Illustration for FOIA 25-136: How many plea deals in 2024? The office says it doesn't know
FOIA 25-136 · Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced

On Friday, June 27, 2025, at 8:53 in the morning, a two-page fax reached the Delta County Prosecutor's Office. It asked one question, in two parts: how many plea agreements did the office offer and accept in calendar year 2024, split between felony charges and misdemeanor charges. It did not ask for a case file, a defendant's name, or a document the office would have to write from scratch. It asked for a count, and it said so twice — once in the request itself and once in a sentence offering to take whatever form the office already had: “a simple table, spreadsheet, or internal report showing these counts is acceptable.”

The office answered on July 17, 2025. It denied the request in full. The reason given was not an exemption, not a privacy interest, not a fee, and not a claim that counting would be burdensome. The reason was that the record does not exist, certified in writing by the FOIA coordinator, after a search, “to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief.”

Nothing was produced. No pages, no spreadsheet, no table, no number. The office did not quote a fee, did not offer to let the requester inspect anything, and did not identify a single statutory exemption. It did, however, take a ten-business-day extension first — and the reason it gave for needing the extension was that it had to review “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” responsive to the request.

Those two documents sit in the same eighteen-page packet, four pages apart. One says the office needs more time because of the volume of records. The other says there are no records. This page is about that pair of sentences, and about what a certificate of nonexistence can and cannot honestly mean when the thing requested is a number.

How to read this page

Documented facts come from the released packet and are dated and quoted. The agency's position is what the office asserted or did. Legal interpretation is analysis of Michigan's Freedom of Information Act, labeled as such. Open questions are issues the record does not resolve. This page does not claim that the denial was unlawful. Michigan's FOIA does not require a public body to compute a statistic or build a report, and the office was entitled to say no. What this page examines is narrower and more concrete: whether the office described accurately what it was refusing, and whether the answer it gave left the requester any path forward at all.

Summary

FOIA 25-136 is the shortest file in this archive and the emptiest. It contains one request, one denial, one certificate, one extension form, two copies of the office's FOIA policy page, two copies of the county's fax-receipt email, a blank appeal form, a two-page excerpt of the appeal statute, and a page that says, in as many words, “This page left blank on purpose.” Eighteen pages of paper. Zero pages of records.

Six numbers describe the outcome, and five of them are zero. Zero pages produced. Zero dollars quoted. Zero dollars paid. Zero exemptions cited. Zero of the twelve months in 2024 addressed — the denial does not say which months the office could report on, or whether the answer differs before and after its case management system went live in June 2024. The sixth number is ten: the business days of extension the office took, for a request it then said required no search because there was nothing to find.

There is a version of this file in which the office is simply right. A prosecutor's office is not required to maintain a running tally of plea agreements by charge level, and if no such tally exists, a certificate of nonexistence is the correct and lawful answer. That version is available on this record, and this page states it plainly because it is probably the legally correct one.

But the lawful answer and the accurate answer are not the same answer, and the gap between them is where this file becomes useful. A certificate of nonexistence is a statement about documents. The request asked for a count. Those are different things, and the office's letter never acknowledges the difference. It does not say “no compiled report exists, but the underlying plea agreements do.” It does not say “we decline to compile a new record under MCL 15.233(4).” It says the public records requested do not exist — full stop — and then closes the file.

What was requested

The request is dated June 27, 2025, captioned “Michigan Freedom of Information Act Request — 2024 Plea Agreements,” and addressed both to the “FOIA Coordinator” and to “Lauren Wickman, Prosecutor” at 310 Ludington Street, Escanaba. It was transmitted by fax at 8:53:42 a.m. Eastern, and the county's own fax platform logged it at that minute, two pages, from an out-of-state number that is redacted on this site.

The operative paragraph is one sentence long:

“Please provide the total number of plea agreements offered and accepted by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office for the calendar year January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024, categorized by: Felony charges; Misdemeanor charges. If available, a simple table, spreadsheet, or internal report showing these counts is acceptable.”

Five features of that request matter to how it should have been read, and the office's response engages with none of them.

It asked for a number, not a document. The words “total number” are the whole request. Everything else is a description of acceptable packaging. A requester who asks “how many” has not asked for a file; he has asked a question that a file might answer.

