Three Felonies, One Sentence, No Docket

The Arrest and the Charges

The record begins with a date and a place, and almost nothing else. According to the request that produced this file, on December 28, 2024 a parolee returning from Ohio was stopped in Rapid River and was reportedly found with approximately one pound of methamphetamine and one ounce of cocaine. That description is the requester’s. No document produced under this request states any quantity of any controlled substance, and none mentions Ohio, parole status, or a return from anywhere. The only substantive record the office released is a one-page court form, and that form is silent on all of it.

What the form does establish is precise. The case is People v. Michael Foster, Circuit Case No. 25-11296-FH, in the 47th Judicial Circuit for Delta County. The originating agency identifier is MI210025J, and the police report number is UPT 329-24. The court’s address is given as 310 Ludington Street, Escanaba, Michigan 49829, with a court telephone number of (906) 789-5103. The defendant’s CTN/TCN is 21-24001680-01. His State Identification number is blank on the form and his date of birth is recorded as “See Ref. No. 1.”

Three charges appear on the form. Count 1 is Controlled Substance — Delivery/Manufacture — Methamphetamine, cited to MCL 333.7401 with no subsection. Count 2 is Controlled Substance — Delivery/Manufacture (Cocaine, Heroin or Another Narcotic) Less Than 50 Grams, cited to MCL 333.7401(2)(a)(iv). Beneath those two counts sits a Habitual Offender — Fourth Offense Notice under MCL 769.12.

That third line is the one that changes the arithmetic of the case. Under MCL 333.7401(2)(a)(iv), a narcotic in an amount less than 50 grams is a felony punishable by up to 20 years or a $25,000 fine, or both. Under MCL 333.7401(2)(b)(i), methamphetamine — a substance described in section 7212(1)(h) — carries the same maximum of 20 years or $25,000. So the two underlying counts are, in statutory terms, equals. The habitual notice is not. Under MCL 769.12(1)(b), where a person has three or more prior felony convictions and the subsequent felony is punishable by a maximum of five years or more, the court may sentence the person to imprisonment for life or for a lesser term. Attaching that notice to a 20-year felony is how a 20-year ceiling becomes no ceiling at all.

The bare citation on Count 1 deserves a word, because it is the kind of detail that gets repeated uncritically. The charge code column reads 333.7401 and stops. It does not identify whether the People were proceeding under (2)(b)(i) for methamphetamine generally or under one of the quantity-graded narcotic tiers in (2)(a). On the face of the statute that omission does not change the defendant’s exposure, because (2)(b)(i) and (2)(a)(iv) both top out at 20 years and $25,000. It does change what the public charging record says, and it matters for anyone later trying to reconstruct which theory the People pleaded. A charging document that cites a statute without a subsection is not wrong in the way a wrong subsection would be. It is incomplete, and incompleteness in a charging record is exactly the thing a public archive exists to notice.

Case Timeline

The chronology below contains only dates that appear in a produced document or in the office’s own correspondence. Where a step plainly must have happened but no date for it appears anywhere in the packet, the entry says so rather than supplying one.

What the Office Produced

The response package runs to eleven pages, but most of it is boilerplate: a two-page cover letter, a Notice of Denial form, a two-page excerpt of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, four pages of fax-transmission headers and the request itself, and a page pointing to the county’s FOIA policy website. The substantive production is a single page. Each element is reproduced below as a redacted transcription. Personal identifiers — the requester’s name, address, out-of-state ZIP, e-mail, telephone number and fax station identifier — have been removed, as have the defendant’s date of birth and State Identification number. Nothing substantive has been altered, and the unredacted originals are retained privately.

The Dismissal: One Sentence, No Docket

The entire stated reason for ending a three-count felony prosecution is a single clause on a pre-printed form. It reads:

Read literally, that sentence does not say the defendant was charged federally. It says federal authorities “indicated” him. The word is almost certainly a slip for “indicted” — the sentence is ungrammatical as written, and “indicted” is the only reading that makes it a reason to dismiss. This page flags the discrepancy rather than silently correcting it, because the form is the record. The PDF the office produced is a 200-dots-per-inch scan with a machine-generated text layer added by an optical-character-recognition process, and the recognition could have misread a typed word. Either way, the point that survives is the same: the form does not say what federal authority did what, to whom, when, or in which court.

That absence is not a technicality. A verifiable assertion of federal prosecution would ordinarily leave a trail, and none of that trail is here. There is no federal district named — not the Western District of Michigan, which covers Delta County, nor any other. There is no federal case number, no magistrate judge, no indictment date, no criminal complaint, no detention order and no detainer lodged against a defendant in state custody. There is no reference to the agency that made the referral: not the Drug Enforcement Administration, not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, not Homeland Security Investigations, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the United States Attorney’s Office. There is no date on which the federal “indication” is said to have occurred, which matters because the motion is dated four and a half months after the arrest.

