$675 for Assault From the Bench: Bradley Knoll’s Second Case and the Oversight That Arrived Late

Former Holland District Judge Bradley Knoll paid $675 for assaulting a man who stood before him in court. It was his second admitted assault in 30 months, and it happened while the Judicial Tenure Commission’s complaint over the first was still open and he was still on the bench.

When the Grand Rapids Press posted the sentence, the reaction underneath it was close to unanimous, and I shared it. Imagine if the tables were turned. Readers said a regular person who threw something at a judge would be going to jail, and that judges are supposed to answer to a higher standard than everyone else, not a lower one.

That instinct is exactly right, and the record shows why. This is the second assault Bradley Knoll has admitted in a Michigan courtroom. The second one happened while he was still wearing the robe, ten months after the Judicial Tenure Commission had filed a formal complaint over the first. It ended Tuesday with a $675 bill.

What Happened on September 29

Knoll, 74, pleaded guilty Tuesday to misdemeanor assault for a Feb. 13, 2026 incident in the Holland courtroom where he had presided since 2003, according to court records reported by WOOD TV8. He had waived arraignment and pleaded not guilty on May 29. MLive’s headline describes him throwing items from the bench at a defendant. WHTC reported that the man was a party in a rental non-payment case. Michigan State Police investigated, and the case was assigned out of county to Muskegon’s Judge Geoffrey Nolan, the same judge who handled Knoll’s 2024 domestic case.

The sentence was $675: $330 in costs, $220 in statutory fines, $75 in miscellaneous fees, and $50 in state costs. No jail and no probation were reported. Michigan’s assault statute, MCL 750.81, allows up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine. The portion of Knoll’s sentence that functions as punishment, the statutory fine, came to less than half the maximum. Everything else is routine court costs and fees.

The First Case, and How It Disappeared

On Dec. 13, 2023, Grand Haven Public Safety arrested Knoll, then chief judge of the 58th District Court, in the parking lot of the Holland courthouse. His 12-year-old grandson had called 911 after watching him strike his wife at their Grand Haven home. On March 26, 2024, Knoll pleaded guilty and admitted in court that he hit her on the top of the head with an open hand. Judge Nolan sentenced him to four months of probation and anger management classes. In an email to the Grand Haven Tribune afterward, Knoll wrote that “no person is above the law.”

The plea went through MCL 769.4a, Michigan’s deferral statute for first-offense domestic assault. A person who completes the terms has the case dismissed without an adjudication of guilt, and the statute can be used once. Knoll completed probation, and the case was dismissed.

That dismissal carried forward. On Sept. 29, 2026, Knoll stood for sentencing on his second admitted assault with no prior conviction on his record. Michigan’s escalating penalties for repeat domestic assault apply when the victim is a spouse, partner, or household member, and the man in Knoll’s courtroom was a litigant. The law saw a 74-year-old with a clean record and a single misdemeanor. The plea transcript from 2024 says otherwise.

Twenty-Seven Months on the Bench

After the arrest, Knoll kept his docket. He told the Holland Sentinel he was not presiding over domestic violence cases, and that was the extent of it. The scope of that recusal was set by Knoll himself, who at the time was the chief judge, the official responsible for assigning cases in his court. No order from outside the courthouse limited his docket until March 2026.

The Judicial Tenure Commission filed a two-count formal complaint on April 22, 2025, 16 months after the arrest. The first count rested on the guilty plea. The second alleged he mistreated the officers who arrested him, threatening one with repercussions for a false arrest and swearing at a detective on his way out of an interview room.

Filing that complaint gave the Commission a tool. Michigan Court Rule 9.225(A)(1) allows the Commission, with the filing of a complaint, to petition the Supreme Court to suspend a judge until the complaint is resolved. Knoll stayed on the bench.

On Feb. 13, 2026, 297 days after the complaint was filed, he assaulted a man appearing before him.

Forty days after that, on March 25, the Supreme Court entered two orders. The first approved a consent agreement: Knoll would retire July 1, six months before his term ended, stay off domestic violence cases in the meantime, and refrain from seeking visiting judge assignments until January 2027, with no domestic violence cases if he is ever assigned. The second, filed as In re Anonymous Judge, suspended him with pay. The Court suppressed that file. It denied Knoll’s request to seal the retirement order. Governor Whitmer appointed Anna White to the seat in June, and she took the bench July 6.

If the Tables Were Turned

A litigant who threw something at a judge would face two systems at once. The first is contempt. Under MCL 600.1711, a court can punish contempt committed in its immediate view and presence summarily, on the spot, without a separate trial. Under MCL 600.1715, that punishment can reach a $7,500 fine, 93 days in jail, or both. The second is the same criminal assault charge Knoll faced, with the same 93-day and $500 exposure, prosecuted on top of whatever the judge imposed from the bench.

Only one person in a courtroom holds contempt power. In February, he was the one throwing. The man on the receiving end had no comparable remedy available to him in that room. He had to wait for state police, a prosecutor, and a court in another county.

The Strongest Case for the Outcome

There is a defensible account of how this ended. Sending the case to an outside judge, after every Ottawa County judge recused, is the correct way to handle a sitting judge as a defendant. A fines-and-costs sentence for a misdemeanor guilty plea is common in Michigan district courts. The consent agreement secured a retirement date without a contested hearing before a master, which can take a year or more. And the deferral statute did exactly what the Legislature built it to do.

Each of those points is true on its own terms, and that is the problem. Every system in this case processed Knoll as an ordinary participant: an ordinary first-time misdemeanor defendant, an ordinary deferral candidate, an ordinary respondent negotiating an exit. None of them was built to account for the fact that the person in front of them held judicial power over other people the whole time, and hurt someone from the bench.

Where the JTC and SCAO Fit

The Judicial Tenure Commission

The Commission is the only body in Michigan that investigates judicial misconduct and recommends discipline to the Supreme Court. Its interim suspension power is discretionary in nearly every case. MCR 9.225 makes suspension automatic in one situation: “Conviction of a felony is grounds for automatic interim suspension.” An admitted domestic assault does not trigger it. A misdemeanor assault on a litigant does not trigger it. Knoll’s conduct, twice, fell into the space the rule leaves to judgment, and judgment produced 16 months to a complaint and 11 more months to a resolution, with the second assault in between.

The State Court Administrative Office

SCAO runs the administrative side of Michigan’s courts on the Supreme Court’s behalf, including the chief judge system under MCR 8.110 and visiting judge assignments. It has no authority over judicial conduct, and nothing in Michigan’s rules required anyone outside the 58th District to decide what cases a criminally charged judge could hear. In Knoll’s court, that decision belonged to the chief judge, and the chief judge was Knoll.

SCAO’s role is not finished. The consent order’s visiting judge terms were written before the courtroom assault conviction existed. Starting in January 2027, any request to place Knoll on a bench as a visiting judge runs through SCAO.

What Fixing It Would Require

None of what follows requires new institutions. It requires the existing ones to act before the second victim instead of after.

What I Notice

I said it in one line under the Press post. Here it is with the record attached.

The readers who said a regular person would be sitting in a cell are right. The record just spells it out in days and dollars, and every one of those days was a day somebody stood in front of him.