It offered the office every cheap route out. “If available, a simple table, spreadsheet, or internal report showing these counts is acceptable.” That sentence is a requester saying: do not build me anything elaborate. A database export, a screenshot, three numbers typed into an email — any of those would have satisfied it. The request even named the preferred delivery method: “electronically (PDF, Excel, or CSV) via email or secure download link.”

It set a fifty-dollar ceiling and asked for an estimate first. “If the estimated cost to process this request exceeds $50, please provide a detailed written estimate in advance.” This is the provision that most often produces a useful answer, because it forces the office to price the work. Here it produced nothing: no estimate was issued, because no work was priced.

It asked for exemptions to be named and for the rest to be released. “If you deny any part of this request, please cite each specific statutory exemption you are relying on and provide all reasonably segregable non-exempt portions, per MCL 15.244.” This is the sentence that anticipates the most likely real-world objection — that plea agreements carry defendant names, dates of birth, and other personal detail — and pre-empts it by asking for redaction rather than withholding.

It named the clock. “I look forward to your acknowledgment and complete response within the timeframe required under MCL 15.235.” The requester knew the statute well enough to cite the receipt rule, the extension rule, and the segregation duty. This was not a request that had to be guessed at.

The paper trail

Figure 1 · Six dates, and only one of them is disputed

Select any date to read what happened and which clock it started or stopped.

Dates from the response letter dated July 17, 2025, the Notice of Denial, the Notice to Extend Response Time, and the county fax platform log. Statutory deadlines computed under MCL 15.235.

Documented: the response is dated July 17, 2025 and captioned “Re: FOIA Request #25-136.” It runs two pages. Page one acknowledges the request, quotes it verbatim, denies it, certifies nonexistence, and explains the appeal right. Page two says “If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me,” signs off “Best Regards,” and carries two signatures — one over the label “Prosecuting Attorney” and one over the label “FOIA Coordinator.” The footer gives 310 Ludington Street, Suite 237, Escanaba, Michigan 49829, and the telephone number (906) 789-5115.

The accompanying Notice of Denial form is filled in with more care than the letter. It is checked “All” of the request was denied, not “Part.” Reason box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” is checked. Reason box 1, “Exempt from Disclosure,” is not checked, and no FOIA section 13 subsection is filled in. Reason box 3, “Redaction,” is not checked, and no subsection or description is filled in. The contact named on the form is Emily DeSalvo.

Those three checkboxes are the most informative thing in the packet, because together they establish what the office is and is not claiming. It is not claiming that any part of the request is exempt. It is not claiming that anything was redacted. It is claiming only that the record does not exist. There is no fallback argument in this file, no alternative ground, nothing held in reserve. The entire denial rests on one factual assertion.

The Notice to Extend Response Time is a separate one-page form. It extends the response date to 7/18/25 — “for no more than 10 business days, until 7/18/25” — and checks reason 1: “The County needs to search for, collect, or appropriately examine or review a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records pursuant to your request.” Reason 2, the multiple-field-offices ground, is unchecked. The line for “Estimated Time Frame to Provide Records” is left blank. The contact is again Emily DeSalvo, at 906-789-5100.

The rest of the packet is packaging. Two pages reproduce MCL 15.240 in full. One is a blank FOIA Appeal Form. Two pages are the county's automated fax-receipt email, forwarded from a county address, showing the TelNet fax notification, the destination fax line, the sending station identifier, the receive time of 6.27.2025 08:53:42 AM -04:00, and a two-page attachment of 44 kilobytes. Two pages are the request itself, exactly as faxed. Two pages are a printout of the Delta County FOIA policy web page. One page reads, in full, “This page left blank on purpose.”

That is a complete inventory of eighteen pages, and not one of them is a public record responsive to the request.

The extension and the certificate

Set the two forms side by side and the file develops a problem that no amount of legal analysis resolves.

What the office said, in the order it said it
DocumentDateWhat it says
Notice to Extend Response Time Extends to July 18, 2025 “The County needs to search for, collect, or appropriately examine or review a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records pursuant to your request.”
Response letter July 17, 2025 “A record of ‘the total number of plea agreements offered and accepted…’ does not exist… the public records requested do not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.”
Notice of Denial July 17, 2025 “All” denied. Box 2 checked: Record Does Not Exist. Box 1 (exempt) unchecked. Box 3 (redaction) unchecked.

