Judicial Capacity and Early Detection Bill for Michigan Courts

Michigan gives judges the ability to have lifelong power over families, liberty, money, and safety. But after election or appointment, Michigan performs no routine verification that a judge remains cognitively, psychologically, or professionally fit to continue exercising that power.

The Fit-Bench Act proposes a narrow, evidence based solution. It does not criminalize aging. It does not stigmatize illness. It creates a neutral early warning and review system so the courts can intervene before harm occurs instead of after collapse.

Judicial capacity is not a character judgment. It is a safety requirement.

What Is the Fit-Bench Act?

The Fit-Bench Act is a proposed Michigan statute that establishes a confidential, data driven framework for monitoring whether judges remain fit to serve over time.

Today, Michigan courts operate on a binary model. A judge is either licensed or removed. There is no middle ground for early detection, temporary relief, treatment, or structured transition. That means impairment is usually addressed only after severe misconduct, repeated reversals, or public scandal.

This should not be breaking news, because in 2021, the American Bar Association warned about the wave of cognitive impairment coming from Baby Boomer Attorneys and Judges. Yet Michigan has done nothing to address it.

The Fit-Bench Act fills that gap by creating a neutral capacity monitoring system built on measurable performance indicators and triggered clinical review when risk thresholds are crossed.

This is how every other safety sensitive profession operates. Judges are one of the few exceptions.

Why This Matters

Cognitive decline does not announce itself. Early neurodegenerative disease often appears first as changes in judgment, impulse control, attention, emotional regulation, and procedural reliability. Those are the same traits that determine whether a courtroom is fair or dangerous.

Medical research shows that mild cognitive impairment affects roughly 10 to 20 percent of adults over 65 and increases sharply with age. Frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson related cognitive decline, and medication interactions frequently present as behavioral or executive dysfunction long before diagnosis.

Judges also experience elevated exposure to trauma, chronic stress, sleep disruption, depression, and substance use. They are disproportionately likely to be prescribed medications that affect attention, memory, or impulse control.

Michigan currently tracks none of this.

Instead, the system waits for litigants, lawyers, or court staff to absorb the damage until it becomes severe enough to trigger a complaint.

That is not oversight. That is blind luck.

What the Law Would Do

The Fit-Bench Act creates a three layer capacity protection system.

First, it establishes a confidential baseline assessment when a judge enters service or begins a new term. This is not a pass or fail test. It is a reference point so future changes can be measured.

Second, it requires monthly performance data to be captured using existing court systems. This includes reversal rates, procedural errors, hearing length volatility, continuance patterns, outlier rulings, and complaints. No medical data is collected at this stage.

Third, when statistically meaningful deviations appear, a confidential capacity review is triggered. That review may include neurocognitive screening, medical evaluation, or functional assessment conducted by an independent panel. Judges retain full due process rights. Findings are protected. The goal is stabilization and safety, not punishment.

Only when a judge is unable to safely perform core judicial functions would temporary relief or structured transition occur.

The Fit-Bench Capacity Checklist

Fit-Bench Scorecard

Subject:    Jurisdiction:

Role: Judge / Magistrate / Referee

Review Window:

Category Status Notes / Observable Indicators
Category 1: Cognitive Tracking ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 2: Legal Accuracy ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 3: Impulse Control ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 4: Neutrality and Bias Risk ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 5: Procedural Control ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 6: Health and Safety Risk Flags ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 7: Resistance to Correction ● ● ● ______________________________________________
Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence ● ● ● ______________________________________________

Overall Flag: ● Green   ● Yellow   ● Red

Summary:

Note: Fit-Bench is a performance screen, not a diagnosis. It identifies repeatable, observable risk patterns that may warrant confidential fitness review.

Fit-Bench is structured around eight categories that capture observable, repeatable performance indicators. The categories are intentionally practical. They are designed to be legible to the public and useful to oversight bodies without requiring anyone to speculate about a judge’s personal life or medical status.

Fit-Bench does not accuse. It measures. A single bad day is not the point. The screen is triggered when patterns appear across time, cases, and settings, particularly when those patterns persist after correction is available.

Category 1: Cognitive Tracking
Signals difficulty tracking facts, parties, timelines, or basic context across hearings. This category focuses on confusion, inconsistency, and failure to integrate information when the same errors recur on the record.