Two further details on the same page are worth recording. The defendant’s date-of-birth field does not contain a date; it contains the words “See Ref. No. 1.” That is a cross-reference to an attachment that was not produced. Whatever Ref. No. 1 is, the public does not have it, and a redaction that consists of pointing at a missing document cannot be evaluated for over-redaction. Separately, the State Identification field is empty. Those two omissions are the entirety of what the office withheld from the form, and both are the kind of identifier a privacy exemption can legitimately cover. The problem is the mechanism, not the category.

The order itself is short and unambiguous, and it is worth reading carefully because a widely circulated account of this case got it wrong. Only box 1 is checked: “Motion for nolle prosequi is granted and the case is dismissed without prejudice.” Boxes 2 through 7 are blank. That includes box 7, which is the box that would have ordered the destruction of the arrest record, biometric data, the DNA profile and the LEIN entry. It was not checked. No record-destruction instruction issued in this case.

The Notice of Denial: What Was Redacted, and Why

The office granted this request in part, and the paperwork says so accurately. On the Notice of Denial, the line reading “Part of your request for records has been denied” is marked, and the alternative “All” is not. Of the three reasons offered on the form, only box 3, “Redaction,” is checked. Box 1, “Exempt from Disclosure,” is blank. Box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” is blank. There is no certificate of nonexistence anywhere in the packet, which is consistent with the office having found and produced the record it was asked for.

In the blank for the subsection number, the coordinator inserted “(a)” by hand, and wrote the reason as “information of a personal nature would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Read together with the cover letter, that is the privacy exemption at MCL 15.243(1)(a), which permits — but does not require — a public body to withhold information of a personal nature where disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy. The office is entitled to invoke it. It is discretionary, and the office exercised the discretion in a narrow way: it redacted identifiers and produced everything else.

That is, in substance, the right outcome. It is worth saying plainly, because a watchdog page that cannot concede a correct call is not worth reading. The request asked for three categories of information: case numbers, charges with statutes, and the outcome. None of those three categories is personal. The office produced all three, and it redacted only the identifiers — a date of birth, a State Identification number, and telephone numbers. Under MCL 15.244 the office had a duty to separate exempt from nonexempt material and to release the segregable remainder. It did separate and it did release the remainder. On the substance, this is compliance.

The paperwork around that correct outcome is where the problems sit, and they are worth naming precisely because they are the kind of defect that recurs across this office’s responses.

First, the cover letter never cites the exemption. It describes the redaction in prose — “As the information is of a personal nature where public disclosure of the information would clearly constitute an unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy” — and stops. The statutory hook appears only on the attached form, and there only as a bare “(a)” in a blank that asks for a subsection number. MCL 15.235(5)(a) requires that a denial specify “the basis for the exemption” and “the specific exemption” relied on. A reader holding only the letter would not know which exemption was claimed. A reader holding only the form would know the subsection letter but not the section number. The two documents together supply the answer; neither does alone.

Second, the stated reason is internally careless in a way that suggests boilerplate. It reads: “to include but not limited to: telephone numbers, dates of births, telephone numbers.” Telephone numbers appear twice in a list of three items, and “dates of births” is pluralized as though it were a category rather than a field. That is the signature of a sentence copied from a template and not re-read. It also never says which document was redacted or what was removed from it. The form has a line for exactly that — “A brief description of the information that had to be separated or deleted” — and the line is blank.

Third, the date-of-birth redaction is executed by cross-reference to a document that was not produced. “See Ref. No. 1” is not a redaction; it is a pointer. If Ref. No. 1 is a case-history printout or an internal cover sheet, then the office has withheld a document while purporting merely to redact a field, and it has done so without identifying the document or claiming an exemption for it. If Ref. No. 1 is nothing, the field is simply wrong. Either way, the public cannot tell, and the form gives it no way to find out.

What the Record Does Not Establish

The most useful thing a public archive can do with a thin file is say exactly how thin it is. Six things that a reader might reasonably assume are established are not established by anything in this packet.

The quantity of drugs. The figure of one pound of methamphetamine and one ounce of cocaine appears in the request, and it appears in the response letter only because the office quoted the request back before answering it. No produced document alleges a weight. The nolle prosequi form has a charge description and a statute and nothing else. There is no laboratory report, no field-test slip, no property receipt and no forfeiture record. The difference matters, because the cocaine count is quantity-graded and the methamphetamine count is not: one ounce is 28.35 grams, comfortably under the 50-gram line in MCL 333.7401(2)(a)(iv), so the tier chosen for Count 2 is consistent with the alleged amount. The methamphetamine count under MCL 333.7401(2)(b)(i) has no quantity element at all, so a pound and a gram would carry the same 20-year maximum. The number in the news account, in other words, would not have changed the charges — which is precisely why its absence from the record is tolerable but its repetition as fact is not.

