FOIA 25-137: The average time from charge to disposition, certified not to exist — after a ten-day extension for “voluminous” records

Watchdog Alerts

Why isn’t this basic information available to the public?

1. The office took a ten-business-day extension because it needed to review “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records,” then denied the request in full because there were no responsive records. Both forms are in the same packet. One of them is describing something that did not happen.
2. The request asked for a number. The office certified that a record does not exist. Those are different claims, and the letter never distinguishes them — it does not say “no compiled average exists but the underlying case records do,” and it does not invoke MCL 15.233(4), the provision that lets a public body decline to compile a summary or answer a question.
3. The office never addressed the measurement question. “Charge authorization” and “final disposition” are both defined in the office's own case records. A denial that treats the request as unanswerable does not say which of the two dates the office cannot produce.
4. The response gives no indication whether the answer differs before and after the office's case-management system went live in June 2024. A request covering all of calendar year 2024 spans both sides of that change, and the office said nothing about it.
5. The packet is eighteen pages long and contains no responsive document. The office spent more paper explaining that it had nothing than it would have spent producing a two-line average.

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024, and this request covers calendar year 2024, so roughly five months of the requested period predate the system. This page does not fault the office for lacking a system-generated average before June 2024. The criticism is that the office never said which months it could report on, or whether the system it adopted in June 2024 can compute charge-to-disposition time at all.

On Friday, June 27, 2025, at 8:56 in the morning, a two-page fax reached the Delta County Prosecutor's Office. It asked for one number: the average time, in days, between charge authorization and final disposition for every criminal case the office prosecuted in calendar year 2024. It asked, if the office happened to have it, for the same figure split between felonies and misdemeanors. It did not ask for a defendant's name or a case file. It said, in plain words, that “a summary table, spreadsheet, or internal report is acceptable” — that whatever form the office already kept the figure in would do.

On July 2, 2025, the office filed a Notice to Extend Response Time. It checked reason box 1: the county needed to search for, collect, or appropriately examine or review “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” responsive to the request. It extended the response date to July 18, 2025 and stated an estimated time frame of the same day.

On July 17, 2025, the office answered. It denied the request in full. The reason was not an exemption, not a privacy interest, not a fee, and not a claim that the work 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 average. No fee was quoted, no inspection was offered, and no statutory exemption was named. The Notice of Denial checks “All” denied and reason box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” and leaves the exemption box and the redaction box blank.

Those two documents sit in the same eighteen-page packet, eight days apart. One says the office needs more time because of the volume of records responsive to the request. The other says there are no responsive records. This page is about that pair of sentences, and about what a certificate of nonexistence can honestly mean when the thing requested is a number rather than a document.

Summary

FOIA 25-137 is the third request in this archive to ask the Delta County Prosecutor's Office for a single number describing its own work in calendar year 2024, and the third to be answered with a certificate of nonexistence. FOIA 25-134 asked how many criminal cases the office had dismissed. FOIA 25-136 asked how many plea agreements it had offered and accepted. 25-137 asked how long its cases took, from the moment a charge was authorized to the moment the case was finally disposed of. Dismissals, pleas, and elapsed time — the back end, the front end, and the clock. The office certified that none of the three numbers exists.

All three were faxed on the same morning in late June 2025. All three offered to accept whatever internal table, spreadsheet, or report the office already had. All three set a fifty-dollar ceiling and asked for a written estimate in advance under MCL 15.234. All three asked the office to name any exemption and release the rest under MCL 15.244. All three were answered on July 17, 2025 with the same two-page letter, the same certificate, the same Notice of Denial with reason box 2 checked, and the same blank appeal form. All three went to the Board of Commissioners, which received the appeals on August 5, 2025 and upheld the denials at a special meeting on August 18, 2025.

The difference is what a case-processing average would actually measure. A dismissal count tells you how often prosecutions end without a conviction. A plea count tells you how often they end with a deal. An average charge-to-disposition time tells you something a prosecutor's office is uniquely positioned to know and uniquely reluctant to publish: how long a person waits, from the day the state decides to charge to the day the matter is over. That is the number that describes the experience of being prosecuted in Delta County, and it is the number the office says it does not have.