An extension under MCL 15.235(2) is available for “unusual circumstances,” and the form the county uses translates that into three specific grounds. The office picked the first: volume. It told the requester, in writing, on a county form, that the reason it could not answer within five business days was the sheer quantity of responsive records it had to examine.

Ten business days later it answered that there were no responsive records.

Both statements can be literally true in exactly one scenario: the office began a search expecting volume, discovered none, and then said so. That is a perfectly ordinary thing to happen, and if it is what happened, the office is entitled to the benefit of it. Nothing in this packet contradicts that account.

But if that is what happened, the file should show a search. A search that begins with an expectation of volume and ends in nothing leaves a trail: a query run against a case management system, a list of file locations checked, a note that the county's records for 2024 are held in a particular place and that place was examined. The certificate in this packet says only that the coordinator searched “to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief.” It does not describe a single place the search went. And the extension form's “Estimated Time Frame to Provide Records” field, which exists precisely to record what the office expected to do with the extra time, is blank.

Open question: what was the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” that required ten additional business days? The packet identifies none, and the denial says there were none. One of the two forms is describing something that did not happen.

The zeros

Five of the six outcome measures in this file are zero, and the pattern is worth seeing at once, because individually each zero has an innocent explanation and together they describe a closed door.

Pages of records produced0
Fee estimate issued$0
Statutory exemptions cited0
Redactions described0
Inspection offeredNo
Months of 2024 addressed0 of 12

Take them one at a time.

Zero pages produced is the headline, but it is not by itself a criticism. A denial in full produces nothing by definition.

Zero fee estimate is the one that matters most, and it is the one that is hardest to explain. The requester set a fifty-dollar ceiling and asked for an advance estimate. The office did not quote one cent. It also did not say “we could produce this for $X, above your limit” — which is the answer a requester can actually use, because it tells him what the information costs and lets him decide whether to raise the ceiling. It said nothing about cost at all.

That silence is striking in light of this office's other files. When asked for a conviction rate across roughly 3,300 case files, the office quoted $9,548 and a $4,774 deposit. When asked for arraignment-to-disposition averages across roughly 886 cases, it quoted $2,931.12 and a $1,465.56 deposit. This office knows how to price a manual review of case files. It has done so, twice, in writing, with fifteen-minute increments and fringe rates. In FOIA 25-136 it priced nothing — not the search, not a database query, not a redacted set of the underlying agreements.

Zero exemptions cited is correct as far as it goes, because the office did not rely on an exemption. But it has a consequence the letter never mentions. If no exemption applies, then nothing in the request is exempt from disclosure — which means the only thing standing between the requester and the information is the office's assertion that the information is not written down anywhere in a form that can be produced.

Zero redactions described follows from the same place. The Notice of Denial's redaction box is unchecked, and no separated material is described, as MCL 15.235(5)(c) would require if a separation had been made. Nothing was separated because nothing was released.

No inspection offered is the cheapest missed option in the file. The requester did not ask to inspect — unlike FOIA 25-129, where inspection was expressly offered and never answered — but inspection is the remedy the statute contemplates when copying is expensive or when the record is voluminous. An office that believes the count cannot be produced could still say: the plea agreements are in the case files, the case files are public records, you may come and read them. That offer costs the office nothing and would have moved the dispute from “does this number exist” to “how much does it cost to count.” It was not made.

Zero of twelve months addressed is the quietest and, in this archive, the most familiar. The request covers January 1 through December 31, 2024. The office's case management system, ProsecutorByKarpel, went live in June 2024. A denial that says the record does not exist for the whole year says, implicitly, that it does not exist for the seven months in which the office was running a system that records charging decisions and dispositions, and for the five months before it. It does not distinguish between them. It does not say “we can report July through December.” It does not say “the pre-June period would have to be assembled from court records.” It says the record does not exist.

A pattern across four requests for a number

FOIA 25-136 is not an isolated answer. It is the fourth time in this archive that the office has been asked for a computed figure, and the fourth different way of not providing one.

