Contact WickmanWatch

Why you might write

This site exists because a prosecutor is a public official paid by the taxpayers, and the basic measures of how that office is performing should not require a lawsuit to obtain. If you have asked the office for a record and were refused, delayed, quoted a fee you could not pay, or told that a document simply does not exist, that experience is worth documenting. Tell me what you asked for, roughly when you asked, and what you were told. If you still have the letters, the envelopes, the fax confirmations, or the emails, send them. The paper trail is the whole case.

You might also write because you were on the other side of the system. If you were charged, if you were a victim, if you were a witness, if you sat in a courtroom in Escanaba and watched how a case was handled, your account may explain something the statistics cannot. I am not looking for a story that fits a conclusion I have already reached. I am looking for what actually happened, and I will check it against the record before I publish anything.

Journalists, attorneys, and researchers are welcome to write with the same expectation: I will show you the source documents and I will tell you plainly what I could not verify. If you have found an error on a page — a misread figure, a wrong date, a quotation that does not match the document, a redaction that failed — write immediately and it will be corrected and the update date changed. Corrections are not an embarrassment here. They are the method working.

What happens to your message

Messages go through the form below and land with me, not with the county. Nothing you send is published without your permission, and identifying details are removed from anything that is published. If you want to be quoted by name, say so. If you want to be described only as a former defendant or a local resident, say that instead. If you want no trace of yourself in the finished piece at all, say that too, and I will use your information only to check facts I can confirm independently.

I read everything. I do not always reply quickly, and I will not reply at all to messages that are only abuse. If your message needs a response, make sure there is some way for me to reach you — a throwaway email address is fine, and so is a phone number you do not mind using once. If you deliberately leave every contact field blank, I will still read what you sent, but I will have no way to ask you a follow-up question or to tell you what I found.

Encryption and anonymity

This page and the form on it are served over HTTPS, so what you type is encrypted in transit between your browser and the form provider. It is not sent in the clear, and it cannot be read off the local network by someone watching the connection. The form itself is operated by a third-party form service, Elfsight, which delivers the message to me; this site runs no analytics, no advertising trackers, and keeps no visitor logs of its own. I am telling you that plainly because a promise of privacy is worth nothing if you do not know who is actually handling the data.

You can remain anonymous. No field on the form is a trap, and you are not required to identify yourself to be taken seriously. If you are worried about being identified by your writing style or by details only you would know, say so in the message and I will paraphrase rather than quote, and I will leave out the specifics that would point at you. If your situation is sensitive enough that you do not want to use a web form at all, say only that in the message and leave a way to reach you; we can find a better channel. What I will not do is promise you something the technology cannot deliver: a web form is private, but it is not a sealed legal privilege, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer.

What this cannot do

I am not your attorney and I cannot represent you, file for you, or give you legal advice. I cannot get a charge dismissed, a sentence changed, or a record unsealed. If you are facing a deadline — an appeal, a court date, a statute of limitations — talk to a licensed Michigan lawyer now and write to me afterward. If you are in danger, call 911 rather than sending a form.

Do not send me anyone else's Social Security number, medical records, or a child's identifying information. If a document you want to share contains that material, tell me what it is and I will tell you how to get it to me safely. Everything published here is redacted first, and I would rather spend an hour redacting than publish one line that hurts someone who did not choose to be part of this.