Category 2: Legal Accuracy
Signals repeated legal errors involving controlling law, sentencing rules, evidentiary standards, or constitutional constraints. This category is not about unpopular outcomes. It is about misapplication of the rules intended to limit judicial power.

Category 3: Impulse Control
Signals volatility, inappropriate escalation, impulsive decision-making, and difficulty maintaining a regulated courtroom presence. This category focuses on observable behavior that affects fairness and predictability, including disproportionate reactions to disagreement.

Category 4: Neutrality and Bias Risk
Signals the introduction of impermissible factors into decision-making, including personal ideology, protected traits, or viewpoint-based punishment. This category also captures retaliation risk, where protected speech or lawful advocacy appears to be treated as aggravating.

Category 5: Procedural Control
Signals breakdowns in basic process, notice, transparency, and consistent rule enforcement. This includes irregular scheduling, unclear access rules, inconsistent treatment of parties, or avoidable procedural confusion that undermines trust and reviewability.

Category 6: Health and Safety Risk Flags
Signals that the court may be operating with unmanaged health or safety risks that affect reliability. Fit-Bench does not require disclosure of private health information. This category is triggered by observable performance and safety indicators that, in other safety-sensitive professions, would prompt confidential evaluation.

Category 7: Resistance to Correction
Signals a pattern of repeating the same errors after appellate guidance, administrative intervention, or prior reversals. This category distinguishes isolated mistakes from entrenched unreliability. When correction is available and the same issues persist, the risk profile materially changes.

Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence
Signals repeated failure to accurately assess or meaningfully consider the fiscal consequences of judicial decisions, particularly sentencing outcomes. This category focuses on measurable public cost creation through avoidable incarceration, excessive departures, and high rates of appeal or resentencing that impose unnecessary financial and social harm.

Fit-Bench’s purpose is simple: create a lawful, confidential path to verify fitness when observable thresholds are met. Michigan currently leaves that question to guesswork, rumor, and crisis. Fit-Bench is designed to make prevention possible.

Each domain can be measured without violating privacy. Together, they provide an early warning system for declining judicial capacity and decision-making that produces measurable public harm.

What Happens Without Early Detection

When Michigan lacks a capacity system, problems surface only after damage is done.

In the Hartig matter, the Judicial Tenure Commission eventually found unfitness to practice due to a mild neurocognitive disorder. But that finding came only after years of erratic rulings, contested hearings, and litigant harm.

By the time formal discipline occurred, the system had already failed dozens of people who appeared before that bench.

Fit-Bench would have triggered review years earlier based on objective court performance data. That protects judges from collapse and protects litigants from avoidable harm.

The Science Behind Fit-Bench

Mild cognitive impairment, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson related decline, and medication induced cognitive dysfunction are common in older professionals. They do not remove insight at first. They actually distort it.

People in early decline often become more confident, more rigid, and less able to process contradiction. In a courtroom, that looks like impatience, hostility, arbitrary rulings, or procedural shortcuts.

These conditions are routinely screened for in aviation, medicine, law enforcement, and the military. The judiciary is a safety sensitive profession with comparable stakes. It should not be exempt.

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of the Fit-Bench Act is to protect the integrity of Michigan courts by ensuring that judicial officers remain cognitively, emotionally, and professionally capable of performing the duties of office throughout their term.

This Act establishes a confidential, evidence based system of early detection, capacity review, and due process protected intervention so that impairment is addressed before it results in public harm, wrongful rulings, or institutional collapse.

Legislative Findings

The Michigan Legislature finds that judges exercise extraordinary power over liberty, family integrity, and financial security.

The Legislature further finds that age related cognitive decline, neurological illness, medication effects, and substance use are common in the general population and increase with age.

The Legislature further finds that Michigan has no routine system for identifying when a sitting judge becomes unable to safely perform the duties of office.

The Legislature therefore finds that a neutral, data driven early detection and review system is necessary to protect both judicial officers and the public.

Bill Rationale

The judiciary is a safety critical system. When impairment goes undetected, the harm is not abstract. It appears as wrongful incarceration, coerced pleas, improper custody rulings, and irreversible financial loss.

Existing disciplinary systems are designed to punish misconduct. They are not designed to detect illness.

Fit-Bench creates a missing middle. It allows the system to say something is wrong without accusing someone of being bad. It replaces collapse with care and scandal with structure.

