The Endorsers Who Had Already Died: Judge Galen’s Website Listed Three Deceased Attorneys

Judge Kathleen Galen’s campaign website listed three deceased attorneys as endorsers, one of them a relative of her opponent, Richard Goodman. The page came down within hours of a Detroit Free Press inquiry. Eleven days later, the campaign offered a second explanation that blames a volunteer, while the Internet Archive shows the page live on the campaign’s domain in May 2025.

Clutch Justice has previously reported on Judge Kathleen Galen’s pre-bench liquor license dispute, the Court of Appeals reversal of her sentencing of Zsazsa Soward, the record-keeping gaps attorneys describe in her courtroom, and the residency lawsuit her brother brought against her opponent. This piece is about a different kind of record: the public face of her re-election campaign, and what it listed under the word endorsements.

What the Free Press Reported

On September 30, 2026, the Detroit Free Press reported that the endorsement page on Galen’s campaign website named three local attorneys who had died. Reporter Tresa Baldas identified them as Michael Janadia, who died in 2021 at 57, Timothy Doty, who died in 2024 at 58, and Azhar Sheikh, who died in April 2025. Sheikh, according to family, was the cousin of Richard Goodman’s mother.

Goodman, a Macomb County Friend of the Court attorney and Galen’s opponent in the November 3 election for the 38th District Court, issued a news release the same day. He said families should not have to see the name of someone they have lost on a campaign website, noted that one of the three was a member of his own family, and wrote that Galen “should take those names down today.” He added that Galen asks Eastpointe residents to trust her with the details of their lives and should begin with the details on her own website.

Goodman’s father, Mt. Clemens attorney Richard J. Goodman, confirmed the family connection to the paper. He told the Free Press he was surprised Sheikh had been listed as giving an endorsement, because Sheikh was well known in the legal community and most people there would have known he had died. He described the listing as a failure to check the details before publishing.

Who the Three Were

The State Bar of Michigan’s In Memoriam notice in the Michigan Bar Journal lists Timothy Thomas Doty II, P75614, of Center Line, who died May 19, 2024, and was admitted to the Bar in 2011. That matches the Free Press’s account of a 2024 death. The dates for Janadia and Sheikh come from the Free Press’s reporting.

The Free Press describes all three as local attorneys. An endorsement from a local lawyer tells voters that someone from the legal community around the court vouches for the candidate. A listing of the deceased in that role delivers the same message on behalf of people who can no longer give it.

The Campaign’s First Account

Galen’s campaign told the Free Press the page containing the three names was from a previous campaign website that had been improperly listed. The campaign said it understood why seeing those names would raise concerns, particularly for their families, and that it was working to locate and remove the older content and replace it. It added that its current campaign website has not been published and that the older page was mistakenly listed as its web page.

The sequence on the day is part of the record. As of 11:40 a.m., following the Free Press’s inquiry, the endorsement page on the campaign’s site had been taken down. Moments later the entire website was removed and listed as under construction.

The Same Domain, Six Days Earlier

On September 24, 2026, Clutch Justice captured the text of galenforjudge.com/testimonials/, a page on the campaign’s domain carrying testimonials for Galen, including one dated 2020. The same domain also carried an endorsements page that listed attorneys and magistrates by name. The site that was listed as under construction on September 30 is the site Clutch Justice was reading six days earlier.

The campaign’s first statement described two websites: a previous one that held the endorsement page, and a current one that had not been published. The published record shows one domain, live on September 24, and taken offline on September 30 after a press inquiry.

The May 2025 Capture

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine holds a capture of galenforjudge.com/endorsements/ timestamped May 24, 2025. The attorneys and magistrates section lists Tim Doty, Michael Janadia, and Azhar Sheikh, each as an attorney. Janadia had died in 2021, Doty on May 19, 2024, and Sheikh in April 2025, the month before the capture.

The capture shows the page as the campaign built it. The header reads “Candidate for 38th District Judge.” The menu lists Home, About, Endorsements, Testimonials, Donate, Voting Info, and Contact. The footer carries a paid-for line naming the Committee to Elect Kathleen G. Galen at 28479 Hoover in Warren, the Hoover Road address that appears on the committee’s April 2020 Statement of Organization. Several names on the endorsement list appear twice, including two judges.

The Archive also holds a 2022 capture of the campaign site on the same domain. Taken together, the captures place the campaign’s website, and its endorsements page, on galenforjudge.com between election cycles, under the campaign’s own paid-for line, long before anyone was working on a 2026 site.

The Second Explanation

In the early afternoon of October 11, 2026, the campaign’s Facebook page, Re-Elect Judge Kathleen G. Galen 38th District Court, posted a graphic headed “A Clarification About an Old Website Page.” Written in Galen’s voice, it says the page at issue was from the 2020 campaign website and was “inadvertently made live by a volunteer while working on the current site,” and that it was promptly removed.