Four requests for a number, four answers
FOIAWhat was askedWhat came back
25-94 Five years of case outcome statistics and warrant counts by police agency Granted in part. Three years of warrant counts by agency released. The case-outcome and performance records were said not to exist.
25-129 Average and median days from arraignment to disposition, 2024 Denied as nonexistent, certified — then priced at $2,931.12 for 3,544 minutes to review approximately 886 cases containing the very dates said not to exist.
26-22 Conviction rate, 2024 Denied as nonexistent, certified — then priced at $9,548 with a $4,774 deposit to search roughly 3,300 case files.
25-136 Number of plea agreements offered and accepted, 2024, felony and misdemeanor Denied in full as nonexistent, certified. No fee quoted. No inspection offered. No exemption cited. No month of 2024 distinguished.

The pattern is not that the office denies requests for statistics. It is that the office has two responses to a request for a number, and both end the conversation. In two files it certified nonexistence and then quoted a price large enough to make the answer academic. In this file it certified nonexistence and quoted nothing, which is cheaper for the office and worse for the requester, because there is no number to negotiate against and no partial path to accept.

There is a third response available, and it is the one this archive keeps looking for: no compiled report exists; here is what the underlying records are; here is what it would cost to count them; here is the portion we can produce today. That answer is lawful. It is also the only answer that leaves the public with anything.

The June 2024 line

Documented: the request covers calendar year 2024. ProsecutorByKarpel, the office's case management system, went live in June 2024.

That fact cuts in both directions, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

It explains why no system-generated plea report exists for the first five months of 2024. If the office had no case management system in January 2024, it had no system-generated report in January 2024, and a request for “an internal report showing these counts” covering that period could legitimately come back empty. This page does not fault the office for lacking system-generated reports before its system existed. That distinction is drawn on every file in this archive and it is drawn here.

But the go-live does not explain the answer the office actually gave, for three reasons.

First, the request asked for all twelve months and the answer covered none of them. A denial that distinguishes July–December from January–June would be a different document — a partial grant and a partial certificate, which is exactly what MCL 15.244 and the structure of MCL 15.235(5) contemplate. The office did not write that document. It wrote one certificate for the year.

Second, a case management system that went live in June 2024 has been recording plea dispositions for the entire period this archive has been asking about. That is what such systems do: they hold charges, offers, plea entries, and sentences. The existence of a system is not proof that a particular report exists inside it. But it is proof that the office's 2024 records are, for the second half of the year at least, held in a structured database rather than in paper files — and a structured database is the easiest possible place to obtain a count.

Third, the request asked for “offered and accepted,” and those are two different measurements. Agreements offered and agreements accepted are not the same number, and the gap between them is one of the more interesting figures a prosecutor's office could publish: it measures how often a negotiated resolution was proposed and declined. A certificate of nonexistence answers both halves at once, which means the public learns nothing about either.

The honest answer available to the office was a sentence it never wrote: “No compiled count exists. The underlying plea agreements for 2024 do exist in our case records. The portion from June 2024 forward can be exported from our case management system; the earlier portion would require a manual review. Here is what each would cost.” That sentence would have been lawful, accurate, and useful. Its absence is the transparency failure in this file.

The appeal, and what it would have had to decide

Documented: the response letter explains the appeal right in the statutory language. “If you disagree with this decision, you may submit an appeal to the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners, or seek judicial review in the Delta County Circuit Court. If you prevail in Circuit Court, you may be entitled to receive attorney fees, costs, and disbursements as well as actual or compensatory damages, and punitive damages of $1,000.00.” A blank FOIA Appeal Form is enclosed, and two pages of MCL 15.240 are reproduced in full.

Appeal status: denial upheld. The requester appealed, and the Board of Commissioners upheld the denial. Chair John Malnar’s letter of August 20, 2025 records receipt of the appeal on August 5, 2025 and the determination at a special meeting on August 18, 2025. The letter’s only stated reason is that the coordinator determined the records “were deemed to not exist.”

What the letter does not address. The office took a ten-business-day extension for the volume of records to be reviewed and then certified that the counts do not exist. The Board’s letter does not mention the extension, does not describe any search, and does not identify an exemption. It records no vote count and cites no agenda item. The written notice is dated August 20, one day after the ten-business-day deadline that ran from August 5.

