Michigan gives judges lifelong power over families, liberty, money, and safety. After election or appointment, the state performs no routine verification that a judge remains cognitively, psychologically, or professionally fit to exercise that power.
Judicial capacity is not a character judgment. It is a safety requirement.Michigan currently operates 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. Impairment is addressed only after severe misconduct, repeated reversals, or public scandal — long after litigants have absorbed the harm.
This is not a new warning. In 2021, the American Bar Association warned about the wave of cognitive impairment coming from Baby Boomer attorneys and judges. 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.
What the Law Would Do
The Fit-Bench Act creates a three-layer capacity protection system. It does not criminalize aging. It does not stigmatize illness. It creates a neutral early warning and review system so courts can intervene before harm occurs — not after collapse.
The Fit-Bench Scorecard — Eight Categories
Fit-Bench is structured around eight categories that capture observable, repeatable performance indicators. They are designed to be legible to the public and useful to oversight bodies without requiring speculation about a judge’s personal life or medical status. A single bad day is not the point — the screen is triggered when patterns appear across time, cases, and settings.
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.
Legislative Findings
The Michigan Legislature finds:
It uses existing court data. It preserves judicial independence. It reduces appeals, reversals, and civil liability.
Michigan already tracks what is needed. The state simply does not use it to protect judicial capacity.
Early, confidential screening allows judges to receive care, accommodations, or temporary relief from the bench before 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.
Most importantly, it prevents harm before it occurs.
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.
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. How Fit-Bench turns public reports into real judicial accountability →
A proposed Michigan statute establishing a confidential, data-driven framework for monitoring whether judges remain fit to serve over time, using measurable performance indicators and triggered clinical review when risk thresholds are crossed.
Traditional judicial discipline systems investigate individual misconduct after complaints are filed. FitBench focuses on system-level diagnostics — examining patterns in procedure, documentation, sentencing compliance, and oversight response to identify institutional risks before formal discipline becomes necessary.
No. FitBench uses existing court performance data, preserves full due process rights for judges, and keeps findings confidential. It does not evaluate judicial decisions on their merits — only observable, repeatable performance patterns that indicate capacity risk.
FitBench is currently a proposed Michigan statute and research-based policy framework. Prepared briefings, data models, and draft statutory language are available upon request to legislators, policymakers, and researchers.
The FitBench Act was developed by Rita Williams, founder of Clutch Justice, as part of broader research examining judicial oversight, institutional accountability, and governance gaps within the criminal justice system. It emerged from investigative work documenting how procedural failures accumulate across institutions.
Legislators, judges, attorneys, court staff, clinicians, and researchers are invited to participate. Prepared briefings, data models, and draft statutory language are available on request. Contact: hello@clutchjustice.com