One and Done: Checking a Viral Post About Judge Casandra Morse-Bills

On election night, a former congressional candidate told Republicans to cast only one Supreme Court vote and leave Judge Casandra Morse-Bills off their ballots. Hundreds of people liked it. Clutch Justice checked every claim. Here’s what we found.

The Post

I saw this one the way most people did: in my feed, the morning after the election, already sitting at 313 likes, 68 comments, and climbing. It is the kind of post that travels well. A named lawyer, a numbered list, a judge described as cruel and unaccountable, and a closing instruction to like and share.

Nicholas Somberg practices criminal defense and personal injury law in Bingham Farms. He ran for Congress in 2024 and won the Republican primary in the 11th District before losing the general election to Haley Stevens by about 18 points. His post told Republicans, and everyone else, to “vote ONLY for Judge Michael Warren” in the two-seat Supreme Court race and leave the second vote blank rather than give it to Morse-Bills.

He gave four reasons. Morse-Bills, he wrote, has spent her whole life in a small town with no oversight and no consequences, and sits as both the district and circuit judge in the same courtroom. She has never been involved with the Republican Party in the years he has been active in it. She is surrounded by controversy, including multiple JTC complaints, one of them his, and lawsuits accusing her of texting jurors. He said he personally watched her allow a witness to give him the middle finger in court, then hold his client’s friend in contempt for the same gesture after the hearing. And he said people in her county are afraid of her.

I am simultaneously a healthy skeptic, and also someone who hates bullies. So of course, I had to check this out. Being a good judge does not, and should never, mean people are afraid of you. If you have to lead with fear, you’re a shitty leader.

Lucky for us, there is quite a bit here that can be fact-checked. Here’s what I found.

The Result

The Associated Press called the race for incumbents Megan Cavanagh and Noah Hood shortly after 1 a.m. Wednesday. In Decision Desk HQ’s unofficial count at midday Wednesday, Cavanagh had 2,228,482 votes and Hood had 1,925,139. Warren had 895,499 and Morse-Bills had 824,369. With both Republican nominees more than a million votes behind Hood, a one-vote strategy would not have changed who won the two seats.

Claim by Claim

The Juror Texts: What Is Actually on File

This is the claim that deserves the most attention, and it deserves a full look at what is actually on file.

In May 2025, an Oscoda County jury convicted Robert “Bob” Declercq, a Grosse Pointe Farms sailor and former wealth manager, of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving his 3-year-old granddaughter. The Attorney General’s office prosecuted the case. Morse-Bills presided, and in August 2025 she sentenced him to 25 to 60 years.

At the end of trial, two alternate jurors, Nos. 43 and 84, were excused by random draw before deliberations. In December 2025, Heather Blundell, a district court clerk hired in 2023, contacted Declercq’s trial lawyer, Shannon Smith. Blundell later gave a written declaration that the judge had been laughing at texts from juror No. 43, Richard Hoffman, who was upset about being dismissed after sitting through the whole trial. Her declaration, as reported by Shifting Gears, said: “Judge Morse-Bills found it extremely amusing that ‘Hoff’ was texting her while I found it very odd that she was having ex-parte communication with a juror.”

Declercq’s appellate lawyer, Michael Dezsi, filed a motion on December 8, 2025, asking Morse-Bills to recuse herself and to produce any communications with jurors from the trial. She declined to step aside. Blundell testified before 23rd Circuit Chief Judge Richard Vollbach Jr., and on February 17, 2026, he denied the recusal request too. Vollbach said it was not a close call, found that the allegations would not meet Michigan’s grounds for disqualification even if true, and said he gave Blundell’s testimony little if any weight. That left Morse-Bills as the judge who would hear Declercq’s motion for a new trial.

