Seventy Percent: ONE Visiting Judge Received Most of the 38th District Court’s Visiting-Judge Money.

Records from Judge Kathleen Galen’s 38th District Court show one visiting judge receiving 70 percent of every visiting-judge dollar the court spent since 2021, a daily rate that jumped to $603 for three months in 2023, and a second stream of $84,837.50 paid to his wife for administrative work and grant coordination. Galen signed the court’s absence reports as chief judge for four of those five years.

The Payment Records

Start with the number. The 38th District Court, which serves Eastpointe, paid $108,860.91 to visiting judges in the records produced for this investigation. William Crouchman received $76,132.07 of it. Ten other judges, Ethridge, Miller, Metry, Rumora, Maceroni, LeDuc, Viviano, Chylinski, Servitto and Paruk, sat 73 times between them and were paid $32,728.84. Crouchman alone sat 192 times, from a half day on June 16, 2021 to a full day on May 29, 2026.

The records come from public-records responses. The State Court Administrative Office produced Judge Kathleen Galen’s annual judicial absence reports for 2021 through 2025 and the assignments SCAO issued her, in a letter dated August 17, 2026. The court itself produced two ledgers with the underlying invoices, one covering every visiting judge except Crouchman and one covering Crouchman alone, plus a third ledger of payments to Paula Mack-Crouchman, William Crouchman’s wife, with her invoices. Nearly every invoice in all three sets is addressed to Heather Froias at the 38th District Court, the staff member Clutch Justice previously reported was named Designated Record Keeper on Galen’s 2020 campaign committee filing.

How a Regular Becomes the Court

Crouchman did not start as the court’s main visiting judge. In 2021 he sat 17 times for $5,550 while other judges billed $15,272.61, which made his share 27 percent. Rumora sat as a regular that year at $700 a full day, Metry billed $574.58, Miller $650.

By 2022 the balance had tipped. Crouchman sat 27 times for $9,809.67 against $6,915.83 for everyone else, 59 percent. In 2023 he sat 40 times for $18,397.96 and the rest of the field billed $2,727.74, 87 percent. In 2024 it was 47 sittings and $18,784.71 against $6,457.12, 74 percent. In 2025 it was 43 sittings and $16,918.99 against $855.54, two sittings by two other judges, or 95 percent.

Rate did not drive this. Through the spring of 2023 Crouchman was the cheapest judge the court used, billing $400 for a full day and $250 for a half day, plus $3.51 in mileage for a six-mile round trip. Maceroni billed $500. Ethridge billed $560 and later $705. The court chose the same judge again and again while paying less per day than nearly anyone else it could have called, and the ledgers show the choice repeated for five years.

Three Months at $603

On May 2, 2023 the daily rate changed. Crouchman’s invoice for that day and May 4 reads $603.51 per full day, marked virtual court, with mileage folded in. The same rate appears on 13 more sittings through June 22, and on $603.93 for three more in July. His last $600 day was July 25, 2023. That is 18 sittings, $10,864.44 total, about $3,600 more than the same days would have cost at his standard $400 plus mileage. On July 24, between two $600 days, a single sitting billed $403.93. By late July his invoices were back to $400.

The ledger marks 17 of the 18 as virtual court and none as grant work. The State Court Administrative Office’s Virtual Backlog Response Docket, the federal-money program that funded virtual visiting-judge sittings, capped visiting-judge pay at $50 an hour and $400 a day. Every other judge whose ledger line carries a grant label billed at or under that cap. Crouchman’s own grant-labeled sittings, which begin in January 2024, are also at or under it. The $600 window sits before any grant label and above the cap. The records produced do not show which account paid it or who approved it.

The Second Stream

Paula Mack-Crouchman’s first invoice to the court is dated May 7, 2023, five days after her husband’s rate changed. It bills 11 hours at $50 for work between April 21 and May 4: a meeting with the judge and court administrator, a budget review, a meeting about a contract, and a staff meeting with the judge and administrator. The total is $550.

Over the next three years she submitted 75 invoices, $84,837.50 in all, about 1,700 hours at $50. By year the payments were $15,825 in 2023, $30,350 in 2024, $28,725 in 2025 and $9,937.50 in 2026 through May 18. Her early invoices describe research on X-ray security screening machines, meetings with other district courts, a policy and procedure manual, financial policies, job descriptions, hiring interviews and a review of the court’s employee handbook. On five days in 2023 she billed for “Court Administrator coverage.” On October 23, 2023 her invoices turn to training and supervising grant employees, and by 2024 each is headed VBRD Grant Coordinator Services. One invoice dated October 10, 2023 bills for work on October 11 through 24.

