No One Is Coming: Michigan Attorneys Describe a Discipline System That Dismisses 94 Percent of Complaints. The Judges Under Investigation Do Not Trust It Either.

Multiple attorneys who practice in Michigan courts described the same pattern to Clutch Justice on background: hearings that go undocumented, dockets that sit for years, and a complaint process built to close before the public ever sees it. The Commission’s own numbers, and a national review of its files, say they are not wrong.

What Attorneys Describe When It Cannot Be Traced Back to Them

Let me tell you what changed how I framed this piece. I did not start from a theory that Michigan’s discipline system is broken. I started from attorneys, people with every professional reason to stay quiet about the judges they appear in front of, describing the same handful of practices to me on background, unprompted, across courts I do not all cover regularly. Attorneys explaining that a hearing happened on the record and a transcript request later came back saying none exists. Attorneys describing months where nothing on a docket moves and no order explains why. Attorneys who represent different clients, in different counties, arriving at the same description independently.

These are not disgruntled litigants venting about a loss. They are officers of the court. Their law license, their income, and their ability to walk into that courtroom again next month all depend on staying in that judge’s good graces, and they chose to tell an independent outlet what they will not tell the body constitutionally responsible for hearing it. That choice is data. When attorneys with everything to lose decide a journalist is the safer place to put this than the Judicial Tenure Commission, the problem is not that they lack confidence in one judge. It is that they lack confidence in the mechanism built to hold that judge accountable. People who have spent a career inside a system, and who still see no path through its own front door, are not being dramatic. They are reporting what they have observed.

This is not a complaint about losing a case. Every attorney who described these patterns has won and lost in front of the judges they described. What they described was procedural: a hearing logged as a status conference rather than a substantive proceeding, so the verbatim-record requirement in MCR 8.108(B)(1) never technically attaches. A transcript request that comes back with nothing to produce. A docket carrying more than a dozen unresolved filings with no written order anyone can point to. Clutch Justice documented several of these specific patterns, sourced and hedged, in its earlier reporting from Eastpointe’s 38th District Court in a piece called “Off the Record.” What is different here is the shape repeating itself in courts that have nothing else in common.

Not everything described in this reporting has to be bad faith to be a problem. A docket that cannot produce a written order for months, or a sentencing calendar that keeps slipping, can be misconduct. It can also be a judge who cannot keep up with the caseload, with no mechanism that forces that to surface either. Michigan’s discipline system does not appear built to tell the two apart, or to catch either one. A commission that dismisses 94 percent of what reaches it, and a chief judge whose own docket-management authority sits over the same unresolved-motion pattern in three unrelated Barry County cases, is not distinguishing a judge who is unwilling from a judge who is unable. Both look identical from where a litigant or an attorney is standing: no ruling, and no explanation for the delay.

One of the attorneys willing to have his name used, Stephen Becker, who practices regularly in the 38th District, is reportedly preparing a complaint of his own to the Judicial Tenure Commission. That detail matters less as an allegation against any one judge and more as a data point about incentive. An attorney who depends on a courtroom for his livelihood, and who will absorb whatever professional cost comes with filing, chose to file anyway. People do not usually make that trade unless staying quiet has stopped feeling like the safer option.

The Numbers Behind the Complaints

None of this is anecdote dressed up as pattern. Michigan’s Judicial Tenure Commission is the constitutional body responsible for investigating judicial misconduct, and its own reporting states plainly what happens to most complaints filed with it: roughly 94 percent are dismissed without any public action. The Commission is barred by court rule from telling most complainants why. A private letter of explanation, caution, or admonition may follow a dismissal, and the complainant is told only that some action was taken, never what it was.

A December 2024 racial equity review of the Commission by the National Center for State Courts found that opacity is not evenly distributed. Grievances filed against Black judicial officers were significantly more likely to advance to full investigation than grievances filed against their white peers, a disparity the reviewers found was not explained by chance. A 2025 follow-up phase of the same review, drawing on 15 years of grievance files and interviews with judges who had gone through the process, found the average judge under investigation had already served roughly eight years on the bench and had, on average, 18 prior grievances on file, almost none of which had produced a prior public outcome.