At a January 14, 2026 hearing on that motion, Morse-Bills addressed the relationship directly. She confirmed that Hoffman is her second cousin, said their mothers are cousins, and said the two are friendly but rarely see each other. She said Hoffman was never asked during jury selection whether he knew her, and that a second-cousin relationship did not have to be disclosed. She denied that he sent her anything during the trial. She did acknowledge two other exchanges: texts before trial about a Jeep he was selling, and a text after the verdict in which she told him the outcome. She also noted that Blundell’s declaration was not sworn. Hoffman declined to comment to Shifting Gears.

I don’t buy the “he was never asked” explanation. It was never Hoffman’s job to raise it. He was a juror. She was the judge, she knew exactly who he was when he was seated, and she was the one person in that courtroom who could have put the relationship on the table and let both sides decide whether he should stay on a child sexual assault jury. She should have.

Blundell was then fired. According to her complaint, the termination notice faulted her for taking the information only to Declercq’s lawyer instead of to the prosecutor, the court administrator, or the judge. On April 27, 2026, she sued Morse-Bills, Vollbach, and court administrator Tom Pratt in federal court, alleging violations of the First Amendment and Michigan’s Whistleblowers’ Protection Act.

Morse-Bills answered the allegation directly in an October interview with Michigan Public. She said the clerk’s claim surfaced because she was running for the Supreme Court and called it “100% incorrect and false.” She also said the lawsuit was still pending.

That denial is narrower than it sounds. By the time she sat down with Michigan Public, she had already acknowledged in open court that she texted Hoffman before the trial about a Jeep he was selling, and texted him again after the verdict to tell him the outcome. What she denies is a message in the window Blundell described: shortly after Hoffman was excused, before the trial was over. Describing the allegation as contact with a juror during a trial and calling it entirely false leaves out the contact she has admitted, and leaves out that the juror is her cousin. And her January explanation came while she was ruling on the motion to remove herself from the case. She was the judge deciding whether she should step aside. Her account of her own texts was not sworn testimony, and nobody cross-examined her on it.

The interview raises a second problem. Canon 3(A)(7) of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct bars a judge from making any public statement that might reasonably be expected to affect the outcome or impair the fairness of a matter pending in any court. A judge may comment on a case where she is a litigant in her personal capacity, which likely covers the Blundell lawsuit. Declercq is different. Morse-Bills is not a party to that case. She is the trial judge, and as of February, Declercq’s motion for a new trial was still waiting for a hearing in front of her. Whether she was in contact with that juror is the question at the center of it. Calling the allegation completely false on public radio, a month before the Supreme Court election, put the judge’s own public answer on the central fact of a criminal case she was still deciding. Whether that crosses the line is for the Judicial Tenure Commission to say. It is a fair question to ask.

Michigan Has Been Here Before: People v. Loew

The Michigan Supreme Court dealt with a judge’s private communications during a criminal sexual conduct trial just two years ago, in another small-county courtroom.

In People v. Loew, decided July 16, 2024, Allegan County Circuit Judge Margaret Bakker emailed Prosecutor Myrene Koch in the middle of the trial, while a state police trooper was still testifying. She criticized the trooper’s investigation and later asked why the complainant had not been sent for a medical exam. The defense was never told the emails existed. The Court of Appeals had called them administrative. The Supreme Court disagreed, held that they violated Canon 3(A)(4) of the Code of Judicial Conduct, and said Bakker should have raised her own disqualification and recused herself. The lead opinion stated that “No matter the content of the ex parte communications, it is a gross breach of the appearance of justice.” Even so, the Court found the error harmless, because the jury never knew about the emails, and Loew did not get a new trial.

Watson Township, through its supervisor, Kevin Travis, filed an amicus brief in that case. The township argued that the Court of Appeals’ broad reading of “administrative” communications would invite injustice in other cases and erode public confidence in the courts. On that point, the Supreme Court agreed.

The Michigan Judicial Institute’s benchbook guidance on judicial disqualification puts the duty exactly where Loew put it, on the judge. Quoting the Code of Judicial Conduct, it says: “A judge should raise the issue of disqualification whenever the judge has cause to believe that grounds for disqualification may exist.”

