Seven installments produced one finding, and it is not about grand juries. Whether an institution can be examined depends on what is knowable about what it did, and in nearly every mechanism in this series, the institution controls that.
Michigan cannot say how many people were charged through a mechanism its Supreme Court held was never authorized. That is not a research failure. It follows from proceedings held in closed session, a statutory restriction that survived the prosecutions, and the absence of any data field recording how a case began. Six changes would fix it, and the most important one is a column in a database.
Why end on records policy rather than on the human consequences?
Because the human consequences in this series were produced by records policy. An unknown number of people were charged through an unauthorized instrument, and the reason they will never be identified is that nobody built a field to hold that fact.
Is finality doctrine the villain here?
No. Finality serves real purposes and any line will disadvantage someone. The problem this series identifies is that the people on the wrong side of the line were never counted, told, or given the information necessary to understand their own cases.
Do these recommendations require new money?
Very little. A data field, a directive to produce a count, a notification requirement, and a sunset provision are administrative and legislative changes rather than programs. The audiovisual retention standard is the only item with meaningful cost.
Has anything like this been proposed in Michigan before?
Not in this combination as far as public records show. The repeal bill addresses the mechanism prospectively and no companion measure addresses measurement, notification, or record disposition.
What Seven Installments Add Up To
I want to state the finding plainly before recommending anything, because the recommendations only make sense against it.
A statute enacted in 1917 authorized judges to investigate, subpoena, and arrest, and said nothing about indictments. Judges issued them for a century under what the Supreme Court eventually called an unchallenged assumption. In 1972 a decision required a hearing that made the defect survivable. In 2001 that decision was overruled. From then until 2022, a person could be charged by a judge sitting alone in a closed room, with no hearing and no access to the evidence.
In 2022 the court held the charging power had never existed. The Flint prosecutions ended with no adjudication, and the evidence stayed restricted. In 2026 the court held the rule does not reach anyone already final, reasoning in part from reliance on the assumption it had held was never law, and noting that the number of affected people is unknown.
A repeal bill passed the House in 2025 and says nothing about any of that.
In each of the four contexts this series examined, closed charging proceedings, absent case coding, statutory secrecy, and the ordinary courtroom transcript, the entity with the greatest interest in how a proceeding is later understood exercised meaningful control over the material through which it would be understood. That is one property appearing four times, not four separate problems.
The Six Changes
None of these is novel and none is expensive. They are listed in order of how much they would accomplish relative to what they would cost.
Record charging route as a data field. Every criminal case in a Michigan case management system should carry a field recording whether the prosecution began by complaint, citizen grand jury indictment, or one-person grand jury indictment. This is a column in a database. Its absence is the single reason this series could not answer its central factual question, and the State Court Administrative Office could direct it without legislation.
Produce the count. Direct a retrospective determination, to the extent existing records permit, of how many prosecutions were initiated by one-person grand jury indictment, in which counties, and across what period. The Supreme Court has said the number is unknown and factored that unknown into its retroactivity analysis. A number nobody has ever been asked to produce should not function as an argument.
Notify identified people. Where a person is identified as having been charged through the mechanism and remains incarcerated, provide notice to that person and to counsel that the charging instrument was later held unauthorized. This does not disturb Robinson and grants no remedy. It is the difference between a person knowing what happened in their case and not knowing, and the current arrangement is that they do not.
Sunset secrecy on conclusion. Where a prosecution arising from a one-person grand jury proceeding has concluded, the restriction on the material should lapse by default, subject to sealing on a specific showing in an individual case. Witness protection and the interests of uncharged people justify continued restriction where they apply, and they should be asserted rather than assumed.
Pass the repeal, and amend it. House Bill 4434 should pass. It should also carry the counting requirement in change two, because a repeal that erases the mechanism from the statute books while leaving its output unmeasured converts an open question into a closed file.
Set a uniform audiovisual retention standard. Whether a complete record of a proceeding exists should not vary by courthouse. A statewide standard for courtroom recording and retention would give both appellate review and judicial conduct review an account that is not assembled solely under the direction of the authority being reviewed. This is the only recommendation here with meaningful cost, and it is the one that addresses the general case rather than the specific mechanism.
The Field Kit includes the Clutch Justice records request templates with jurisdiction guidance and exemption anticipation language, built for the agencies and courts that answer these questions.
Open the Field KitWho Would Have to Act
The charging route data field and the retrospective count are administrative matters within existing authority over case management standards and reporting.
Requires no legislation and no constitutional change. Changes one and two.
Notification, the secrecy sunset, and the amended repeal are statutory. A single bill could carry all three alongside the existing repeal language.
Changes three, four, and five. The vehicle already exists in the Senate.
Court rules govern the record on appeal and transcript production, and the court’s administrative authority reaches recording and retention practice statewide.
Change six, through the rulemaking process rather than through litigation.
No item on this list requires all three to act together, which matters because reforms that require simultaneous action from independent bodies do not happen. The data field alone would change what the next version of this series could establish.
Why This Matters
I said in Part I that mechanisms are boring, and that the quality is not incidental. I want to close on what I think that actually costs.
Three former state officials had charges dismissed and no finding was ever made about the allegations. The people of Flint received no adjudication and cannot read the evidence that was gathered. Todd Robinson was charged by a judge who had no authority to charge him and remains convicted. Behind him is an unknown number of people in the same position, and unknown is not a figure of speech here. It is the literal state of the record.
Every one of those outcomes was produced by correct application of legitimate rules. Nobody in this series broke a law. The Supreme Court read two statutes carefully and got the answer right. The retroactivity framework it applied is one that other courts use and that serves purposes worth serving.
And the aggregate result is a state that cannot tell you what its own charging mechanism did for a hundred years, will not tell the people it did it to, and is about to repeal it in a way that closes the question rather than answering it.
That is not a scandal, which is precisely the difficulty. Scandals get covered. This is a records policy, and records policy is the thing that decides who can ever find out what happened to them.
This concludes the series. Parts I through VIII trace one Michigan mechanism from its 1917 enactment through the 2022 decision that ended its charging power, the 2026 decision that confined the remedy, the statutory secrecy that keeps the record closed, and the repeal now before the Senate.
Continue Your Investigation
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