Attorney General Schuette Must Stop Defending Child Abusers And Start Protecting Michigan Kids: What You Need To Know About The Sexual Assault Scandal The Dems And Liberal Media Are Waiting To Unleash

By Brandon Hall
(Email Him At WestMIPolitics@Gmail.com)

In a scandal the Democrats and media are sitting on for the fall, Attorney General Bill Schuette has fought for five years to prevent hundreds of young juvenile offenders who were molested, sexually assaulted, or raped while in state custody from getting their day in court.

A judge has sanctioned Schuette's office multiple times for inappropriate delays, and one called his attempt to try and use a cheap legal trick to move the case to the Court of Claims, which would deny the victims a jury trial, "horrible."

The attorneys representing the victims have already sued the State of Michigan for sexual abuse in women's facilities, garnering a $100 million settlement in 2009 after 13 years of court battles.

Experts are stunned Schuette won't settle, the taxpayer tab in this lawsuit goes up by the day, and it has already cost millions in man-hours and consulting fees. What started off as 7 plaintiffs is now over 200.

At one point, Schuette's office demanded reporters turn over notes from interviews with plaintiffs, then backtracked after a media uproar.

Detroit News Editor Nolan Finley has blasted Schuette as "stubborn or stupid," and he says it's time to settle.

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For years, the State of Michigan forced juveniles to be housed with adult offenders, and the results were horrific: teen inmates were used as sex slaves by inmates, abused and ignored by guards, and forced to endure hideous conditions..

According to the Detroit News:

"John Doe 11 is one of 11 unnamed plaintiffs saying Gov. Rick Snyder, the Michigan Department of Corrections and 15 wardens from facilities around the state violated their civil rights — essentially failing to protect an at-risk segment of the prison population and demonstrating "deliberate indifference to their safety." Another 200-plus inmates have responded to a notice of a class-action lawsuit, according to the plaintiffs' legal team of Deborah LaBelle and Michael Pitt.

The suits, originally filed in 2013, are getting renewed attention not only for the newly detailed rape allegations from inmates, but also for the state's defense tactics and its historically get-tough approach toward juvenile offenders.

The lawsuits describe alleged incidents in which teens were forced into sex acts by adult prisoners through physical violence or the threat of it. In some cases, corrections facility employees are accused of sexual harassment, allowing assaults to happen or ignoring requests for help from teen inmates."

"State officials have declined to address specific allegations contained in the lawsuits, but court filings offer some hints about the state's attitude toward the allegations. One defense filing from January 2014 included the following passages:

"to the MDOC's knowledge, a prisoner's vulnerability to another prisoner is more a function of the prisoner's attitude and deportment and behavior, than it is strictly of age."

Schuette's decisions in the lawsuit puzzle experts.

According to Bridge:

"It's a strategy that puzzles legal experts, and could prove costly to state taxpayers, because Michigan is an outlier in continuing to mandate that 17-year-olds be treated as adults for sentencing purposes, and because more inmates are seeking to join the class action lawsuit as it drags on.

"This case is going to grow by the minute," Bunton said. "If they're concerned about taxpayers, if they want to lower recidivism rates, we have to put a stop to this (lawsuit) now."

The current suit claims teen offenders were sexually assaulted in Michigan prisons under a state policy that, until August 2013, allowed young inmates to be placed in cells with adult inmates. Prison officials, the suit contends, ignored or laughed off the inmates' complaints, and even groped several of the teenagers themselves. The inmates' lawyers accuse state prison officials of creating a culture of institutional indifference to the attacks.

All of the alleged incidents took place between 2010 and 2013, long after the state acknowledged in 2004 that juvenile offenders were "five times more likely" to be sexually assaulted in prison than adult prisoners.

Since the suit was filed in December 2013, lawyers representing the state's Attorney General's Office have papered courtrooms from the Washtenaw Circuit Court to the Michigan Supreme Court with at least seven interlocutory (interim) appeals, seven requests to delay the case until motions are appealed, and motions so numerous that Washtenaw Circuit Judge Carol Kunhke set up a weekly Thursday afternoon hearing time for the case."

"Lawyers for the state have been sanctioned three times by judges for delays. The Attorney General's scorched earth defense of the suit recently drew attention when the office issued subpoenas for a reporter's notes following interviews with prisoners involved in the lawsuit and recordings from an interview plaintiffs attorney Deborah LaBelle conducted with Michigan Public Radio (AG Bill Schuette laterapologized and withdrew the subpoenas).

Schuette's office's aggressive handling of the case drew the ire of Court of Appeals Judge Amy Ronayne Krause, who blasted a legal maneuver to transfer the case to the state's Court of Claims where it could not be heard by a jury. "This request for declaratory actions is really some sort of horrible, frivolous attempt to manufacture jurisdiction in the Court of Claims," Krause said. "I find your arguments to be really rather ... odious."

It's an especially puzzling tactic to try again, considering that the attorneys for the juvenile offenders are largely the same lawyers who successfully slogged through 13 years of court hearings in the women prisoner lawsuit.

