The Six-Year Gap: Jackson Judge Thomas Wilson Retired Before Michigan Ever Disciplined Him

Michigan’s judicial watchdog asked Thomas Wilson about his drinking in 2019. He said no. He kept his seat, won re-election unopposed, and retired five months after the public complaint. Today the Michigan Supreme Court told him he can’t come back to a bench he already left.

When the headline crossed my feed this afternoon, I had one question: how long? Not what he did. The order lays that out in detail. How long did a sitting circuit judge drink on the job, proposition his colleagues, sit on protection orders, and lean on cases involving his own family before the system that is supposed to stop that actually stopped it?

The answer is in the court’s own findings. Years. And the system never actually stopped him. He left on his own schedule.

What the Supreme Court Adopted

The October 9 order resolves Formal Complaint No. 110, which the Judicial Tenure Commission filed on September 11, 2025. Wilson consented to the commission’s decision and recommendation, and the Supreme Court adopted it, including a set of stipulated findings. Because they are stipulated, they are not allegations anymore. Wilson agreed to them.

On alcohol, the findings say Wilson abused alcohol from sometime between 2013 and 2015 until 2020 or 2021. During that period he appeared in public smelling of alcohol, disheveled or flushed, and sometimes went to the courthouse after drinking. The original complaint placed him at an Election Day 2016 gathering of county employees inviting them to take a shot, at a 2018 judges’ meeting smelling of alcohol, and leaving a chief judge a slurred voicemail in March 2019 after missing a judges’ meeting.

On harassment, the findings say that from 2016 to 2018 Wilson made remarks to several female coworkers describing sexual encounters or commenting on their bodies, and that the women found the remarks offensive. The complaint identified the women as fellow judges, an assistant prosecuting attorney and an attorney’s office employee. In his October 2025 answer, Wilson denied the harassment allegations. He has now stipulated to the findings.

On conflicts, the findings say Wilson did not disclose relationships he should have disclosed when local attorneys appeared before him. Three of those lawyers were tenants in a building he owned. He was an investment partner with one. Five represented Wilson or his family in legal proceedings, and the complaint alleged that in some instances he did not pay them. The order states there is no evidence any of the relationships affected his decisions. The relationships were never disclosed to the litigants who would have needed that information to raise the question.

On interference, the findings cover three episodes. In March 2019, Wilson called police dispatch to stop the arrest of a domestic violence defendant who was violating another judge’s no-contact order. In his own divorce case, he tried to get a judge who had already disqualified herself to sign an order zeroing out his child support balance. In a relative’s juvenile retail fraud case, he used his influence to keep the matter in Jackson County, where he was chief judge, rather than in a neighboring county.

On delay, the findings say Wilson sat on a Court of Appeals order for 23 months after the higher court vacated a delayed sentence he had imposed over the prosecutor’s objection. He failed to timely decide personal protection orders assigned to him in 2018, 2021 and 2023, more than 50 proceedings in all. And he told his staff not to code cases as under advisement, which kept the delays out of the reports that go to the State Court Administrative Office.

The Six Years

The single most important date in this record is May 2019. That is when the Judicial Tenure Commission asked Wilson to obtain an alcohol assessment through the State Bar of Michigan’s Lawyers and Judges Assistance Program. The request itself shows his drinking was already a concern for the commission by then. Wilson did not get the assessment. He later told the commission under oath that, at the time, he knew he was drinking excessively.

The commission’s public complaint was filed on September 11, 2025. That is six years and four months after the assessment request. The commission took Wilson’s sworn testimony on January 22 and April 15, 2025, which means the formal record-building that produced the complaint happened in the final year of that window.

Look at what the findings place after May 2019. The PPO delays in 2021 and 2023. The motion he left pending from mid-2021 until March 2022. A divorce decision he issued more than a year after closing arguments were submitted. His drinking by his own account continued into 2020 or 2021. The conflicts with attorney tenants ran until January 2022. The commission had asked its question. The conduct kept going.

Wilson’s own lawyers noticed the gap. His October 2025 answer argued the complaint should be barred by laches, the doctrine that a claim can be lost through delay, citing the commission’s “unreasonable and inexcusable delay in proceeding with a Formal Complaint.” That is the accused judge, in a court filing, making the argument the public would make. The defense did not win. The observation underneath it was accurate.

The Ballot Nobody Could Read

Michigan elects its trial judges. The theory is that voters are the backstop. In Wilson’s case, the backstop had nothing to work with.

