Barry County’s Judge Is Missing From the Bench. The Court Hasn’t Said a Word.

What Sources Are Saying

Clutch Justice has heard the same account from multiple people who work inside and around the Barry County Trial Court, including practicing attorneys and corrections staff: Judge Schipper is missing in action. Several said the reason is a heart attack. Corrections staff are often the first to notice when a judge is gone, because incarcerated people waiting on hearings stay in the Barry County Jail until a judge hears them.

A judge recovering from a cardiac event deserves the same medical privacy as anyone else. The public is owed an answer to a different question: who is deciding the cases?

Schipper was appointed to the 56-B District Court by Governor Rick Snyder in 2011 after two decades at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Grand Rapids. Barry County operates a unified trial court under a concurrent jurisdiction plan, and Schipper presides over felony matters that originate as Barry County Circuit Court cases, including sentencings and post-conviction motions. When he is out, those cases do not pause on their own. Someone has to hear them, adjourn them, or reassign them.

What the Public Record Shows

The Barry County Trial Court has three judges: Chief Judge William M. Doherty, Judge Vicky L. Alspaugh, and Judge Schipper, supported by Magistrate Rebecca Hawkins and Referee Benjamin O’Hearn. The court’s online presence lives on the county website, and on October 1, 2026, Clutch Justice reviewed every court-facing page there.

The court’s schedule page still links to a live docket display for each judge, Schipper included, with no explanation attached. His biography on the judges’ page still says he was elected in 2012 and is serving a six-year term, a sentence that has been out of date since 2019. The most recent local administrative order on the court’s posted list is LAO 2026-4, approved June 9, 2026, which governs access to juror questionnaires. Nothing posted since then addresses who is handling Schipper’s cases.

What Michigan Courts Are Supposed to Do

The governing rule is MCR 8.110, the Chief Judge Rule. It sets out exactly whose job this is, and in Barry County that person is Judge Doherty, whom the Michigan Supreme Court appointed chief judge of the Barry County Trial Court for the two-year term that began January 1, 2026.

The rule treats illness differently from every other kind of absence. A Michigan judge cannot be away from the court without the chief judge’s prior approval, except for personal illness, and sick time does not count against a judge’s 20 to 30 days of annual vacation. That exception exists for good reason: nobody schedules a heart attack. It also means the absence itself is not the problem. The obligations that follow it fall on the chief judge.

Under MCR 8.110(C)(3), the chief judge must coordinate judicial absences, direct how the court’s business is apportioned, supervise caseload management, and request visiting judges and assign matters to them. Under MCR 8.110(C)(2)(e), the chief judge represents the court in its relations with the public and the news media. And under MCR 8.110(D)(6), the chief judge must maintain records of judicial absences available to the Michigan Supreme Court. Those records feed SCAO Form 25a, the annual judicial absence report, which breaks out medical and sick days and goes to the State Court Administrative Office’s regional administrator. For Barry County, that is Region V.

Case reassignment carries its own paper trail. MCR 8.111(C)(1) allows the chief judge to reassign a case when a judge cannot undertake it, but only by a written order stating the reason, filed with the clerk, with the clerk notifying every attorney of record. The same subrule lets the chief judge designate a judge to act temporarily during another judge’s absence. If the court instead redistributes a judge’s caseload under its concurrent jurisdiction plan, MCR 8.111(C)(2) requires a local administrative order identifying the revised distribution.

How Other Michigan Courts Have Handled It

Barry County is not the first Michigan court to lose a judge to illness, and the courts that came before it show that transparency and medical privacy are not in tension. In each of the examples below, the public learned that a judge was out and who was covering the work. In none of them did the public learn a diagnosis.

Why the Silence Fits a Pattern

Clutch Justice has documented recurring record-keeping and notice problems in the Barry County Trial Court, including docket entries that litigants say changed after filings were mailed, proof-of-service failures affecting incarcerated litigants, and pending motions that go unadjudicated without a written disposition. Several of those problems are now the subject of filings at the Michigan Court of Appeals and requests to the State Court Administrative Office. The common thread is a court that treats information about its own operations as something the public has to extract rather than something the court has to provide.

An unannounced judicial absence is that same pattern in its simplest form. The people with the most at stake are the ones least able to work around it: incarcerated people waiting on sentencing or post-conviction rulings, self-represented litigants who cannot call a judge’s chambers and get a straight answer, and families trying to understand why a hearing date came and went.

The Questions Barry County Has Not Answered

None of the following requires disclosure of a single medical detail. When did Judge Schipper last preside? Has Chief Judge Doherty designated a judge to act temporarily on his cases, and if so, who? Have any cases been reassigned by written order under MCR 8.111(C), and were attorneys of record notified? Has the court requested a visiting judge through the State Court Administrative Office? Are in-custody defendants on his docket being heard on schedule, or held while their hearings wait? And when does the court expect to tell the public any of this?

Clutch Justice wishes Judge Schipper a full recovery. That wish and the questions above are not in conflict. A judge’s health is his own business. The court’s docket is everyone’s.