That makes the appeal worth describing in the abstract, because in a file like this one it is the only remaining mechanism, and its shape determines whether the mechanism can work at all.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: under MCL 15.240(1)(a), a person denied may submit a written appeal to “the head of the public body” that states the word “appeal” and identifies the reasons for reversal. Under MCL 15.240(2), the head must within ten business days reverse the denial, uphold it in writing, reverse it in part, or extend once by up to ten business days. For a county, the “head” is the Board of Commissioners, not the prosecutor. Under MCL 15.240(3), a board is not considered to have received the appeal until its next regularly scheduled meeting, which means the ten-day clock can begin weeks after the appeal is mailed.

The appeal in this file had a specific and narrow question to answer, and it is not the question the Board answered in FOIA 25-129. There, the Board was asked to review a denial of a statistic and upheld it in a one-page letter that did not mention the 886 cases or the $2,931.12. Here, the question was sharper still: did the office actually search, and if it did, what did it search? The Board’s letter does not answer it, and does not record that the question was asked.

The certificate is the only evidence of the search, and it says the coordinator searched “to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief.” That is the statutory formula, and it is sufficient on its face. But a certificate that recites the formula without describing a single repository examined is, in practice, unreviewable: a Board cannot check it, and a court cannot test it. The requester's only route would have been to put the extension form next to the denial and ask the Board to reconcile them — volume of records on one page, no records on the other.

That is a fair question, and it is the one this file poses. It is also the reason the packet is worth publishing even though it contains no records: the two forms contradict each other on their face, and the contradiction is the office's own paperwork, not a requester's inference.

On timing: under MCL 15.240(1)(b) a civil action to compel disclosure must be brought within 180 days after the final determination. Counting from July 17, 2025, that period ran to approximately January 13, 2026. This page states the date because it is the deadline that governs, not because anything in the file shows it was missed.

What the statute required, and what it did not

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: the obligations in this file are narrower than they first appear, and on the face of the documents the office met most of them. Saying so is part of an honest reading.

The response was timely. Under MCL 15.235(1) a request transmitted by fax is not received until one business day after transmission, which for a Friday morning fax is the following Monday, June 30, 2025. Under MCL 15.235(2) the office then had five business days — July 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8, with July 4 a holiday — and one extension of up to ten business days, which would have run to July 22. The office recorded receipt on June 27, one day earlier than the statute requires, which shortened its own clock to July 7 and its extended date to July 21. Its extension form set July 18. It answered on July 17. Under every version of the arithmetic, the response was inside the deadline. This page does not allege delay, because there was none.

A denial notice was issued, and it took the right form. Where the reason for a denial is that a record does not exist, MCL 15.235(5)(b) requires a certificate of nonexistence “if that is the reason.” The office supplied one, in the statutory language. Where a denial rests on an exemption, MCL 15.235(5)(a) requires an explanation of the basis. The office claimed no exemption, so that clause was not triggered. Where material is separated, MCL 15.235(5)(c) requires a description of it. Nothing was separated. And MCL 15.235(5)(d) requires the appeal right to be explained using the word “appeal” and naming the head of the public body; the letter does both, naming the chairperson of the Board of Commissioners.

The act did not require the office to count anything. This is the provision that most plausibly supports the denial, and the office did not cite it. MCL 15.233(4) provides that the act “does not require a public body to make a compilation, summary, or report of information, except as required in section 11.” MCL 15.233(5) provides that the act “does not require a public body to create a new public record,” apart from the furnishing of copies or edited copies of an already existing record. A requester who asks for a total the office has never calculated is asking for a compilation, and the office may decline.

So the denial was probably lawful. The difficulty is not the outcome; it is the description.

A certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.235(5)(b) is a statement that a record does not exist. What the office declined to do, on any fair reading, was compile a count — a different act, governed by a different subsection, with a different justification. The office had a lawful sentence available to it: “No compiled report exists, and the act does not require us to create one under MCL 15.233(4).” It did not write that sentence. It wrote that the public records requested do not exist, “under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.”

Those two statements are not equivalent, and the difference is not pedantic. The first tells the requester that the data may exist but the summary does not, and that the summary is the thing being refused. The second tells him that nothing is there. A requester who receives the second answer has no reason to ask a follow-up question, no reason to narrow the request, and no reason to appeal — because the answer he received says the information is not in the building.