Judicial Tenure Commission investigations are confidential until the commission files a formal complaint. That rule exists for a reason: most requests for investigation go nowhere, and judges should not be smeared by every disappointed litigant. But confidentiality has a cost when an investigation runs for years. Wilson stood for re-election in November 2024, more than five years after the commission asked about his drinking. He ran unopposed. No public filing existed. Two months later, the commission was taking his sworn testimony.

Unopposed judicial races are common in Michigan, and incumbency carries weight on the ballot. Put that together with a confidential process that can run past an election cycle, and the people of Jackson County re-elected a judge whose oversight body had been asking questions since 2019. They had no way to know.

Ordered to Retire, After Retiring

Under the Michigan Constitution, the Supreme Court can censure, suspend, retire or remove a judge on the commission’s recommendation. Wilson’s retirement took effect in February 2026, about five months after the complaint became public and before any hearing before a master. By the time the order came down, suspension and removal had nothing to attach to. The order directs him to do what he had already done.

What remains is the forward-looking bar: Wilson may not seek election or accept appointment to judicial office. That matters. It is also the only part of the sanction with any reach.

The consent agreement also barred Wilson from seeking or accepting a visiting judge assignment, the paid temporary work retired judges take to cover vacancies, absences and backlogs. That restriction ran until September 1, 2026. The order was released October 9. The one sanction aimed at keeping him off the bench as a visiting judge expired before the public saw it.

Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh wrote separately on exactly that point. She noted that only the Supreme Court can appoint a retired judge to a visiting assignment, and that neither the commission nor Wilson can direct how the court uses that power. In a footnote, she wrote that the misconduct here would be “relevant, and likely dispositive” to whether any such appointment would be appropriate. That is a meaningful signal from the person who controls those assignments. It is a footnote. It is not an order.

Leaving Before the Hearing

Wilson is not the first Michigan judge to exit ahead of a public misconduct proceeding. In 2025, the commission filed a public complaint against Taylor 23rd District Court Judge Joseph Slaven, alleging among other things that he disparaged his chief judge, campaigned against her from the bench, used court resources for her opponent’s materials, and repeatedly refused to wear his robe. His hearing before a master was set to begin November 5, 2025. The afternoon before, he sent a letter indicating retirement or resignation, and the master agreed to call off the proceedings. The commission’s executive director said the case would remain open until the Supreme Court closed it. Clutch Justice has not located a final Supreme Court order in Slaven’s case.

Two judges, two public complaints, two departures before a single witness testified in a public hearing. The mechanics are the same in both. A judge who leaves takes the heaviest sanctions with him, and the hearing that would have put the evidence on a public record never happens. In Wilson’s case the stipulated findings are detailed, which is more than a quiet resignation would have produced. But the findings are what Wilson agreed to, negotiated after he had already left, not what a master found after hearing from the women he harassed or the litigants whose protection orders sat.

What Would Change This

None of the fixes here require new constitutional authority. They require the existing process to move on a timeline that matches the risk.

First, when the commission has asked a sitting judge for a substance assessment and the judge refuses, that refusal should itself trigger a deadline for a charging decision, not an open-ended investigation. Wilson’s refusal is now a count in the findings. It was a refusal in 2019, too.

Second, sanctions in a consent agreement should run from the date the Supreme Court enters the order, not from a fixed calendar date that can pass while the agreement sits waiting for adoption. A restriction that expires before anyone outside the process can see it protects no one.

Third, the State Court Administrative Office’s caseload reporting is the system’s early warning for a judge who is not deciding cases. A judge instructing staff to miscode cases to stay off that report should draw its own referral the moment it is discovered, and PPO timelines in particular deserve an automatic flag when they slip.

Fourth, the commission’s confidentiality rules could account for the election calendar. When an investigation of a sitting judge has been open for years and that judge is on the ballot, the public interest in some disclosure, even a bare acknowledgment that a matter is pending, grows heavier with every year that passes.

Why This Matters Beyond Jackson County

Every person whose case Wilson touched between 2013 and 2023 was entitled to a sober judge, a disclosed conflict and a timely ruling. Some of them were people asking a court to protect them from someone they were afraid of. The findings confirm they did not always get those things. The findings came in October 2026.

I keep coming back to the order’s structure. Retire: already done. Stay off the visiting bench: deadline already passed. Don’t run again: the only live sanction, imposed on a man who had already left. The process reached the right conclusion about what happened. It reached it on a schedule that let the judge pick his own exit, and that is the part that should bother everyone who has ever stood in front of a Michigan judge and assumed somebody was watching.

If you appeared before Judge Wilson, especially on a personal protection order, and want to share what that wait was like, send it through Clutch Intel.