Six numbers describe the outcome of 25-137, and five of them are zero. Zero pages produced. Zero dollars quoted. Zero dollars paid. Zero exemptions cited. Zero of the twelve months of 2024 separately 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 average of charge-to-disposition time, and if no such average has ever been computed, 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 measurement. Those are different things, and the office's letter never acknowledges the difference. It does not say “no compiled average exists, but the underlying case records with their filing and disposition dates 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 27th, 2025, captioned “Michigan Freedom of Information Act Request — Average Case Processing Time for 2024,” and addressed both to the “FOIA Coordinator” and to “Prosecutor Wickman” at 310 Ludington Street, Escanaba. It was transmitted by fax at 8:56:43 a.m. Eastern, and the county's own fax platform logged it at 8:57 that morning, two pages, from an out-of-state number that is redacted on this site.

The operative paragraph reads:

“Please provide the average time from charge authorization to final disposition for all criminal cases prosecuted by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office during the calendar year January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024. If available, please include: The overall average (in days); If possible, a breakdown by felony vs misdemeanor classification. A summary table, spreadsheet, or internal report 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 measurement, not a document. The words “the average time from charge authorization to final disposition” are the whole request. Everything else describes acceptable packaging. A requester who asks “how long” has not asked for a file; he has asked a question that the office's own case records would answer.

It named both endpoints precisely. “Charge authorization” is a specific event in a prosecutor's workflow — the moment the office authorizes a charge to be filed. “Final disposition” is the moment the case is closed, whether by plea, trial, dismissal, or transfer. Both are recorded in the case file. The request did not leave the office guessing about what to measure.

It offered the office every cheap route out. “A summary table, spreadsheet, or internal report is acceptable.” That sentence is a requester saying: do not build me anything elaborate. A database export, a screenshot, two 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 fulfill this request exceeds $50, please provide a detailed written estimate in advance, as required by MCL 15.234.” 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 any portion of this request is withheld, please cite each specific statutory exemption relied upon and provide all reasonably segregable non-exempt information, in accordance with MCL 15.244.” This is the sentence that anticipates the most likely real-world objection — that case-level records carry defendant names, dates of birth, and other personal detail — and pre-empts it by asking for redaction rather than withholding.

The request also named the clock: “I look forward to your acknowledgment and complete response within the statutory timeframe under MCL 15.235.” This was not a request that had to be guessed at.

The paper trail

Two details in the timeline are worth pausing on. The first is that the office dated its own receipt to the day the fax arrived. Under MCL 15.235(1), a request sent by fax is not received until one business day after transmission, which would be Monday, June 30. By recording receipt on June 27, the office gave itself a shorter clock, not a longer one. That is a small point in the office's favor, and it is noted here because accuracy cuts both ways.

The second is the one-day gap between the letter and the form. The cover letter is dated July 17, 2025. The signature line on the Notice of Denial is dated 7-18-2025, verified at high resolution on the released copy. That is not a scandal; a form signed the next morning is ordinary paperwork. But it matters for one reason: July 18 is the date the extension form said the response was due. Whatever the sequence inside the office, the public record shows a response that landed on the extension deadline and a denial form dated the day after the letter that carried it.

The extension and the certificate

Here is the heart of the file. The office produced two documents that describe the same request in incompatible terms, and it produced them within the same response package, eight days apart.

Documented: The extension form is in the packet. It identifies request 25-137, it is dated July 2, 2025, and it checks reason box 1 — the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” ground. It extends the response date to July 18, 2025 and states an estimated time frame of the same day. The denial letter is also in the packet, dated July 17, 2025, and it certifies that after a search the requested records do not exist.