The defendant’s parole status and his travel from Ohio. Nothing produced mentions parole, the Michigan Department of Corrections, a parole detainer, or Ohio. Those facts come from the request. They may well be true. They are not in the file.

The existence of a federal prosecution. This is the central gap. The motion asserts that federal authorities took some step. No federal docket number, district, division, charging instrument, agency or date appears anywhere in eleven pages. A federal felony prosecution is not a secret; it produces a public docket. The absence of even a docket number in a dismissal motion is not proof that no federal case exists. It is proof that the office did not tell the public how to find it.

The contents of the complaint and the information. The letter names them. The file we hold does not contain them. Whatever they say about the stop, the officers, the quantities and the theory of the case is unavailable to this page.

What happened between December 28, 2024 and May 9, 2025. There is no arraignment date, no bond record, no probable-cause conference, no adjournment and no register of actions. A case number exists, which means the case was opened, but the four and a half months between arrest and dismissal are a blank.

Whether the dismissal was the office’s idea. The motion is signed by the prosecutor, but the stated reason is that federal authorities acted. Whether the federal matter was initiated before or after the state charges, whether the state case was brought first and then yielded, or whether the two were coordinated from the start, cannot be determined from anything produced.

Analysis: Exposure, Sovereignty and the Refiling Window

The infographic below sets out what the charging form actually put on the table. The two underlying counts are 20-year felonies. The fourth-offense notice is what removed the ceiling. All of it was dismissed in a single order, and none of it was dismissed on the merits.

Three legal points follow, and each is labelled for what it is.

There is a structural point underneath all of this that is larger than any single form. When a prosecutor dismisses a case because another sovereign has taken it up, the public loses its ability to see the case resolved in the forum it can watch. The state file closes. The federal file, if it exists, lives behind a different docket, a different charging instrument and a different set of public-records rules. The only bridge between the two is the sentence in the motion, and in this case that sentence is a fragment. A one-line hand-off is efficient. It is also, by design or by habit, unaccountable — because the office that knows the answer is not the office that will be asked to explain it.

None of this means the dismissal was improper. Prosecutors dismiss cases for good reasons, and a federal prosecution of a large methamphetamine seizure is a plausible and often sensible allocation of resources. The point is narrower and harder to argue with: a decision of that consequence should leave a record a citizen can check. Here, the record is a single checked box and a sentence with no docket number in it.

Comparison With Other Requests to the Same Office

This office does not deny everything, and it is worth saying so with the files in front of us. The pattern across the requests this archive has documented is not uniform refusal. It is selective silence about the things that would let a reader verify a conclusion.

In FOIA 25-131, arising from a May 2024 task-force stop, the office produced a felony information for one defendant and then answered a question about the other defendant’s outcome twice, in two incompatible ways — once by certifying that no record existed, and once by explaining why the record it did not have was exempt. It also cited MCL 15.232(h)(iv), which is a definitional clause excluding the judiciary from the definition of “public body,” as though it were an exemption. That request cost nothing and produced four pages, and the pages contradicted each other.

In FOIA 25-129, the office produced a 25-page packet, granted one item subject to a $2,931.12 fee estimate, denied two items as nonexistent with a certificate, and never addressed the fourth item at all — a request for in-person inspection. The Board of Commissioners later upheld the denial. That request was answered with volume and with arithmetic that reconciles exactly, and it still left a request item unanswered.

FOIA 25-132 is the cleanest of the three on process. It was timely, it was free, it was segregated properly, and it answered the question. What it shares with the others is the thing that matters most: the dispositive fact is asserted rather than documented. In 25-131 the asserted fact was a federal indictment. In 25-129 it was a fee estimate built on a case count the public cannot audit. Here it is a federal hand-off described in nine words. In each case the office had the underlying document — a docket number, a case list, a referral — and in each case the public got the conclusion without it.

That is the through-line this archive exists to draw. A public body can comply with the letter of the Freedom of Information Act and still leave the public unable to check its work. The statute requires disclosure of records, not of reasoning. When the reasoning is the thing in dispute, the records have to carry it, and here they do not.

FOIA Request Details

The request asked for three specific categories and one procedural protection. The table below sets out what was asked, what came back, and how the office handled it.

The timing is worth setting out because it is the one part of this file that is unambiguously clean. The request was transmitted by fax on the evening of June 26, 2025 and logged by the office’s fax service at 8:43 a.m. on June 27. Under MCL 15.235(1), a fax is received one business day after transmission, which places receipt on Friday, June 27. Five business days from that date runs to Monday, July 7, because Friday, July 4 was Independence Day. The office answered on Thursday, July 3.