The Commission’s investigation into a judge Clutch Justice has covered before, Judge Hartig, took roughly five years before a formal public complaint was filed, a timeline documented in this outlet’s own prior reporting. Barry County’s Judge Michael Schipper received what Clutch Justice’s earlier reporting described, citing a Commission report, as a private communication over comments he made on the bench years before the conduct discussed later in this piece. Neither case is unusual. Both are consistent with a Commission whose primary output, in the overwhelming majority of files, is a closed file the public never sees.

That timeline raises an obvious question. If a negotiated outcome is effectively decided in advance, as the judges interviewed for the NCSC review describe, why does reaching one take years instead of weeks? The two findings are not in tension. Nothing in Michigan’s process puts a public clock on any stage of it. No docket tracks a complaint’s age. No deadline carries a real consequence when it is missed. A commission that faces no cost for taking five years to arrive at a foregone conclusion has no reason to take five weeks instead, and a process nobody outside the building can see has no one to object to the pace. Predetermination explains what the outcome will be. The absence of any external clock explains why getting there takes as long as it does.

Getting a complaint into that process at all is its own filter. Michigan Court Rule 9.220(A) requires a request for investigation to be “verified on oath of the grievant.” The Commission’s own filing instructions translate that into a concrete requirement: an original signature, notarized, mailed in. The Commission states plainly that this is why it cannot accept a complaint by email or fax. That rule sits inside a court rule chapter most recently revised in 2019, governing a commission whose constitutional framework dates to a 1968 amendment to the Michigan Constitution, and it still functions today as a paper-era authentication step, one that assumes a grievant has reliable transportation, a bank branch or notary office within reach, and time off during business hours to get a signature verified in person. For a shift worker, a rural resident, or anyone who cannot easily get to a notary, that is a real obstacle standing between a documented grievance and the mailbox, one more filter narrowing who gets to use a mechanism that already dismisses 94 percent of what reaches it.

One Complaint, Tracked From the Mailbox

In May 2025, Clutch Justice began tracking a single Judicial Tenure Commission complaint in real time, from the day it was mailed through every documented step of the Commission’s response. The point was not to prove anything about the judge named in that complaint. It was to answer a narrower, more measurable question: what does it actually look like, procedurally, when a citizen files this kind of complaint. The interactive timeline below walks through what happened.

The Same Two Names, Different Case Numbers

Barry County’s Fifth Judicial Circuit shows what the numbers above look like in a single courthouse. Michael Cammenga, representing himself in a domestic relations matter that has run since March 2020, says more than a dozen 2025 filings and numerous 2026 filings sit with no written disposition he can identify. After missing a January 2026 hearing while recovering from spinal cord stimulator surgery, the circuit court issued a civil failure-to-appear bench warrant with a cash-only bond exceeding $280,000. In April 2026, Barry County Court Services told him in writing what that meant in practice.

The result is a loop. Appearing in person risks arrest under the outstanding warrant. Not appearing means no ruling, and no ruling means no path to appellate review. Cammenga is not the only litigant describing a version of that loop in front of the same court. Mark Foley’s case, before the same trial judge and the same chief judge, has raised the same record and service failure pattern since 2022, and reached the Michigan Supreme Court, which accepted amicus briefs supporting his application in September 2026.

The Arizola amicus brief, filed September 12, 2026, argues that Schipper’s sentencing pattern sits alongside Barry County record-keeping failures and proof-of-service failures that specifically affect incarcerated litigants trying to appeal. The Snowden matter, raised publicly at a February 2026 Barry County Board of Commissioners meeting, involves disputed FOIA denials and alleged disclosure failures. Three different case numbers. Three different underlying disputes: a divorce, a criminal sentence, a records fight. One administrative office, and, per the amicus brief filed in Cammenga’s case, one chief judge whose docket-management authority under Michigan court rule reaches all three.