Those two statements cannot both be true in the ordinary sense. If the office needed ten extra business days to work through a voluminous set of responsive records, then responsive records existed on July 2. If no responsive record existed, there was no volume to work through and nothing to extend for. The packet does not reconcile them. It does not say the search began, found a large volume, and then concluded that none of it was responsive. It does not say the extension was precautionary. It simply contains both documents and leaves the contradiction on the page.

There is a charitable reading, and it should be stated. A FOIA coordinator facing a request for a statistic may not know, on day three, whether the office can produce it. She may reasonably take the extension while she asks the case-management staff whether an export exists. When the answer comes back that no one has ever computed this, she certifies nonexistence. Under that reading, the extension was a good-faith hedge, and the certificate is honest.

What that reading cannot explain is why the letter says nothing about it. A one-sentence addition — “the office took an extension to determine whether a compiled average existed; none does” — would have made the packet coherent. The office did not write that sentence. It wrote a certificate that speaks only in the statutory formula, and it left the requester to notice the extension on his own.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(2)(d) permits a public body to extend the response period by up to ten business days when “the requested records are voluminous” or when fulfilling the request requires examining a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records. The extension is a procedural device premised on the existence of records to examine. A certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.233(5) is a substantive assertion that no responsive record exists. Invoking the first and then relying on the second is not automatically unlawful — the statute does not forbid a body from extending and then concluding that nothing exists. But the two are in tension, and a public body that takes the volume extension has, in effect, told the requester that records exist. If it later says they do not, the burden of explaining the change falls on the body, not on the requester.

What was asked, and what came back

The scorecard makes the shape of the response visible. The office did one thing well — it answered inside the statutory window — and then disposed of six separate requests with one sentence. That is efficient, and it is lawful, and it is also the reason this file exists: a requester who asks seven things and receives one certificate has no way to tell which of the seven the office actually considered.

A number is not a document

The most useful thing this record does is force a distinction that the office's letter blurs. Under Michigan's FOIA, a “public record” is a writing prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by a public body in the performance of an official function. A case file is a public record. A docket sheet is a public record. A database is a public record. An average is none of those things. An average is a calculation performed on records.

So when the office certifies that “the public records requested do not exist,” it is making a claim about writings, and the request was making a claim about arithmetic. Both can be true at once: there may be no document containing the average, and there may be thousands of documents from which the average could be computed. The letter does not say which of those situations applies, and the difference is the entire value of the request.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233(4) addresses exactly this situation. It provides that a public body is not required to make a compilation, summary, or report of information, or to provide a certified copy of a record, unless the request is for a record that already exists. In other words, Michigan law gives a public body a clean, honest way to say: “we do not have this computed, and we are not required to compute it.” That is a different answer from “the record does not exist,” and it carries different consequences. A body relying on MCL 15.233(4) is acknowledging that the underlying records exist and that the requester may obtain them, subject to fee and redaction. A body relying on a certificate of nonexistence is saying there is nothing to obtain at all.

The office chose the second framing without ever mentioning the first. That choice has a practical consequence for the requester: it ends the conversation. If the answer is “we decline to compile,” the requester can respond by narrowing the request to the underlying records — give me the case list with filing and disposition dates and I will do the arithmetic. If the answer is “no such record exists,” there is nothing to narrow, and the only remaining move is an appeal or a lawsuit.

Open question: Did the office search its case-management system for a disposition-date field at all? The letter does not say. If the system the office adopted in June 2024 records both a charge-authorization date and a disposition date — and a case-management system built for a prosecutor's office almost certainly does — then a report could be generated, and the question becomes whether the office is required to generate it. That is a legal question under MCL 15.233(4), and it is a question the letter never reaches.

The system, and the five months before it

ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024. This request covers January 1 through December 31, 2024, so roughly five months of the requested period predate the system. That matters, and this page does not fault the office for lacking a system-generated average before June 2024. A paper-and-spreadsheet office cannot produce a clean database export of a year it did not spend in a database.