And the segregation duty still applies to whatever does exist. MCL 15.244 requires a public body to separate exempt from nonexempt material and make the nonexempt material available. It does not require the office to count plea agreements. It does require that if the office holds plea agreements for 2024 — records “prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by” the office in the performance of an official function, within MCL 15.232(i) — then a refusal to produce them must rest on an identified exemption applied to identified material, with the remainder released. The Notice of Denial identifies no exemption and no material. That is consistent with the office's position that it produced nothing because nothing was requested that exists. It is not consistent with any position that the underlying agreements were considered and withheld.

The one provision the office did not address at all is the fee provision. The requester set a $50 ceiling and asked for an advance estimate. Under MCL 15.234(2) a fee must be itemized so as to express the hourly wage and the number of hours, with fringe benefits not exceeding 50 percent. Under MCL 15.234(8) a deposit may be required where the estimate exceeds $50, capped at one half. None of that machinery was engaged, because no estimate was issued. A zero-dollar answer is not a fee violation. It is simply the end of the process: there is nothing to itemize, nothing to deposit, nothing to appeal under MCL 15.240a, and nothing to pay.

Authorities and sources

Show the statutes, cases, and sources cited on this page

Every statutory citation on this page was read in the official text at the Michigan Legislature's public act database and is recorded in this site's internal citation reference before use. The principal provisions relied on are MCL 15.232(i) (definition of public record), MCL 15.233(4) and (5) (no duty to compile, summarize, or create), MCL 15.234(2), (8) and (13) (itemization, deposits), MCL 15.235(1), (2), (5)(a)–(d) (receipt, deadlines, contents of a denial notice), MCL 15.240(1)–(3) and (7) (appeal to the head, 180-day civil action, $1,000 civil fine), MCL 15.240a (fee appeals), and MCL 15.244 (segregation).

The factual record for this page is the eighteen-page packet released in response to FOIA 25-136, consisting of the response letter dated July 17, 2025, the Notice of Denial, the Notice to Extend Response Time, the reproduced text of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, the county's fax-receipt notification for June 27, 2025, the request as faxed, and two printouts of the Delta County FOIA policy page. Redacted copies are linked below. The unredacted originals are retained privately and are not hosted on the public server.

What comes next

Three things follow from this file, in ascending order of usefulness.

1. A narrower request. The denial is broad because the request was broad. A request limited to July 1 through December 31, 2024 — the period after ProsecutorByKarpel went live — removes the transition objection entirely and leaves the office with only one possible answer. A request framed as “the number of cases in which a plea of guilty or no contest was entered, by charge level” also avoids the word “agreements,” which the office may read as referring to a document type it does not maintain.

2. A request for the underlying records rather than the count. If the office's position is that the count does not exist but the agreements do, then the agreements are the public records and the count is arithmetic. A request for a representative sample — say, all plea agreements entered in a single month — tests whether the office will produce the underlying documents with names redacted under MCL 15.243(1)(a). If it will, the count is a spreadsheet exercise. If it will not, the reason will finally have to be stated as an exemption rather than an absence.

3. A request for the search itself. The certificate says a search was made. It does not say where. A request for any record documenting the search — a query log, a case-management export, an email between staff about the request, the completed worksheet behind the extension form — would establish whether the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” identified on the extension form was ever located. Those records, if they exist, are public records about the handling of a public records request, and there is no exemption that obviously covers them.

Correlation note — added October 23, 2026. FOIA 25-133, now in this archive, is the closest sibling to this file and the reason for this note. It asked the same office, in the same summer, for a 2024 count of charging activity — monthly felony and misdemeanor charge authorizations — and it too was answered with a certificate of nonexistence. The difference is what came with the certificate. The July 17, 2025 letter in 25-133 attached an annual screening table for the same year and called it responsive, and a September 2, 2025 supplemental letter then offered “the underlying information that would allow for your requested statistical summaries or breakdowns to be calculated” for $2,815.20, with a $1,407.60 deposit and a 180-day estimate. This file got none of that: no table, no price, no inspection, no offer. Both requests asked for a number about 2024. Nothing in either packet explains why one was priced and the other was not.