The Pattern Is Not Confined to One County

Barry County is the deepest documentary record Clutch Justice has assembled, but attorneys elsewhere describe the same shape. In Berrien County, attorneys who practice before Judge Sherry Frame describe, on background, a docket that moves the way Barry County’s does: motions accumulating without written rulings, an arraignment calendar that regularly runs behind, and at least one sentencing these sources say has been adjourned nine separate times. Clutch Justice has not obtained the underlying docket for that matter and is not naming the case here. The sources describing it asked not to be identified for the same reason the attorneys quoted earlier in this piece did: they still appear in that courtroom. What they describe fits the pattern documented everywhere else in this reporting, a docket moving slowly enough that no single delay looks unusual on its own, in a system with no public mechanism that tracks the pattern across the delays.

Eastpointe’s 38th District Court supplies a version of the same dynamic that is fully documented, already reported by Clutch Justice in “Off the Record.” During an April 2026 pretrial hearing, defense attorney John Gerlach told Judge Kathleen Galen on the record that he felt “physically intimidated by him and his physical reaction toward me,” referring to his own client, and asked to be relieved as counsel that same day. Galen did not grant immediate withdrawal. She required a written motion, adjourned the matter a week, and kept Gerlach on the case with the client he had just described as physically intimidating him in the meantime. Whether to grant a lawyer’s stated safety concern immediate relief is not, on its face, a complicated legal question. The transcript shows Galen did not treat it as one.

Confidentiality Was Supposed to Protect the Process

There is a real reason judicial and attorney discipline files stay confidential while pending. An accusation against a sitting judge or a practicing attorney can end a career and a reputation before any facts are tested, and a system that made every complaint public on filing would hand a losing litigant, a political opponent, or anyone with a grudge a ready-made weapon. Michigan’s court rules protect judges and attorneys under investigation for a version of the reason grand jury proceedings stay sealed: the presumption runs toward the person accused, not the accuser, until an investigation actually supports going public.

That rationale assumes confidentiality is experienced as protection by the people it is meant to protect. The 2025 NCSC review complicates that assumption directly. Judges who went through Commission investigations and were interviewed for the review described the negotiation process itself as unfair. Some said the Commission had effectively decided the outcome before negotiation began. Others said the Commission declined to meet with them directly at all, leaving negotiation as an option they were told existed but were never actually offered. If the confidentiality meant to give judges a fair, private path to resolve accusations is, according to a third-party review of the Commission’s own files, experienced by many of them as arbitrary and pre-decided, the protection is not reaching the people it is designed for either.

That symmetry does not soften the conclusion. It sharpens it. This is not a story about judges closing ranks against complainants, or complainants losing patience with judges who did nothing wrong. It is a system where the people it investigates and the people who file against it both describe the same blindness, from opposite sides of the same closed door. That is not an isolated bad actor waiting to be found. That is a mechanism that has stopped functioning as oversight for anyone who depends on it, on either side of the complaint.

The Attorney Side of the Ledger

Judicial discipline is not the only accountability mechanism attorneys describe as unreliable. Michigan’s Attorney Grievance Commission, the body that investigates complaints against lawyers, dismissed 15,816 of the 21,048 grievance files it opened between 2012 and 2020, a rate close to three in four, according to a review of the Commission’s own published annual statistics. The Commission’s individual annual reports show the same pattern year over year. In 2015 alone, 1,819 of 2,208 total dispositions were grievances the Grievance Administrator dismissed outright, before a case ever reached a hearing panel.

The pattern shows up before anyone is formally disciplined at all. In Allegan County, judicial candidate Tom Siver is already bound by Canon 7 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct, which governs the political and campaign conduct of judges and candidates for judicial office alike. Clutch Justice’s reporting on Siver, including a published piece examining a client he represented while that client sat in jail and a campaign that delayed required financial disclosures until after voters had already cast ballots, documents conduct a sitting judge could face discipline over. Siver is not yet a judge, and the Judicial Tenure Commission has no jurisdiction over him unless he wins. What his campaign shows, whether by calculation or habit, is confidence that the consequences most attorneys and judges describe as unlikely to materialize for anyone will not materialize for him either.