But the request did not ask for a database export. It asked for the average, and it explicitly said a summary table, spreadsheet, or internal report would do. An office that kept case files on paper in the first half of 2024 and in a case-management system in the second half could still answer the question, at least approximately, and could certainly say which months it could answer for. The office said nothing about any of this. The certificate does not distinguish January from December, does not mention the system, and does not say whether the answer would be different after June.

That silence is the most concrete criticism available on this record. It is not that the office refused to compute a number. It is that the office did not tell the public whether the number is computable, for which months, and from what. A one-paragraph letter explaining that the office's system went live in June 2024 and that the first five months would require a manual review at a stated cost would have been a complete and honest answer. It would also have been a public record of the office's own transition, which is precisely the kind of fact this site exists to collect.

The pattern: a number, then a certificate

25-137 is not an isolated refusal. It is the third instance in this archive of a statistical question answered with a certificate of nonexistence, and the fifth request in which the office either certified a number away or priced it out of reach. The table below sets the instances side by side.

Read together, the six rows describe a consistent posture. When the office is asked for a document it already has, it produces the document. When it is asked for a statistic it has not compiled, it either certifies that the statistic does not exist or prices the compilation high enough that the request dies. The two outcomes look different on paper — a certificate is free, a quote is expensive — but they have the same effect: the public does not learn the number.

25-137 is the cleanest example of the first path, because the office did not even price the work. A quote of $2,931.12 would at least have told the requester that the office knew how to compute the figure and was willing to, for a fee. A certificate tells him there is nothing to buy. Between an expensive answer and no answer, the second is harder to challenge, because there is no fee determination to appeal under MCL 15.240a and no produced record to test.

The appeal, and what it did not address

The requester appealed to the Delta County Board of Commissioners. The Board received the appeal at its regular meeting on August 5, 2025, determined to uphold the denial at a special meeting on August 18, 2025, and Chair John Malnar signed the written notice on August 20, 2025.

The letter is one page. Its operative sentence is: “Your request was initially denied because the response excluded records that the Delta County FOIA Coordinator determined were deemed to not exist.” That is the entire reasoning. The letter does not mention the ten-business-day extension the office took for the volume of records. It does not describe any search. It does not identify an exemption. It does not address the distinction between a compiled average and the underlying case records. It records no vote count and cites no agenda item.

The timing is worth noting in the office's favor: the tenth business day after August 5 was August 19, so the determination on August 18 fell inside the statutory period. The written notice, dated August 20, came one day after that period closed — a minor point, and not one this page treats as a violation, since the determination itself was timely.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.240(1) gives a requester two routes: appeal to the head of the public body, or file a civil action in circuit court. The Board of Commissioners is the appeal authority for a county prosecutor's denial, and its determination is what the statute contemplates. But MCL 15.240(2) requires the body to “determine” the appeal, and a determination that merely restates the coordinator's conclusion without examining the basis for it is difficult to distinguish from a rubber stamp. The statute does not define how thorough the review must be. It does, however, place the appeal in front of a differently constituted body, which implies that the body is expected to look at something the coordinator did not.