The invoices cover work that a court’s own administrator ordinarily performs, and they run from the month after William Crouchman’s rate rose until the month his last recorded sitting fell. The records produced contain no contract, no engagement letter and no approval for any of it.

What the Grant Allowed

The Virtual Backlog Response Docket was a State Court Administrative Office program funded by the federal American Rescue Plan Act. SCAO’s January 19, 2023 notice invited courts to propose virtual dockets for criminal cases that had exceeded processing time guidelines. It paid visiting judges up to $50 an hour and $400 a day, reimbursed courts after the fact, barred courts from using it to replace existing funding, allowed salaries and contractual services, and required quarterly progress and financial reports. It told courts they “should eliminate their criminal case backlog within 12 months.”

The 38th’s grant-labeled Crouchman sittings run from January 12, 2024 to April 17, 2026. That is 78 sittings and $31,206.54, all at $403.93 or $253.93, meaning the $400 or $250 cap plus mileage. Seventy-five fall on a Friday. Paula Mack-Crouchman’s grant billing starts in October 2023. Both streams outlasted the 12-month expectation by more than a year.

The ledgers also show something that cuts against the simplest reading. Of 70 grant-labeled sittings in 2024 and 2025, only 12 fall on a day Galen’s absence reports list as leave. Most of the grant work was an added docket, run on days Galen was on the bench, and mostly run by one judge.

The Point Was to Clear the Backlog

The purpose of the Virtual Backlog Response Docket was to clear overdue criminal cases. SCAO told participating courts they should eliminate that backlog within 12 months. The 38th District Court’s records show grant-labeled visiting-judge sittings continuing for more than two years, alongside a separate stream of grant-coordination invoices. That makes the results of the program central to this spending story.

Galen says the court is still backlogged and that she “inherited a mess” from her predecessor. An inherited backlog may explain the need for additional help. It does not answer what that help accomplished. How many overdue criminal cases were pending when the grant work began? How many were resolved? How much of the backlog she now describes consists of those original cases, and how much developed later?

A continuing backlog does not, by itself, establish that the program accomplished nothing. The court could have resolved older cases while new delays accumulated, and the backlog Galen describes may be broader than the criminal cases covered by the grant. But the invoices cannot settle those questions. They show spending and billed work, not the change in overdue cases. The public needs the starting case count, the quarterly progress reports and the remaining backlog to assess whether the program achieved its purpose.

The predecessor explanation addresses where the problem began. The accountability question is what happened after the court received additional resources to address it.

How Many Days Galen Was Out

Galen’s annual absence reports account for 172 leave days across 2021 through 2025, an average of 34.4 a year. Those are the totals she reported, and they break into four kinds: 104 vacation days (44 new-year vacation days plus 60 carried over from the prior year), 49 education days, and 19 medical or sick days. In 2021 she reported 26 days; in 2022, 43; in 2023, 34; in 2024, 37; in 2025, 32.

Two of the totals differ slightly from the dates listed beneath them. The 2023 and 2024 reports each list a half-day among the carryover dates while reporting 15 whole carryover days. The 2021 report lists totals but no dates, and it counts two of its days as bereavement, with a handwritten note on the form reading “Father’s funeral.” The 2026 report was not in the production.

The benchmark is the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its December 2022 National Compensation Survey found that state and local government employees are granted an average of 11 paid sick days after one year of service and 12 after five or more. Vacation grows with tenure: 13 days after one year, 16 after five, 19 after ten and 22 after twenty. Private-industry workers averaged 7 sick days and 11 to 20 vacation days across the same service marks. Those figures describe what employers grant, not what workers take, and the survey does not measure judges specifically.

On paper, Galen’s own use is ordinary. Her sick and medical days averaged 3.8 a year, about a third of the government average. Her vacation, counting carryover, averaged 20.8 a year, inside the 19 to 22 days granted to government workers with ten to twenty years on the job. Her education days, 9.8 a year, have no BLS comparison because they are professional-development leave.