Grading the Mechanisms

Put every accountability mechanism discussed above side by side and grade each one on what its own numbers, not its stated purpose, actually support.

One Court Runs Every Mechanism in This Piece

Every body graded above answers, in the end, to the same institution. The Attorney Discipline Board describes itself as the adjudicative arm of the Michigan Supreme Court for discharge of its exclusive constitutional responsibility to supervise and discipline Michigan attorneys. The Attorney Grievance Commission operates as the investigative and prosecutorial arm of that same court for the same responsibility. The Judicial Tenure Commission investigates judicial misconduct, but by its own description exists for recommending discipline of judicial officers by the Michigan Supreme Court, which holds final authority over any outcome the Commission proposes. Even the State Court Administrative Office, whose caseload data appears throughout Clutch Justice’s Barry County reporting, operates under Michigan Court Rule 8.103 under the Supreme Court’s supervision and direction.

That is not incidental to the pattern documented in this piece. It is close to the whole explanation for it. The institution investigating judges, the institution investigating the attorneys who appear in front of those judges, and the institution measuring how the courts themselves are performing all report, structurally, to the same court whose own members and professional colleagues are sometimes the ones being investigated. Self-regulation is not automatically corrupt. But a self-regulating system that also controls its own transparency, sets its own deadlines, and answers only to itself has removed every external check that would otherwise catch it operating badly, whether or not any individual decision inside it was made in good faith.

Why This Matters Beyond These Cases

I want to be direct about what I am and am not arguing here. I am not arguing that every judge under investigation is guilty of what they are accused of, and the NCSC review itself does not argue that either. I am arguing that a system built almost entirely around confidentiality cannot simultaneously claim to be protecting due process and functioning as meaningful oversight. It can do one of those well. Right now, by its own numbers, it is mostly doing the first.

Attorneys are supposed to be the profession’s internal check, the people with enough standing and enough firsthand knowledge of a courtroom to call out what does not work there. What this reporting found is not that they are too afraid to use that voice. Stephen Becker is using his own name and is reportedly preparing a formal complaint. It is that the voice does not appear to change much once it reaches the mechanism built to hear it. A commission that dismisses 94 percent of what reaches it is not built to treat a sustained, independently corroborated pattern reported by a career officer of the court any differently than it treats noise, named or anonymous. That is not a minor data point buried in this reporting. It may be the most damning one in it. A system that cannot act on its own practitioners telling it, repeatedly and independently, that something is wrong, whether misconduct or plain inability to do the job, has lost the confidence of the people who work inside it every day.

In 2023, after her own first Judicial Tenure Commission complaint, Rita Williams wrote to the Michigan Supreme Court Clerk proposing two specific reforms: a public, searchable database of judicial complaints and their outcomes, and real-time status access for the people who file them. Neither has been adopted. Clutch Justice keeps tracking individual complaints in real time not because any single complaint proves the system is broken, but because tracking is the only oversight tool available when the official mechanism will not report its own results. That is not outrage. It is what is left when the process itself keeps closing the file.

The Lever Attorneys and Judges Do Not Have

Everyone described in this piece is boxed in by the same confidentiality wall. An attorney cannot go on the record without risking a courtroom relationship he depends on. A judge under investigation cannot see the case against him clearly enough to negotiate it. A complainant gets a form letter and nothing else. But voters and taxpayers sit outside that wall. The Judicial Tenure Commission, the Attorney Grievance Commission, and every circuit court named in this piece run on public money, staffed by people who are elected or reappointed on a public timeline and who answer, eventually, to the people funding them. That check only works if someone actually uses it.

Court watching sounds smaller than it is. It means sitting in on hearings that are already open to the public, taking structured notes on what actually happens against what the docket later claims happened, and publishing what you saw. It is slow and it is unglamorous, and it works for exactly the reason every mechanism graded above fails. Misconduct survives on invisibility. A person in the gallery with a notebook removes that.