Why the Morse-Bills Situation Is Arguably Worse

In Loew, the judge’s emails went to a party. Here, by the judge’s own account, the person on the other end of the texts was a juror, and her relative.

Jurors are the fact-finders. Loew’s harmless-error ruling leaned on the fact that the jury knew nothing about the emails. That reasoning does not fit neatly when the person the judge was texting was sworn onto the jury. Morse-Bills says Hoffman never contacted her during trial, and he was excused before deliberations. But she has acknowledged texting him before trial about a Jeep sale, she knew he was her second cousin when he was seated, and she did not raise it with the lawyers. After the verdict, she texted him the result.

Bakker’s emails were a breach of the appearance of justice with a defense lawyer kept in the dark. Morse-Bills’s situation adds an undisclosed family relationship with a sitting juror on top of it. If the Supreme Court said Bakker should have raised her own disqualification, it is hard to see how a judge who knew her cousin was on the jury had any less reason to speak up.

Clutch Justice’s full reporting on the Loew emails is in From Allegan to the Ballot.

The Shed Case Coverage Got Slightly Wrong

Election coverage this fall described the DeSandre lawsuit as dismissed on governmental immunity. The opinion is more specific than that, because it’s essentially Morse-Bills getting off on an unfortunate, immovable technicality.

The DeSandres sued Oscoda County, its sheriff, a deputy, Morse-Bills, and her successor as prosecutor, Kristi McGregor, who had represented the neighbor in a related PPO hearing before joining the prosecutor’s office. Judge Michelson ruled that both prosecutors had absolute immunity because approving charges and seeking warrants are core prosecutorial functions, and that claims against them in their official capacities were really claims against the State of Michigan, which is shielded by sovereign immunity.

Absolute prosecutorial immunity protects charging decisions even when the charges fall apart. Here they did: a state circuit judge dismissed them in 2019 after finding the shed was attached to the land and was not personal property at all. The federal court did not decide that Morse-Bills charged correctly. It decided she could not be sued for it.

The Mailer Nobody Signed

There is one more connection to Morse-Bills’s campaign that Somberg’s post did not mention, and it came from her own committee’s paperwork. This is one I personally ran into.

Her Supreme Court campaign committee lists long-time Allegan County GOP antagonist Jason Watts as its treasurer. Watts also ran the campaign of Tom Siver, who ran against Judge Christopher Burnett for the 57th District Court in Allegan County this fall. In October, a mailer from a group calling itself the Committee for Good Judges went out attacking Burnett. Its return address is the same PO Box the Morse-Bills committee lists as its mailing address.

The mailer carries no paid-for-by line. Michigan’s campaign finance law, MCL 169.247, requires political communications like this one to identify who paid for them. Without that line, there is no way for a voter holding the mailer to tell whether it came from the Morse-Bills campaign, from Watts, from the Siver campaign, or from someone else using the same box. Watts knows the rule well: Bureau of Elections files show he has filed at least three complaints against other committees alleging violations of that same identification requirement.

I asked the Morse-Bills campaign about the mailer and the shared address on October 13. The campaign never responded.

Burnett won the 57th District seat over Siver by more than 9,000 votes in the unofficial count. Clutch Justice endorsed Burnett in that race.

What I Can’t Check, and Why

I can’t check Somberg’s JTC claims, because JTC submissions are confidential. Under Michigan’s court rules, a request for investigation filed with the Judicial Tenure Commission stays private. The Commission investigates behind closed doors and only makes a matter public if it files a formal complaint. Clutch Justice found no formal complaint against Morse-Bills. If Somberg and other attorneys filed requests, as he says, those filings exist only in the Commission’s files and in the filers’ own copies.

That is exactly why I’m launching CourtWatch. CourtWatch is a Clutch Justice app that records what actually happens in Michigan courtrooms, hearing by hearing, so that how a judge runs a courtroom shows up as data instead of rumor. The JTC can keep its files sealed. What happens in open court is public, and someone should be writing it down. People need to know exactly what they’re voting for and have the receipts at their fingertips to be informed voters.

