Glass Houses

James L. Galen Jr., the Clinton Township defense attorney who helped bring the residency suit against his sister Judge Kathleen Galen’s general election opponent, carries his own three decade public record. It includes a felonious assault charge the Court of Appeals ordered reinstated after a trial court dismissed it, three misdemeanor cocaine pleas admitted in a 2020 attorney discipline stipulation, two prior findings of criminal contempt, and a suspension history running from 1996 to 2020.

Clutch Justice has already reported on the residency lawsuit James Galen Jr. and Cindy Jakubiszen brought against Richard Goodman, on Judge Kathleen Galen’s pre-bench liquor license dispute, and on a documented pattern of record keeping gaps inside her own courtroom. This piece is about a different record: the public discipline and criminal history of the man who is both the judge’s brother and a named plaintiff in the case against her opponent.

Establishing Who James L. Galen Jr. Is

The State Bar of Michigan and the Attorney Discipline Board both identify James L. Galen Jr. by a single bar number, P43406. His own attorney profile lists a 1990 State Bar admission following a 1989 law degree, and his practice, the Law Offices of James L. Galen, Jr., has operated from 21321 Cass Avenue in Clinton Township for over three decades. Clutch Justice previously confirmed, through the certified transcript of an August 19, 2026 Oakland County hearing and the Michigan Court of Claims’ own order, that this is the same James Galen Jr. named as a plaintiff, alongside Cindy Jakubiszen, in the residency challenge to Richard Goodman’s candidacy for the 38th District Court seat Kathleen Galen currently holds. Goodman’s confidential complaints to the Judicial Tenure Commission and the Attorney Grievance Commission name both Kathleen Galen and her brother.

The 1996 Suspension and Probation

The Attorney Discipline Board’s own public case database lists a suspension of 30 days and two years of probation against P43406, effective April 10, 1996, with reinstatement on May 13, 1996. The Board’s own Notice of Suspension and Probation, Case No. 96-14-GA, decided by Tri-County Hearing Panel #102, describes what produced it.

Galen had been retained to represent a defendant in pending criminal matters. A woman was served with a subpoena to testify for the prosecution at that defendant’s preliminary examination. She contacted Galen and asked how she could avoid testifying. Galen invited her to meet him at his home, where she again told him she did not want to testify, and he admitted spending the night with her without disclosing the relationship to the court or the prosecutor. Months later, with a trial date approaching, the witness contacted Galen again, this time hoping to avoid being served with a trial subpoena. She did not appear for trial. Galen admitted letting her stay at his home for several days, and again did not tell the prosecutor she had been there.

The notice states this conduct violated Michigan Court Rule 9.104(1) through (4) and Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct 3.3(a)(2), candor toward the tribunal, 3.4(a) through (c) and (f), fairness to opposing party and counsel, and 8.4(a) through (c). Galen and the Grievance Administrator stipulated to the 30 day suspension and two years of probation, plus $112.57 in costs. The notice does not name the client Galen represented or the witness he sheltered, and Clutch Justice has not independently identified either of them.

On his own Avvo attorney profile, in a space the platform provides for lawyers to respond to listed discipline, Galen described this discipline only as having “agreed to sit out for thirty (30) days,” calling it the lowest suspension level the Attorney Grievance Commission administers and noting the underlying conduct was, by his own count, roughly a quarter century old. That characterization does not mention a prosecution witness, a subpoena, or either of the two nondisclosures the stipulation describes.

The 2008 Reprimand

The Attorney Discipline Board’s Notice of Reprimand in Case No. 07-148-GA, issued May 29, 2008 and effective May 22, 2008, is more complete. Galen and the Grievance Administrator filed a stipulation in which he pleaded no contest to allegations that he neglected a legal matter, failed to act with reasonable diligence and promptness representing a client, and failed to refund an unearned advance fee, in violation of Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1(c), 1.3, 1.16(d), and 8.4(a). The hearing panel ordered a reprimand, $500 in restitution to the affected client, and $766.64 in costs. On his Avvo profile, Galen described this reprimand as “the lowest form of public discipline” and noted the conduct was, again by his own count, over eight years old at the time it was announced.

Hypocrisy Runs in the Family

The Macomb Daily’s September 11, 2018 headline was explicit: “Macomb County criminal defense attorney possessed crack cocaine.” That reporting predates the 2020 disciplinary action. The later Attorney Discipline Board notice records Galen’s admission to guilty pleas for misdemeanor cocaine use in three separate matters. The headline and the disciplinary notice describe different parts of the record; the headline alone does not establish which of those three matters the 2018 story concerned.

