Michigan Perfected Swift and Sure Justice. It Won’t Use It on Judges.

Sometimes I like to remind everyone that I have a master’s degree in Criminal Justice and I am not, in fact, just a pretty face over here. So let’s talk about Cesare Beccaria, deterrence theory, Michigan’s Swift and Sure Sanctions framework, and the strange way our justice system seems to forget the criminological principles it uses to regulate everyone else the moment the potential misconduct comes from the people administering that system.

Beccaria was writing about this in the 1700s. One of the foundational principles of classical criminology is that deterrence is not primarily about making punishment increasingly severe. Certainty and celerity are the load-bearing variables: whether misconduct is likely to produce a consequence, and how quickly that consequence follows the behavior. When consequences are predictable, proportionate, and closely connected in time to the conduct, they carry a greater deterrent and corrective effect than a harsher penalty that arrives late.

Michigan eventually built a version of that theory into its own probation supervision model. Swift and Sure Sanctions identifies violations quickly, addresses them promptly, and meets them with predictable, proportionate consequences, with escalating responses for repeated violations. The system does not wait for someone to accumulate years of problems before deciding intervention might be warranted.

The framework we don’t use on ourselves

Now compare that philosophy to how Michigan handles potential judicial and attorney misconduct. Complaints to the Judicial Tenure Commission and Attorney Grievance Commission are confidential while pending, and the state’s own public record shows individual matters staying open for a year or more. During that window the judge remains on the bench, the attorney continues practicing, and cases keep moving through a system that has not yet been told whether something is actually wrong with it.

That delay creates something we do not talk about nearly enough: waste and rework. Sometimes hearings should have been an email. I said what I said.

When something goes wrong at the trial court level, correcting it later can require additional motions, hearings, transcripts, appointed counsel, prosecutor time, judicial time, appellate briefing, appellate review, reversal, remand, and another round of proceedings in the lower court. Families wait longer for finality. Defendants may remain incarcerated while litigation continues. Victims stay tied to unresolved cases. Taxpayers finance every additional layer required to correct something that could potentially have been addressed much earlier.

Then consider what happens when the issue is not isolated. If the same conduct affects multiple cases before anyone intervenes, the state has not created one appellate problem. It has created an inventory of future appeals and post-conviction litigation that the rest of the justice system will spend years processing. That is an extraordinarily stupid and expensive way to run quality control.

What that gap looks like in Michigan right now

This is not an abstract complaint. In Barry County, self-represented litigant Michael Cammenga filed a complaint for superintending control at the Michigan Court of Appeals in August, alleging more than a dozen 2025 filings and numerous 2026 filings in his underlying case sat without a written ruling he could identify or appeal. Court services told him in writing that the court would not issue a written order without an in-person hearing, even though he had submitted documented postoperative medical restrictions. That single line captures the whole problem: “The Court will not issue a written order or ruling without an in-person hearing.” A month later, his case was still working its way through the appellate process rather than back in front of the judge who could have resolved it in an afternoon.

The same trial judge and chief judge appear in a separate Michigan Supreme Court matter, Mark Foley’s case, where the court agreed in September to accept outside amicus briefs on the underlying access problem. Two litigants, same bench, same administrative structure, both stuck in the same kind of procedural limbo that Swift and Sure was specifically designed to prevent from happening to anyone else.

Or look at Eastpointe’s 38th District Court, where a sitting judge’s opponent in a contested November election has filed both Judicial Tenure Commission and Attorney Grievance Commission complaints. Those complaints will remain confidential regardless of how the election turns out. Voters will render a verdict in November. The institutions built to answer the underlying conduct question may still be working on theirs long after ballots are counted.

The part I am not arguing

I am not suggesting judges or prosecutors should be disciplined merely because someone files a complaint. They are entitled to due process, allegations require evidence, and investigations need to be fair. But there is a tremendous amount of room between immediate punishment based on an accusation and an accountability structure so slow that the institution keeps absorbing downstream costs while everyone waits for an answer.

The more interesting question is why the framework Michigan already uses elsewhere could not inform professional accountability. A substantiated lower level violation could receive a prompt corrective response. Repeated substantiated misconduct could trigger escalating intervention. Serious misconduct could move rapidly into formal proceedings. Data could identify recurring problems across cases before those problems generate years of appellate litigation.

Not every mistake or ethical lapse needs to end someone’s career. That is part of the value of earlier intervention. Correcting conduct when a problem first becomes identifiable may prevent it from becoming serious enough to require the harshest available sanction later.

There is something fundamentally inconsistent about a justice system telling people under court supervision that accountability works best when consequences are swift, certain, and proportionate, while operating judicial and attorney oversight systems where meaningful intervention can arrive long after the conduct being examined.

I recently sent Michigan’s State Court Administrative Office a formal request asking it to look at exactly this kind of pattern in one county’s trial court operations: record keeping, mail service, and a set of matters, including Cammenga’s and Foley’s, that kept surfacing the same administrative problems. Whatever SCAO decides, the request itself is the point. The mechanism to ask Michigan’s own courts to apply Michigan’s own accountability logic to themselves already exists. Almost nobody uses it.

Beccaria in 2026

Beccaria articulated the basic theory in 1764. Michigan adopted versions of that philosophy in its own criminal justice system centuries later. Perhaps it is time for the Judicial Tenure Commission and Attorney Grievance Commission to consider what happens when the same principle gets applied upstream.

Because every preventable reversal, remand, repeated hearing, and round of post-conviction litigation represents resources spent fixing a problem after it has already traveled through the entire system once. We should be much more interested in stopping the problem before we have to pay to process it twice.

So to write it out in crayon: deal with sh*tty lawyers and judges immediately. Stop letting it fester, and the system will follow suit. You’re welcome, AGC and JTC.