The statement says the attorneys listed on the page endorsed Galen in 2020. It says Sheikh, whom it identifies as a relative of her current opponent, endorsed her in connection with that campaign, and that Michael Janadia, who died after the 2020 election, endorsed her that year. It says the campaign contacted attorney Gary Janadia after the Free Press story ran, and that he confirmed Michael’s 2020 support and continues to support Galen himself. It describes the episode as the mistaken republication of an old endorsement page rather than a fabrication of endorsements, and asks voters to look past political rhetoric and compare the candidates on their records.

What the statement adds

The statement dates the endorsements. If all three endorsed in 2020, the page was a list collected during Galen’s first campaign and left in place, not a list to which names were added after their deaths. That answers a question this piece left open on September 30, and Gary Janadia’s confirmation, as the campaign describes it, supports the account for one of the three. The campaign has not offered documentation for the other two.

What the statement does not account for

The mechanism. The campaign’s first account, given to the Free Press on September 30, was that the page belonged to a previous website that had been improperly listed and that its current site had not been published. The second account adds a volunteer who made the old page live while working on the current site.

Both accounts have to reckon with the archive. The endorsements page was publicly available on galenforjudge.com on May 24, 2025. For the volunteer account to hold, the volunteer’s work on the current site would have had to begin, and the old page would have had to go live, before that date, which is more than 17 months before the November 2026 election. The page then stayed up until the Free Press asked about it on September 30, 2026.

“Promptly removed” describes the removal only when measured from the reporter’s inquiry. Measured from the archive, the page was public for at least 16 months. The statement does not say when the volunteer did the work, when work on the current site began, or why a page the campaign describes as belonging to an old site was still being served from its domain on September 24.

Clutch Justice posted the Wayback Machine link in a public comment on the campaign’s October 11 post and asked how the volunteer explanation accounts for the page being available more than a year earlier. The campaign had not responded as of publication of this update.

“Every” Macomb County District Court Judge

A banner across the bottom of the October 11 graphic reads “Proudly endorsed by every Macomb County District Court judge.” That is a specific claim, and a checkable one. “Every” leaves no room for a judge who did not endorse.

Macomb County’s district courts include the 37th District Court in Warren and Center Line, the 40th District Court in St. Clair Shores, and the 41A District Court in Sterling Heights. Judge Suzanne Faunce sits on the 37th. Judge Joseph Oster sits on the 40th, where county election records show he was re-elected unopposed in 2020. Judge Kimberley Wiegand sits on the 41A, where she has served since her appointment in 2003.

Clutch Justice has not found public confirmation that any of those three judges has endorsed Galen’s 2026 campaign. The campaign has not published a list of the judges it counts, and the graphic does not say whether “every” refers to each judge sitting in October 2026 or to a set of endorsements gathered at an earlier point. Given that the same graphic explains a six-year-old endorsement list, when “every” was true is a fair question. Clutch Justice asked the campaign about the claim in the same public comment. The campaign can settle it by producing the list.

Why the Dates Matter

Janadia died in 2021, so any endorsement he gave predates this re-election campaign by at least five years. Galen’s campaign committee filed its Statement of Organization on April 24, 2020, and the testimonials on her site include entries dated that year. The campaign’s October 11 statement now says all three attorneys endorsed in 2020.

If that is accurate, it accounts for how the names got onto the page. It does not account for the page itself. A list collected in 2020 sat on the campaign’s live domain in May 2025, after all three men had died, and was still there in September 2026, when the Free Press found it. Whether anyone at the campaign reviewed the page in those 16 months, and who maintained it, is the part of the story the campaign’s two statements leave out.

What Michigan’s Judicial Campaign Rules Say

Canon 7 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct governs how judicial candidates conduct their campaigns, including what they say in public communications. The provision barring false or misleading campaign communications was narrowed by the Michigan Supreme Court in In re Chmura, decided in 2000, to reach knowing or reckless falsity rather than any inaccuracy. Applying that standard to the endorsement page turns on who maintained it and when it was last reviewed.

The “every judge” banner raises a separate question under the same standard. An endorsement claim is a statement of fact about who supports a candidate, and the campaign published this one on October 11, in a graphic about the accuracy of its own endorsement claims. A complaint under the Code would go to the Judicial Tenure Commission, where filings are confidential while they are pending.

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 documented a campaign committee that has held a reporting waiver since December 2020, a printed mailer and a reception invitation that share an address with the committee, and a committee treasurer who is also the magistrate of her court. The endorsement page, and now the campaign’s statements about it, are more of what the campaign has published to voters about itself.

Voters learn about a judicial campaign from the materials the campaign controls, and a committee operating under a reporting waiver files little that anyone could check them against. When a page disappears within hours of a press inquiry, what remains is what someone captured. Here, the Internet Archive had captured it more than 16 months earlier, which is why the campaign’s account can be checked at all. A mistake on a neglected web page is an ordinary campaign failure. An explanation that does not fit the archived record, delivered alongside a new and unsupported endorsement claim, is a different kind of problem for a sitting judge asking voters to trust her word.