substantive discussion happens off the recorded portion of the hearing. The same attorneys describe cases pushed toward pretrial hearings even when the prosecutor’s own office is prepared to resolve or dismiss them. And they describe hearings scheduled, and clients required to appear, on dates when Galen herself was on vacation, rather than adjourned in advance, so that the case is adjourned that day instead. Separately, several of the same attorneys describe Galen publicly attributing courtroom delays to understaffing while, they say, closely controlling the court administrators responsible for addressing it.

That description lines up with the documented record above. When attorney John Gerlach told Galen on the record that he felt physically intimidated by his client and asked to be relieved from the case that same day, she didn’t grant it in the moment. She required a written motion, adjourned the matter a week on a schedule of her own choosing, and kept him on the file until then.

A similar pattern shows up in who stays. Judge Tanya Grillo, before her own appointment to the Macomb County Circuit Court in January 2026, spent years working inside the 38th District Court as part of her role managing indigent-defense coverage across the county; her own 2020 testimonial for Galen’s campaign describes working “side by side with her in the 38th District Court trenches over the last several years.” According to multiple sources in the Macomb legal community, she left a six-figure position there fairly quickly. Clutch Justice has not independently confirmed the timeline or the reason for her departure.

A more serious version of the same pattern, according to these attorneys, goes beyond sidebar discussion. They describe hearings, held both in person and over Zoom, where the matters actually addressed go beyond scheduling, but which are logged as Status Conferences rather than substantive hearings. Michigan Court Rule 8.108(B)(1) requires a verbatim record of testimony, rulings on motions, and the reasons for those rulings; that requirement does not turn on what label a proceeding is given. Multiple attorneys separately describe requesting transcripts for hearings of this kind and being told none exist: hearings that, according to the people appearing in them, address more than scheduling while carrying a label Michigan’s own court rules do not exempt from the verbatim-record requirement.

These accounts share the same shape as the three case files above: something governing how a case moves, or how a courtroom runs, without leaving behind the kind of record that would let anyone outside that courtroom confirm it. In the case of the mislabeled hearings, that missing paper trail is not a hole in the reporting, it is the substance of what these attorneys are describing. A transcript request that comes back saying no record exists is itself a form of documentation of the practice, not an absence of one. None of it is neutral with respect to the caseload crisis above, either. A pretrial the prosecutor did not request, an appearance required only to be adjourned, a hearing held off the record, each adds to the docket rather than merely reflecting a docket that was already too large.

Why This Matters Now

Kathleen Galen is on the November 3, 2026 ballot for re-election to the 38th District Court, opposed by Richard Goodman. Clutch Justice has separately reported on Galen’s pre-bench role in a liquor-license dispute that independently matches an anonymized 2024 Judicial Tenure Commission admonition, and on the Court of Appeals reversal of her sentencing of a pregnant defendant, Zsazsa Soward, over an ability-to-pay assumption the appellate panel called unsupported by the record. The records in this piece are a different kind of evidence than either of those. They are not anonymized, and they did not require an appellate opinion to exist. They are a vacated sentence, a stipulated correction, and a same-day transcript, three separate paper trails from the same courtroom, each one showing the same gap between what the law requires be established on the record and what the record shows.

The 38th District Court is where most Eastpointe residents encounter the justice system, not through felony trials, but through the misdemeanors, fines, and pretrial hearings that make up the bulk of a district court’s docket. A jail sentence vacated after the fact, a $505 debt nobody can explain, and an attorney kept on a case despite a stated safety concern are all, in their own way, evidence of the same thing: how carefully, or how carelessly, a record gets built in the first place. Michigan’s own workload data shows a court already operating far past its designed capacity. The record does not establish why the pattern attorneys describe exists. What it does establish is that unnecessary pretrials, hearings held over a judge’s own vacation, and matters kept off the record add caseload and delay rather than merely reflecting caseload that was already there, and that Galen has a documented institutional stake in the outcome: a court that looks too overwhelmed to consolidate is a court more likely to get a second judgeship instead of losing its own.