No extension was invoked, no deposit was demanded, and no itemization was issued. The five-business-day clock in MCL 15.235(2) was met with a business day to spare, and the ten-business-day extension available under the same provision was never needed. Whatever else is true of this response, it was not slow and it was not expensive.

Remedies, Deadlines and Next Steps

Two of the statutory remedies that would ordinarily follow a partial denial have already expired, and it would be dishonest to present them as live options.

The appeal to the head of the public body under MCL 15.240(1)(a) runs to the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners, which is the route the office’s own letter describes. The head must act on an appeal within ten business days under MCL 15.240(2), and under MCL 15.240(3) a board or commission is not deemed to have received an appeal until its next regularly scheduled meeting. That route was available in July 2025 and is no longer a practical remedy for this response.

The civil action to compel disclosure under MCL 15.240(1)(b) had to be commenced within 180 days of the denial. Counting from July 3, 2025, that window closed on December 30, 2025. A fee action under MCL 15.240a is not available here, because no fee was charged and no deposit was demanded.

What remains useful is not litigation over this response but a set of narrower requests aimed at the facts the response left out. Each of the following is a request this archive intends to make, and each is drafted to be answerable in a page or two.

Ask the federal side directly. A request to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan for any indictment, criminal complaint, information or docket entry naming Michael Foster and arising from conduct on or about December 28, 2024 in Delta County. A federal prosecution produces a public docket; if one exists, this will find it, and if none exists, the answer is itself the story.

Ask the office for its federal correspondence. A request to the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office for all correspondence, referrals, e-mails, memoranda and notes between the office and any federal agency concerning Michael Foster, Case No. 25-11296-FH, or the December 28, 2024 arrest, from December 2024 to the present. This is the document set that would show who made the referral, when, and on what terms.

Ask for the two documents the letter names. A request for the felony complaint and the felony information in Case No. 25-11296-FH, together with the register of actions for that case. These are court records, they are public, and their absence from the production is the single largest gap in this file.

Ask what Ref. No. 1 is. A request for the document to which the date-of-birth field cross-refers. If it is an internal case-history printout, it should have been produced with the date of birth redacted rather than withheld by reference.

Ask about the task-force record. A request for the UPSET report bearing number UPT 329-24, or for confirmation of which agency holds it. If the prefix does not denote UPSET, the office can say what it does denote, and the answer will correct an inference this page has declined to make.

Each of these requests should be sent by a method that generates a receipt, should state the statutory deadline the office is expected to meet, and should ask in terms for the specific exemption if any part is withheld. The record of this office’s responses is that a well-drafted request gets a timely answer. The gap is not in the answering. It is in what the answers are willing to say.

Sources and Method

This page was built from two files: the eleven-page response package released under FOIA Request #25-132, and the one-page responsive record enclosed with it. Both were read in full, and every quotation above is transcribed from those pages. The redacted PDFs linked in Section 03 are faithful transcriptions with personal identifiers removed; the unredacted originals are retained privately and are available to the county, to counsel, or to a court on request.

The checkboxes on the Notice of Denial and on the order of nolle prosequi were verified visually at high resolution rather than taken from the scanned text layer, because optical character recognition cannot reliably read a mark inside a box. On the Notice of Denial, “Part” is marked and “All” is not; box 3 is marked and boxes 1 and 2 are not. On the order, box 1 is marked and boxes 2 through 7, including box 7, are not. The responsive-record PDF is a 200-dots-per-inch scan with a machine-generated text layer added on June 27, 2025, which is why the word “indicated” is treated above as the record’s text while its likely intended meaning is noted separately.

Statutory text is quoted from the Michigan Compiled Laws as published by the Michigan Legislature. The provisions relied on are MCL 15.232 (definitions), MCL 15.235 (response, denial and exemption-identification requirements), MCL 15.240 (appeals and remedies), MCL 15.240a (fee appeals), MCL 15.243(1)(a) (the privacy exemption), MCL 15.244 (segregation), MCL 333.7401 (delivery and manufacture of controlled substances, including subsections (2)(a)(iv) and (2)(b)(i)), MCL 769.12 (fourth-offense habitual enhancement) and MCL 767.24 (limitation periods). No judicial decision is cited on this page, because the analysis does not turn on one; the dual-sovereignty point is stated as doctrine rather than attached to a case citation.

Three categories of statement are kept separate throughout. Documented facts are things that appear on the face of a produced record, such as the case number, the charge codes, the dates and the text of the motion. Agency assertions are things the office says that no produced record corroborates, chiefly the existence of a federal prosecution. Interpretation is this site’s reading of the statutes and of the response, and is labelled as such. Where the record is silent, this page says it is silent rather than supplying an inference.