The middle-finger story is in a similar spot. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; I just don’t have the exact case citation yet. Somberg describes a witness making the gesture toward him in court without consequence, and his client’s friend being held in contempt for the same gesture after the hearing. A contempt finding would normally generate an order and a transcript, and the post names no case, date, or party to pull them from.

What Happens Now

Morse-Bills’s circuit seat was not on the ballot. She returns to the 23rd Circuit as the only judge in a county of about 8,200 people, with a federal lawsuit by a former member of her own court staff still pending against her. Declercq’s appeal, and the question of whether his trial judge was in contact with an alternate juror, also remain live. So does the question of who paid for the Burnett mailer.

Those are the things that will still matter in six months. The post will not.

Why This Matters Beyond One Post

Judicial races in Michigan are nonpartisan for a reason. Supreme Court candidates are nominated at party conventions, but their names go on the ballot with no party label, and trial judges run without one entirely. That is deliberate. A judge is supposed to apply the law the same way to whoever is standing in front of them, regardless of how that person votes. Whether a judge shows up at party conventions tells you nothing about whether they disclose a relative on the jury, follow ability-to-pay rules, or treat the people in their courtroom fairly. Morse-Bills herself told a League of Women Voters forum she would avoid party politics on the bench. That is the right standard, and it is the one voters should hold every judge to, from either party.

Judicial races are where Michigan voters know the least and get the least reliable information. The Code of Judicial Conduct limits what judicial candidates can say about issues that may come before them, most outlets cover only the statewide race, and the most consequential records, JTC requests for investigation, are sealed by design. That leaves a vacuum, and social media fills it.

The confidentiality rule is supposed to protect judges from being smeared by complaints that go nowhere. My stance is simpler: where there is smoke, there is usually fire.

The problem is that the JTC is so opaque that it cripples voters’ ability to make sound decisions if people like Nicholas Somberg don’t speak up. Look at Detroit, where voters just elected Kahlilia Davis, a former judge the Michigan Supreme Court has barred from exercising judicial power until 2029, and nothing on the ballot told them. Look at Eastpointe, where Judge Kathleen Galen is running what amounts to a pay-to-stay operation out of her courthouse to keep the city afloat: the Court of Appeals vacated a jail sentence after she locked up a pregnant woman over fines and costs without a supported finding that she could pay, in a court that was already ordered to stop pay-or-stay jailing in 2016. Clutch Justice laid it out in the Soward reversal. She won reelection anyway.

The answer is documents. A pending federal lawsuit with a case number is checkable. A hearing transcript is checkable. A federal opinion explaining exactly which immunity applied is checkable. When a claim about a judge comes with a case number, look it up. When it does not, ask for one, and keep asking.

But it shouldn’t fall on individual voters to chase down case numbers on Facebook. We need systems that are transparent and checkable too. Right now, Michigan voters pick judges with almost nothing to go on: no party label on the ballot, a Judicial Tenure Commission that keeps complaints sealed unless it decides to act, and appellate reversals scattered across opinions that rarely name the trial judge. A judge can rack up complaints, reversals, and recusal fights for years, and the first time most voters hear about any of it is a viral post the night of the election, or never.

That is how misconduct runs unchecked. Not because nobody notices, but because what people notice never gets collected anywhere voters can see it. The fix is data: how often a judge’s rulings are reversed, how often they jail people over fines and costs, how often recusal motions are filed and denied, how they treat the people in front of them on an ordinary Tuesday. Put that in front of voters and the next Morse-Bills, Galen, or Davis race is decided on facts instead of rumor. That is what CourtWatch is for, and it is what Michigan’s courts should be publishing themselves.

I will keep following Blundell v. Morse-Bills and the Declercq appeal. If the texts are produced, if the court rules on the firing, or if the JTC acts publicly, it will be here, with the documents attached.

Related Clutch reporting: Election Night 2026: Michigan Judicial Race Results.