The reports measure something narrower than the courtroom did. They list the days Galen chose to report as leave, signed by Galen as chief judge for four of the five years. They do not record what her docket did on those days. Several attorneys who practice before her describe being required to appear on days she was on vacation, only to have the matter adjourned because she was not there. If that account is right, the days that cost litigants time are not limited to the days on the form, and a hearing that is set and then adjourned leaves no trace in a leave report. The reports also show how the days cluster. She reported seven straight court days off from February 6 through February 14, 2024, and five straight from March 10 through March 14, 2025.

Leave is only part of the picture. SCAO’s assignments also sent Galen to other courts on days she was not in Eastpointe. Fourteen specific dates in 2023 and 2024 put her on the Lapeer County 71A District Court, and a separate assignment covers September 22 through October 31, 2023, also labeled medical leave for that court. Two of those dates appear twice in the records. May 17, 2024 is both a Lapeer assignment date and a carryover leave day on her 2024 report, and August 1, 2023 is both a Lapeer date and a half-day of vacation on her 2023 report. Whether the 38th’s bench was empty on those days, or whether the 38th paid for a visiting judge on them, is a question the ledgers can answer date by date. The leave totals answer a different question than the one litigants ask. The court’s own calendar, its adjournment records and its docket-day counts would show how many days the bench was actually unavailable, and none of those were in the production.

Who Was Chief Judge

Michigan Court Rule 8.110(C)(3) gives a chief judge authority over court finances, supervision of court personnel including hiring, discipline and discharge, and the power to “request assignments of visiting judges” and direct what they hear. Rule 8.110(D) requires a judge’s absences to be approved by the chief judge. In a court with one judge, the chief judge and the judge being covered are the same person.

The absence reports SCAO produced carry a line for the chief judge’s name and signature. Galen’s name and signature are on it for 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. The 2025 report is signed by James M. Biernat. For most of the period examined here, the person who approved the court’s absences, supervised its budget and requested its visiting judges was the judge whose calendar was being covered.

SCAO assignments show a second layer. On five days, SCAO assigned Galen to serve on the 71A District Court in Lapeer County as coverage for that court’s judge: August 1, 2023, December 8, 2023, March 1 and 8, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The 38th’s ledger shows Crouchman sitting in Eastpointe on all five, at a combined $1,719.65. The court paid for a judge to fill its bench on days its own judge was sitting on another county’s.

After the Handoff

Something changed at the top of the court in 2025. The absence report for that year is signed by Biernat, not Galen. The records do not say why or when.

The spending did not change with it. Crouchman sat 21 more times between December 5, 2025 and May 29, 2026, for $7,732.53. The grant label on his invoices stops after April 17, 2026, and his final five sittings, from April 28 through May 29, carry none. Paula Mack-Crouchman’s last invoice is dated May 18, 2026, for $300. The 2026 absence report has not been produced, so Galen’s 2026 leave cannot be compared with those dates. In the other ledger, the only 2026 entry is a full day for Judge Paul Paruk on August 6.

What Comes Next

Eight categories of records would answer most of what these ledgers raise. They are the 38th District Court’s VBRD grant application and budget, which had to name who would administer the grant; its quarterly financial reports to SCAO, which show what the grant reimbursed and what it did not; its baseline backlog counts, quarterly progress reports and end-of-program case counts, which would show how many targeted cases were resolved and what remained; any SCAO or regional approval for a daily rate above $400; any contract or engagement letter for Paula Mack-Crouchman’s work; the court’s job descriptions and hiring records for the administrator position she covered; the court’s daily calendars and adjournment records for 2021 through 2026, which would show how many hearing days were set and adjourned around Galen’s leave; and the order or record that changed the court’s chief judge. The court’s answer to any of them is a public record.

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 reported on her pre-bench role in a liquor-license dispute, on the reversal of her sentencing of Zsazsa Soward, and on a courtroom that keeps its most consequential business off the record. Those were stories about what a judge did in front of defendants. This one is about what a court paid for, who decided, and who got paid.

I read these three sets of records the way I read any ledger. I looked for the pattern first and the explanation second. The pattern is on the page: a court in a county with a standing pool of retired judges, paying one of them for 192 days over five years while ten others shared what was left. The explanation is not on the page. That is why the records requested above matter, and why Galen, who signed as chief judge for four of five years, has the most to say about them.

The grant was intended to clear a backlog. Galen’s account of inheriting that problem makes the starting point relevant; her continuing backlog claim makes the results essential. The unanswered question is how much of the targeted backlog the additional staffing actually cleared.