Then came Galen’s own public comments about a client’s drug charges. In FOX 2’s March 1, 2019 coverage, while representing Nathaniel Abraham, Galen said:

In that same report, Galen described how Abraham’s prior drug conviction increased his potential sentencing exposure. FOX 2’s March 3 follow-up also reported on the additional charges and possible enhanced penalties. Those were descriptions of potential punishment at the time, not a report of Abraham’s eventual sentence.

Galen was discussing alleged drug sales; his own disciplinary admissions concerned misdemeanor cocaine use. Those are different offenses. He also criticized the lack of rehabilitation in confinement and argued that Abraham received unusual police attention. Even with that context, his warning about another person’s drug choices is striking beside the record of his own.

The 2020 Suspension: Contempt, Neglect, and Cocaine

The most serious of the three public discipline actions is also the most fully documented. The Attorney Discipline Board’s Notice of Suspension and Restitution With Condition, Case Nos. 20-26-GA and 20-27-JC, issued May 18, 2020 and effective August 1, 2020, before Washtenaw County Hearing Panel #5, describes a stipulation in which Galen admitted considerably more than a single lapse. Galen and the Grievance Administrator filed the stipulation under MCR 9.115(F)(5), and the Attorney Grievance Commission and hearing panel both approved it.

The notice states plainly that the stipulation “contained respondent’s admission that he was twice held in criminal contempt, and that he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor violations of use of a controlled substance, cocaine, in three separate matters.” The same stipulation contains a separate admission that Galen neglected a client’s driver’s license restoration appeal by failing to file it with the Michigan Secretary of State, and that he neglected another client’s criminal matter by failing to appear for two consecutive hearings.

Based on his conviction, admissions, and the stipulation, the hearing panel found Galen had engaged in conduct violating a criminal law, pursuant to MCR 2.615, in violation of MCR 9.104(5), neglected a legal matter under MRPC 1.1(c), failed to act with reasonable diligence under MRPC 1.3, failed to keep a client reasonably informed under MRPC 1.4(a), and failed to ensure his nonlawyer staff complied with professional conduct rules under MRPC 5.3(b). The panel also found violations of MRPC 8.4(a) and (c) and MCR 9.104(1) through (4). Galen’s license was suspended for 120 days effective August 1, 2020, subject to conditions the notice describes only as “relevant to the established misconduct” without specifying what those conditions were, along with $1,750 in restitution and $883.96 in costs. He submitted an affidavit of compliance on December 2, 2020, the Grievance Administrator raised no objection, and the Attorney Discipline Board reinstated him to practice effective December 4, 2020.

Two things the public notice does not say are worth naming directly, because the underlying stipulation itself, a longer document than the public notice summarizing it, may. The notice does not date the three underlying misdemeanor cocaine pleas. The Macomb Daily headline places public reporting about a crack cocaine case in September 2018, before the disciplinary action. It does not establish the dates of all three pleas or match each plea to a particular criminal case. Here, 2020 identifies the disciplinary proceeding, not the year of the underlying conduct or all three pleas. It also does not specify what the disciplinary conditions attached to his suspension actually required, so whether they included substance use monitoring, testing, or participation in the State Bar’s Lawyers and Judges Assistance Program is not established by the record Clutch Justice has obtained.

What Michigan Law Allowed—and What the Sentencing Record Still Needs to Show

For the misdemeanor cocaine-use offenses described in the disciplinary notice, the relevant starting point is MCL 333.7404(2)(a), as enacted in 2016 PA 308: a base maximum of one year in jail, a fine of up to $2,000, or both, for each offense. That is a statutory ceiling, not a mandatory jail term. The exact offense dates, judgments, and any applicable enhancements must be checked before stating the precise exposure in each of Galen’s cases.

Michigan’s felony sentencing guidelines do not provide a mandatory sentence for these misdemeanor pleas. The Michigan Judicial Institute’s sentencing guidance explains that courts sentencing a person convicted only of a misdemeanor do not have a sentencing-guidelines range they must consult. Three pleas therefore do not, by themselves, establish that Galen should have served three consecutive years in jail. Nor does a newspaper headline about possession establish a felony possession conviction; the disciplinary notice describes misdemeanor use pleas.

The 120-day suspension was a professional licensing sanction. It was not a 120-day jail sentence and does not establish what punishment the criminal courts imposed. The judgments of sentence, plea agreements, and relevant court transcripts are needed to determine whether Galen received jail, probation, fines, treatment conditions, or some combination, and to assess how those outcomes compare with similarly situated defendants.