The legal framework, in plain terms

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(2) gives a public body five business days to respond to a FOIA request, and permits one extension of up to ten business days in defined circumstances, including when the requested records are voluminous. The office used that extension here and then answered inside the extended window. On the face of the statute, the timing was correct.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233(5) provides that if a public body does not possess a record, it shall certify that fact in writing to the requester. The certificate in this packet tracks the statutory language closely. If the office genuinely possesses no document containing a charge-to-disposition average, the certificate is the right form of answer, and the office complied with the statute by giving it.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233(4) is the provision the letter does not use. It allows a public body to decline to make a compilation, summary, or report of information, and to decline to provide a certified copy of a record, unless the request is for a record that already exists. The distinction between (4) and (5) is the distinction between “we will not compute this” and “this does not exist.” A body that relies on (4) is acknowledging the underlying records; a body that relies on (5) is denying them. Choosing (5) when the truth is closer to (4) is not a technicality. It tells the requester there is nothing further to ask for.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234 governs fees. It permits a public body to charge for the cost of searching, examining, reviewing, and separating records, computed at the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of the work, plus fringe benefits, and it requires an itemized estimate if one is requested. The request here asked for an estimate in advance if the cost would exceed $50. No estimate was issued. That is consistent with a certificate of nonexistence — there was no work to price — but it also means the requester never learned what the office thought the work would cost, which is the information that would have told him whether the office had considered doing it.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.244 requires a public body that withholds exempt material to separate and release the nonexempt portion. Because the office withheld nothing as exempt, the segregation duty was never triggered. The provision is relevant here only because the request invoked it, and because its invocation is evidence that the requester anticipated a redaction problem — names, dates of birth, victim identifiers — and offered to accept redacted records rather than full ones. The office did not take him up on it.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.240 provides the appeal route the requester used, and MCL 15.240a provides a separate route for challenging an excess fee. Because no fee was quoted, the fee-appeal route was unavailable. That is a structural feature worth naming: a certificate of nonexistence closes both the records question and the fee question at once, leaving only the general appeal and a circuit-court action.

Authorities and sources cited on this page

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

Michigan Freedom of Information Act, Public Act 442 of 1976, MCL 15.231 et seq., in particular MCL 15.233(4) (compilation and summary), MCL 15.233(5) (certificate of nonexistence), MCL 15.234 (fees and estimates), MCL 15.235 (response deadlines and extensions), MCL 15.240 (appeals and civil actions), MCL 15.240a (fee appeals), and MCL 15.244 (segregation of exempt material).

Documents relied on: the FOIA request dated June 27, 2025 and its fax receipt; the Notice to Extend Response Time for Request No. 25-137 dated July 2, 2025; the response letter dated July 17, 2025; the Notice of Denial for Request No. 25-137 bearing a signature-line date of 7-18-2025; and the Delta County Board of Commissioners letter dated August 20, 2025 signed by Chair John Malnar. All are reproduced, with requester identifiers removed, in the document list on this page.

Comparisons drawn from other records in this archive: FOIA 25-129 (arraignment-to-disposition times, certified nonexistent and then priced at $2,931.12), FOIA 25-133 (annual screening data produced, monthly counts priced at $2,815.20), FOIA 25-134 (dismissed-case count certified nonexistent after a volume extension), FOIA 25-136 (plea-agreement counts certified nonexistent), and FOIA 26-20 (aggregate case totals produced).

What would move this forward

The productive next step is not another request for the average. It is a request for the underlying records that would let the average be computed, in a form the office cannot describe as a compilation. A per-case list for calendar year 2024 — case number, charge, charge-authorization date, disposition date, and resolution type, with names redacted — is a set of existing records, not a new report. If the office produces that list, the average can be computed by anyone. If the office refuses it, the refusal will have to be framed as an exemption or a fee, and either of those is reviewable in a way that a certificate of nonexistence is not.

Two narrower requests would also be useful. The first asks only for the office's case-management system documentation: what fields the system records, whether a disposition-date field exists, and what standard reports the system can generate. That is a request for existing configuration documents, and it would establish whether the office's claim of nonexistence is a statement about its software or about its recordkeeping. The second asks for the office's written FOIA procedures and any internal guidance on how statistical requests are handled — the document that would explain why a volume extension and a certificate of nonexistence were issued for the same request eight days apart.

Both of those requests are catalogued in our internal working list, with the specific wording and the record that supports each one.

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.