Correlation note — added October 23, 2026. FOIA 25-134, now in this archive, is this file's twin. It was faxed the same morning, asked the same kind of question about the same year — how many criminal cases were dismissed in 2024, felony and misdemeanor — and was answered with the same July 17, 2025 letter, the same certificate of nonexistence, and the same Notice of Denial with reason box 2 checked. Both requests took the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” extension and then certified that no responsive records existed. Read together, the two files show that this was not a one-off handling of one difficult request. It was the office's standard answer, on a single day, to two of the most basic numeric questions it could be asked about its own work in 2024.

Correlation note — added October 23, 2026. FOIA 25-135, now in this archive, is the third request faxed to this office on the same morning, and it is the one that breaks the pattern in an instructive way. It asked for a five-field summary of every 2024 case prosecuted to trial. Page one of its July 17, 2025 response denies the request because “the record do not exist” — the same sentence this file received. Page two of that same letter grants the request in part and lists eight case files, which the office then produced in twenty-four pages. So of the three same-morning requests that were all certified nonexistent, one came back with the records attached. Nothing in any of the three packets explains why 25-135 produced twenty-four pages while 25-134 and 25-136 produced none.

A note on what this page does not claim. It does not claim that the denial was unlawful, because the act does not require the office to compile a statistic it has never compiled. It does not claim that the response was late, because it was not. It does not claim that the office failed to search, because the certificate says it searched and this archive has no evidence to the contrary. It does not claim that plea agreements for 2024 exist in a form that could be counted, because the packet does not show that either.

It claims something narrower and fully documented: that the office told the requester in writing that it needed ten more business days because of the volume of responsive records, and then told him in writing that there were no responsive records; that it certified the absence of a record in answer to a request for a number, without ever distinguishing the two; that it quoted no fee, offered no inspection, and named no exemption, closing every route by which the requester might have narrowed, appealed, or paid his way to an answer; and that it did all of this in a packet of eighteen pages that contains not one responsive document. Those are documentary observations. They are enough.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-180, now in this archive, is the next variation on the certificate this file received. Filed August 2, 2025 and answered August 8, 2025, it asked for 2024 trial counts by type and verdict and was denied the same way: a certificate of nonexistence, a zero-dollar price, and no pages produced. The difference is the Notice of Denial. Where this file's form checks box 2 alone, the 25-180 form checks box 1, “Exempt from Disclosure,” and box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” on the same request, with the exemption subsection line left blank and a cross-reference to FOIA 25-135 inserted in the space where the exemption would go. The two reasons are alternatives, not complements. Checking both, and naming neither exemption, is the same practice this file documents — answering a request for a number with a statement about a record — carried one step further into internal contradiction.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-239, now in this archive, is the direct contrast to the certificate this file received. Filed October 10, 2025, it asked for any list of officers with sustained credibility findings and for the office’s tracking policy. Where this file was closed with a certificate of nonexistence and no pages, 25-239 was answered with 137 pages, a partial grant, and a plain-language explanation that the office requests credibility information case by case rather than keeping a list. Two requests, both for a compiled record the office might not maintain: one got a certificate, the other got the components and an explanation. Nothing in either packet explains why the office answered them so differently.

Documents

These are redacted copies prepared for publication. Requester names, home addresses, personal phone numbers, and email addresses have been removed. Unredacted originals are not hosted on the public web server.

FOIA Request (redacted) The two-page request faxed on June 27, 2025, asking for the number of plea agreements offered and accepted in 2024, felony and misdemeanor, with the $50 cost ceiling, the segregation demand and the offer to accept a table, spreadsheet or internal report. Requester identifiers removed. Response Letter and Certificate of Nonexistence (redacted) The two-page letter dated July 17, 2025 denying the request in full, with the certificate of nonexistence in the statutory language and the explanation of the appeal right. Notice of Denial (redacted) “All” denied; box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” checked; the exemption box and the redaction box left blank; Emily DeSalvo named as contact. Notice to Extend Response Time (redacted) The extension form extending the response date to July 18, 2025, with reason box 1 checked for “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” and the estimated time frame left blank. Board of Commissioners Appeal Decision (redacted) The August 20, 2025 letter from Chair John Malnar upholding the denial. It records receipt of the appeal on August 5, 2025 and the determination at a special meeting on August 18, 2025. It does not mention the volume-based extension the office took before certifying that the counts do not exist.