The Felonious Assault Charge

People of the State of Michigan v. James L. Galen, Michigan Court of Appeals No. 189490, Lower Court No. 94-131765-FH, is a published record of a criminal prosecution against a defendant named James L. Galen in Oakland Circuit Court. The Court of Appeals opinion, decided December 30, 1996, describes a defendant who had already been bound over for trial on a felonious assault charge following a preliminary examination. Before trial began on August 14, 1995, defense counsel moved to dismiss on the ground that the complaining witness was not present, telling the court he had taken a sworn statement from the witness that differed substantially from that witness’s preliminary examination testimony. The trial court found the witness unavailable and the prosecution’s efforts to produce her diligent, but dismissed the charge anyway, reasoning that the witness had made contradictory statements and “is not going to be located whatsoever.”

The prosecution appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed. The panel, Judges Fitzgerald, Holbrook, and Post, found that former testimony from an unavailable witness is ordinarily admissible where the opposing party had an earlier opportunity to cross-examine, and that the substance of the witness’s alleged contradictory statement was never placed in the record, leaving the appellate court no way to evaluate whether that statement actually undermined the reliability of her preliminary examination testimony.

The Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal and returned the case for further proceedings. What actually happened next, whether the case proceeded to trial, resulted in a plea, or was dismissed again on different grounds, is not stated in the opinion itself. Oakland County’s own Court Explorer index confirms the case, listed as No. 1994-131765-FH before Judge Grant, is now marked archived, meaning closed, but the index view available to Clutch Justice does not show what the final disposition actually was. A full register of actions for the case has not yet been obtained.

The underlying conduct behind the charge itself, what happened, when, and between whom, is not described anywhere in the Court of Appeals opinion, which addresses only the evidentiary question on appeal. Clutch Justice searched newspaper archive sources covering 1994 through 1997 for contemporaneous coverage of the case and did not locate any.

An Identity the Record Does Not Fully Close

Every version of this case Clutch Justice has reviewed, the Court of Appeals caption and Oakland County’s own party index, names the defendant “James L. Galen,” without a “Jr.” That is not a small detail. The same Oakland County index lists a separate, distinct party record for “GALEN, JAMES, L, JR” as a plaintiff in an entirely unrelated 1992 case, No. 1992-444196-DP before Judge Dare. The county’s own docketing system, in other words, treats “James L. Galen” and “James L. Galen, Jr.” as two different name entries.

Sources familiar with the matter have told Clutch Justice that the felonious assault defendant is the same James L. Galen Jr. who practices law today as P43406. Clutch Justice has not located a primary document, a booking record, an arraignment transcript, or any filing that uses the “Jr.” suffix for this specific defendant, that independently closes the gap between the court’s own naming convention and that identification. This piece proceeds on the sourced identification because it was offered directly and specifically, not because Clutch Justice has resolved the naming discrepancy itself. Readers should weigh that distinction accordingly, and Clutch Justice is continuing to seek the kind of record, an Oakland County arrest report or the case’s full register of actions, that would settle it beyond dispute.

What This Record Does Not Establish

The 1996 stipulation states plainly that Galen’s conduct violated rules on candor to the tribunal and fairness to opposing counsel by concealing a relationship with a prosecution witness. It says nothing about substance use. The three cocaine pleas are acknowledged in the Attorney Discipline Board’s 2020 notice, tied explicitly to Case Nos. 20-26-GA and 20-27-JC. Separately, the Macomb Daily reported a crack cocaine case in September 2018. Neither source establishes a connection to the 1996 witness-related discipline or the separate felonious assault case.

What We Still Don’t Know

The identities of the client Galen represented and the witness described in the 1996 stipulation are not given in the notice and have not been independently established. The final disposition of Oakland Circuit Court Case No. 94-131765-FH after the Court of Appeals sent it back in December 1996 has not been confirmed, and Oakland County’s own index does not show it beyond marking the case archived. The conduct underlying the felonious assault charge itself, what happened, involving whom, and where, is not described in the appellate opinion and has not surfaced in a search of period newspaper archives. Whether the defendant in that case is definitively the same James L. Galen Jr. who practices as P43406 rests on sourced identification rather than a primary document Clutch Justice has independently verified. The public notice does not date all three underlying cocaine cases or pleas. The September 2018 Macomb Daily report establishes that coverage of a crack cocaine case preceded the 2020 discipline; a case-by-case match to the three pleas remains unconfirmed. What specific conditions were attached to the 2020 suspension, and whether they included substance use monitoring, testing, or participation in the State Bar’s assistance program for lawyers and judges, is not specified in the notice summarizing the stipulation.