Policy Brief

Fit-Bench is fiscally conservative, constitutionally sound, and operationally realistic. It uses existing court data. It preserves judicial independence. It reduces appeals, reversals, and civil liability.

Most importantly, it prevents harm before it occurs.

Michigan already tracks what is needed. The state simply does not use it to protect judicial capacity.

Why Now: Court Capacity, Public Safety, and the Cost of Cognitive Impairment

Michigan’s correctional system is operating under sustained staffing shortages, rising medical costs, and growing pressure to reduce unnecessary incarceration. The Michigan Department of Corrections has struggled for years to recruit and retain correctional officers, mental health clinicians, and probation staff, while also managing an aging and medically complex prison population. Every unnecessary jail or prison placement compounds those strains.

Judicial decision making sits directly upstream of that system. Every sentence, every bond condition, and every revocation order determines whether a person is diverted into treatment, supervised in the community, or placed into custody. When those decisions are made by a judge experiencing cognitive impairment, early neurodegenerative disease, untreated substance use, or medication induced confusion, the risk is not theoretical. It shows up as inconsistent rulings, inappropriate severity, missed alternatives, and failure to weigh rehabilitation options.

Modern criminal justice policy emphasizes diversion, treatment courts, specialty dockets, and evidence based supervision. These tools require careful evaluation of risk, treatment readiness, and proportionality. Judges who are impaired are far less likely to process complex clinical information, track compliance histories, or evaluate long term outcomes. In practice, this increases reliance on blunt instruments like incarceration rather than tailored intervention.

That has direct consequences for MDOC. Over-incarceration driven by impaired decision making increases bed counts, medical spending, transport demands, and staffing burdens. It also worsens outcomes for defendants who would have been better served by treatment, probation, or specialty court supervision.

FitBench is not punitive. It is preventative. Early, confidential screening allows judges to receive care, accommodations, or temporary relief from the bench before their impairment produces irreversible harm to people and institutions. This protects litigants from unjust outcomes, protects taxpayers from unnecessary correctional spending, and protects judges themselves from being forced to work past the point of safe performance.

Michigan cannot afford to ignore this risk at a time when every unnecessary incarceration strains an already fragile system. FitBench aligns judicial health with public safety, fiscal responsibility, and the state’s broader shift toward evidence based justice.

Public Reporting and Accountability

Right now, most people who try to report judicial misconduct are not ignored because they are wrong. They are ignored because they do not speak the court’s language.

Courts require complaints to be framed in technical legal terms. Families experience harm in human terms. That gap means most real-world judicial failures never enter the system in a way that can be tracked, compared, or acted on.

The Fit-Bench framework closes that gap.

Under Fit-Bench, families, court watchers, and attorneys would enter what they observed into a structured reporting system that translates lived experience into measurable performance signals. Those signals become part of the Fit-Bench database, allowing patterns to be detected early, long before harm multiplies across cases.

This makes Fit-Bench not just a judicial oversight tool, but a public accountability and complaint-tracking system built on evidence instead of silence.

See more:
How Fit-Bench turns public reports into real judicial accountability →

How to Engage

Legislators, judges, attorneys, court staff, clinicians, and researchers are invited to participate in the Fit-Bench working group.

Prepared briefings, data models, and draft statutory language are available upon request.

This is not about punishing judges. It is about building a court system that is honest about human limits and responsible with human lives.

About Rita Williams and Clutch Justice

Rita Williams is the founder and editor of Clutch Justice, an independent public interest project focused on court accountability, judicial ethics, and how legal systems actually function in people’s lives. Her work blends investigative reporting, data analysis, and lived experience to expose risks inside institutions that are supposed to protect the public but are rarely examined in real time.

Clutch Justice was created to do the work traditional watchdogs often cannot or will not do: track patterns, connect dots, and publish evidence based reporting about the justice system before people get hurt.

Inquires on Fit-Bench can be sent to: hello@clutchjustice.com

Additional Reading

Clutch Justice coverage on judicial mental fitness and accountability

Scholarly Research (placeholder)

  • [Insert peer-reviewed article title], Journal Name, Year — Brief annotation of relevance

Rita Williams is a Michigan-based doctoral candidate and criminal justice advocate focused on sentencing integrity, judicial accountability, and court process analysis. She developed the Fit Bench framework to support structured, evidence-based evaluation of judicial decision-making.