Related FOIA requests

• FOIA 26-292 — FOIA 26-292: The office used the requester's own cost-saving clause to withdraw the request, then offered to grant it if he removed the clause (Granted in part, denied in part — no records produced; the office conceded the data exists and refused the aggregate on the ground that the requester's own scope limitation excluded it, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-291 — FOIA 26-291: The office answered a request for a privilege log with nine document titles — and cited a subsection of the FOIA that does not exist (Granted in part — a nine-row title-and-date table supplying two of the eleven requested fields, no count, and a citation to a subsection of MCL 15.243 that does not exist, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-290 — FOIA 26-290: The office refused the victim-services records because it says you already have them — from a packet that contained none (Refused — five paragraphs labelled “granted” but zero pages produced, on the authority of a prior production that contained no responsive documents; the sixth paragraph received no disposition, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-131 — FOIA 26-131: Twenty case files, priced at $82.66 before a single page is copied (Granted in part — release conditioned on a $41.33 deposit; no records produced yet, April 17, 2026)
• FOIA 26-35 — FOIA 26-35: The office counted 52 pleas in 85 minutes — eight days after saying the same kind of aggregate did not exist (Granted — 52 pleas reported from the District and Circuit Court dockets, no fee quoted, no exemption cited, no pages withheld; the count is over-inclusive by the office's own admission, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-34 — FOIA 26-34: The office denied a count of diversion cases by defining “diversion” down to a programme it does not run (Denied — certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.233(1), Denial Form box 2 checked, on the ground that the only diversion programme in Delta County is juvenile diversion administered by the Probate Court; no exemption cited, no fee quoted, no waiver determination, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-33 — FOIA 26-33: Asked to count deferred prosecution agreements, the office certified the total nonexistent and priced the underlying data at $9,093.33 (Granted in part and denied in part — the aggregate record denied as requiring creation of a new record, with a certificate of nonexistence and Denial Form box 2 checked; the underlying data granted subject to a $9,093.33 estimate, a $4,546.66 deposit and a 270-day production estimate; public-interest fee waiver left undetermined, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-32 — FOIA 26-32: What the office's own memos say about the migration that broke its records — a 95-page production that answers its own denial (Granted in part, denied in part — five records produced across 95 pages, with only personal contact information redacted under MCL 15.243(1)(a); no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-31 — FOIA 26-31: Asked how many crime scenes a prosecutor attended, the office listed eight documents and denied them as duplicative (Denied in full — refused as a duplicative request under Densmore v Department of Corrections, on the ground that the eight listed records were already produced in response to FOIA 25-267; Denial Form box 1 checked with the section 13 subsection left blank; no aggregate figure supplied and no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-30 — FOIA 26-30: Eight documents, one number, and a Densmore refusal built on a premise the record does not fully support (Denied — no aggregate total produced; eight responsive documents identified but not reproduced under a Densmore prior-production rationale; no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-29 — FOIA 26-29: A count of inherited convictions the office could not locate — priced at $1,033.33 for the work of counting (No count produced — office could not locate a record; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,033.33 with a $516.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-28 — FOIA 26-28: A headcount of cases open when the prosecutor took office — denied, then priced at $1,653.33 on an 800-file baseline (Denied in part, granted in part — no record states the headcount, with a certificate of nonexistence; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,653.33 with an $826.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-22 — FOIA 26-22: A conviction rate the office says does not exist, priced at $9,548 (Denied — record does not exist; $9,548 quote for the underlying files, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-21 — FOIA 26-21: A count of convictions the office says does not exist — then a quiet amendment that changed the number behind the bill (Denied as a compilation — no count produced; fee of $9,548.00 quoted for underlying files; amended response revised the volume figure without explanation, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-20 — FOIA 26-20: The aggregate case total, and the records that would let you count it (Denied — record does not exist, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 25-279 — FOIA 25-279: The office granted the personnel and budget records on paper — then sent three invoices totaling $34,673.79 and none of the records (Granted in part on paper — dozens of records listed as enclosed and none enclosed; three cost itemizations totaling $34,673.79, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-278 — FOIA 25-278: The office says it never tracked plea bargaining — then bills $23,146.66 for a 4,000-file review it says is already covered by another invoice (Granted in part — 62 trials produced from the calendar; plea-offer data certified not to exist; a $23,146.66 estimate the office says is moot if the twin invoice is paid, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-277 — FOIA 25-277: No annual statistical report exists, the underlying data does, and the office prices it at $34,720 (Granted in part — no statistical report exists; the underlying data is granted at a $34,720 estimate built on a volume figure the office has never counted, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-257 — FOIA 25-257: Three certificates of nonexistence, then a $19,840 bill to rebuild the data by hand (Denied — three certificates of nonexistence, with a $19,840 estimate to rebuild the same data by hand, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-254 — FOIA 25-254: Two certificates of nonexistence, two documents produced, and a $74,520 itemization copied from an earlier request (Granted in part, denied in part — two documents produced, two certificates of nonexistence, and a $74,520 estimate identical to FOIA 25-244's, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-244 — FOIA 25-244: Ten service slips, thirteen policy manuals, and a $74,520 quote (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-241 — FOIA 25-241: The special-prosecutor petition the office filed, and the 2024 memo that says it did not need another one (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-240 — FOIA 25-240: Officer use-of-force referrals, and the $1,863 bill for the one part the office would search (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-239 — FOIA 25-239: The Brady/Giglio list and how the office tracks officer credibility (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-234 — FOIA 25-234: Four lab reports, two certificates, and 26.4 grams where the press said four ounces (Granted in part, October 1, 2025)
• FOIA 25-202 — FOIA 25-202: No RFP, no bid, no purchase order — and the emails that show how the system was picked (Granted in part, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-201 — FOIA 25-201: ProsecutorByKarpel contracts, invoices, and licensing (Granted in part, denied in part, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-200 — FOIA 25-200: The software the office runs on — seven systems named, one of them retired in June 2024 (Granted in full, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-197 — FOIA 25-197: A request for complaints against the office came back as the office's own civil-rights lawsuits (Granted in part, denied in part, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-196 — FOIA 25-196: Audits of the office, 2019 through 2024 — five county financial statements produced, two fiscal years missing (Granted in part — five annual county financial statements produced; fiscal years 2022 and 2024 absent from the release; no exemption cited and no certificate of nonexistence, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-195 — FOIA 25-195: Reports on the office's own work — four case-tracking reports produced, performance reviews certified nonexistent, county reports withheld as attorney-client (Granted in part and denied in part — ten documents produced; county reports withheld on attorney-client privilege; performance reviews certified nonexistent; $5,961.60 estimated, $2,980.80 deposit, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-194 — FOIA 25-194: Every email and text the Prosecutor sent in 2024 — a $63,028.80 estimate on a request the requester offered to narrow (Granted in part and denied in part — exemptions cited; $63,028.80 estimated, $31,514.40 deposit required, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-215 — FOIA 25-215: Three answers to one request — two certificates of nonexistence, a grant, and a $13,248 estimate (Granted in part, August 9, 2025)
• FOIA 25-180 — FOIA 25-180: Two boxes checked — the trial records both “already provided” and “do not exist” (Denied in full — certificate of nonexistence plus an exemption box checked; no fee, no pages produced, August 2, 2025)
• FOIA 25-139 — FOIA 25-139: Forfeitures in cases that ended without a conviction, certified not to exist — while the same office took an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-136 — FOIA 25-136: The plea-agreement count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-135 — FOIA 25-135: The office denied the 2024 trial summary as a record that “does not exist” — then produced eight case files on the next page (Granted in part — 8 case files produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-134 — FOIA 25-134: The dismissed-case count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-133 — FOIA 25-133: The office certified the monthly count did not exist — then attached an annual one and offered to sell the underlying data for $2,815.20 (Granted in part — one annual screening table produced; monthly counts withheld; $2,815.20 quoted with a $1,407.60 deposit, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-129 — FOIA 25-129: Arraignment-to-disposition times the office certified do not exist, then priced at $2,931.12 (Granted in part — two items denied as nonexistent; $2,931.12 quote on the third, June 26, 2025)
• FOIA 25-118 — FOIA 25-118: Final case outcomes for January and February 2025 (Fee estimate issued, June 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-94 — Prosecutor Case Outcome Statistics, 2021–2025 (Granted in Part, May 23, 2025)