A class-action lawsuit, brought by the same team of attorneys who won a $100 million settlement in a strikingly similar case, can't be handled like a pro se lawsuit of a prisoner complaining about cafeteria food, Schlanger said.

"It's one thing for Michigan to make this mistake once," Schlanger said. "Maybe they think (the women prisoner sex assault case) was a once-in-a-lifetime case and now this is back to normal. But there's normal and not normal."

Roesti said the Attorney General's Office's aggressive tactics in the women's case were obvious and, in retrospect, a disservice to the state and its taxpayers.

"There were many occasions (in the women's prisoner case) when they could have gone to trial much sooner," Reosti said. "They delayed it as much as they could. There's no doubt that was a tactical choice by the state...

The current case involving juvenile offenders began with seven prisoners, and now has more than 200 current or former juvenile prisoners."

"AG Spokesperson Andrea Bitely declined to tell Bridge how many AG attorneys are assigned to the juvenile offender lawsuit or how many hours has been devoted to the case so far.

But documents filed in the case indicate the AG's office has already paid $311,000 for a firm to locate and redact portions of more than 400,000 pages of MDOC documents relevant to the suit, with 31 attorneys and 17 other staffers working to complete the MDOC contract.

"The Michigan Attorney General's office has a duty to represent the State of Michigan and the taxpayers in all cases against the State," Bitely told Bridge in a statement, "and John Doe v. MDOC (the teenage offender lawsuit) is no different."

In one way, though, John Doe V. MDOC is very different from the thousands of cases filed by prisoners annually: the potential it holds to punch a $100 million hole in the state budget.

LaBelle, who now is leading the case for the juvenile offenders, says the MDOC and the attorney general's office have declined to discuss a settlement in the current lawsuit."

Schuette has even targeted journalists.

According to Editor And Publisher 

"Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has withdrawn two subpoenas his office served a Huffington Post reporter, seeking copies of notes and records on interviews she conducted with inmates inside two state prisons.

Schuette’s office also on Monday withdrew a third subpoena served to Michigan Radio for all records related to an interview conducted by Cynthia Canty of the public radio station’s program “Stateside” with an attorney — one who represents nearly a dozen juvenile inmates in a lawsuit filed against the Michigan Department of Corrections."

Detroit News Editor Nolan Finley has blasted Schuette as "stubborn or stupid," and he says it's time to settle.

According to his editorial:

"Stubborn or stupid? Or does the state of Michigan really believe it can prevail in lawsuits filed by 11 juvenile prison inmates who charge they weren't protected from being brutalized by adult prisoners?

If it's the latter, then state officials either haven't read the horrific evidence presented in the lawsuits, or learned nothing from a similar suit filed by women inmates and settled in 2009 for $100 million.

That $100 million would fill a lot of potholes.

As reported by The Detroit News, several of the young men claim they were turned into sex slaves while housed in the adult prisons, raped and passed around from inmate to inmate. Some contend they were abused with the knowledge of prison officials, and possibly with their help.

There may not be much sympathy in our society for prisoners, but jurors listening to boys retelling nightmarish stories might decide that rape is a cruel and unusual punishment for the crimes they committed.

Once the boys take the stand, the state may as well just get out its checkbook.

The outrage here — apart from the sexual abuse — is that the cases could have been settled years ago — and perhaps still could be settled today — by the state agreeing to fix the problem and get the kids who were abused the help they need. That's all the attorneys asked for before taking the matter to court.

Juvenile prisoners in Michigan allege rape, abuse

Michigan is among the toughest states on juvenile criminals. It is one of just nine states where minors can automatically be tried as an adult, and one of just four that don't allow judges the ability to send a teen's case back to juvenile court.

The lawyers for the kids — the same team that represented the abused women — want the state to comply completely with a new federal rape protection law requiring juvenile inmates be separated from adults.

But instead of negotiating a settlement that makes sense for both the inmates and the state, Michigan is aggressively fighting the lawsuits, filing a couple of dozen appeals already of procedural rulings issued by the federal and Washtenaw Circuit courts.

This seems bone-headed. Fixing the things that led to the suit might not only save taxpayers from taking a financial hit, but is also the right thing to do. Children don't belong in prison with adults.

Some of the young offenders committed serious crimes; but many others are locked up for property offenses. One juvenile was sent to adult prison for stealing a bike.

Many end up behind bars because the counties in which they are convicted find it more economical to send them to prison at the state's expense than to place them on probation, which the counties must pay for.

While the intent of Michigan's ultra-tough juvenile sentencing laws is to deter crime, the reality is that teens too often come out of prison broken and bitter and more dangerous to society than when they went in.

The Corrections Dept. says the juveniles are making up their stories. It said the same thing about the women inmates.

It seems Michigan is again rolling the dice in a very expensive game."

Unbelievable.

Attorney General Schuette should settle this lawsuit immediately, it's the right thing to do.

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Brandon Hall is a lifelong political nerd from Grand Haven, and is the Managing Editor of West Michigan Politics.

>>>Email him at WestMIPolitics@Gmail.com
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