FOIA 26-131: Twenty case files, priced at $82.66 before a single page is copied

Watchdog Alerts

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

1. The office says roughly twenty files are responsive, then prices redaction of an estimated 160 to 200 pages. Its own earlier response to requests 26-100 through 26-105 put felony volume at roughly 350 files a year while claiming it had to review 1,500. The arithmetic behind the fee has never been reconciled to the arithmetic behind the case volume.
2. The requester documented that ProsecutorByKarpel went live on June 10, 2024, so every 2025 case was entered natively into a searchable relational database, and that a filtered query should return roughly 350 results in minutes. The April 24 response never addresses the Karpel question. It prices a manual, page-by-page review anyway.
3. The public-interest fee waiver section of the county's own Detailed Cost Itemization form is left entirely blank. Neither the waiver box nor the reduction box is checked, and the 'Subtotal Fees After Waiver' line is empty. The request asked for a waiver under MCL 15.234. The office neither granted one nor gave a written reason for refusing.
4. A 50 percent deposit of $41.33 is demanded before a single page is produced, and the thirty-day production clock does not start until the deposit is received. The fee is small enough that paying it is easier than appealing it, which is precisely how a fee wall works.
5. This is a resubmission of FOIA 26-101. The requester had to reword and narrow the request — to 2025 only, to five document types, to existing records only — before the office would even quote a price.

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live on June 10, 2024. This request was deliberately limited to cases authorized or filed in calendar year 2025, after that go-live date, so that every responsive case would have been entered natively into Karpel's relational database. The requester said so in the request and asked the office to confirm whether a filtered Karpel query was run. The April 24, 2026 response does not mention Karpel, does not confirm or deny the query, and does not explain why a database that its own vendor documentation describes as supporting 'broad search capabilities' and 'custom ad hoc reports' would require a manual review of 160 to 200 pages. Nothing on this page faults the office for how pre-2024 records were stored. The criticism is confined to how a 2025-only request was priced and answered.

On Friday, April 17, 2026, a requester sent the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a narrowed, reworded version of a request the office had already seen once. The new request asked for five specific documents from every 2025 felony sex-offense case the office authorized or filed: the charging document, the plea sheet, the judgment of sentence, any order of nolle prosequi, and the verdict form. It was limited to a single calendar year, to existing records only, and it explicitly disclaimed any request for a report, a summary, a database export, or a statistic. The office received it on Monday, April 20. On Friday, April 24 — the fourth business day of the five the statute allows — it answered. The answer was timely, specific, and, in the end, a price list. To see the records, the requester would first have to send $41.33.

A narrowed request, a priced answer

The request is numbered 26-131. Its own first line calls it a resubmission: “Replaces/Resubmission of FOIA Request #26-101.” That detail matters more than it looks. A resubmission is what a requester does when the first attempt did not produce the records — when the scope was too broad, the fee too high, or the answer too vague. The second attempt is usually narrower, more precise, and harder to refuse on grounds of burden. This one is all three. It asks for one year instead of all years. It asks for five named documents instead of a category of records. It says, in a section headed “Important Clarifications,” that it is not asking the office to create anything, compile anything, query anything, or analyze anything. It asks only for documents the office already keeps in its case files.

The office's response engages with none of that narrowing. It grants the request in part and denies it in part, states that it identified approximately twenty responsive files, and then quotes a fee for locating and redacting them. The fee is not large. That is the point. At $82.66, with a $41.33 deposit, the request is cheap enough that paying it is easier than fighting it, and expensive enough that it is no longer free. A fee wall does not have to be tall. It only has to be tall enough that the person on the other side decides the climb is not worth it.

What makes this packet worth a page is not the size of the fee. It is what the fee is built on. The office prices a manual, page-by-page review of roughly twenty files, at two minutes a document across an estimated 160 to 200 pages. The requester, in the request itself, had already put on the record that the office's own earlier response to requests 26-100 through 26-105 described felony volume as roughly 350 files a year while simultaneously claiming it had to review 1,500. The requester had also documented that the office's case-management system, ProsecutorByKarpel, went live on June 10, 2024, which means every 2025 case was entered natively into a searchable relational database. And the requester had asked the office, in three numbered demands, to confirm whether a filtered Karpel query was run, to produce Karpel's own documentation if the system cannot do the search, and to itemize the cost at the lowest qualified wage. The April 24 response does none of those three things. It does not mention Karpel at all. It simply prices the manual review and asks for the deposit.

What was asked for

The request defines its universe precisely: every felony criminal case authorized or filed by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office during calendar year 2025 in which the charge or charges involve a felony sex offense. It names the statutes — Criminal Sexual Conduct under MCL 750.520b through 750.520e, child sexually abusive material or activity, and any other felony sex-offense statute — so that the office cannot answer a narrower question than the one asked. And for each such case it asks for five documents, each named exactly:

• The Felony Information or Charging Complaint.
• The Plea Sheet or Plea Agreement.
• The Judgment of Sentence.
• The Order of Nolle Prosequi.
• The Verdict Form.

These five documents, taken together, are the public skeleton of a prosecution. The charging document says what the state alleged. The plea sheet says what the defendant agreed to, if anything. The judgment of sentence says what the court imposed. The order of nolle prosequi says what the prosecutor chose to drop. The verdict form says what a jury found. A reader who had all five for every 2025 sex-offense case would know, without asking the office for a single statistic, how many such cases were charged, how they resolved, what sentences followed, and which ones were dismissed. That is the whole reason a prosecutor's office might prefer not to hand them over in bulk: the documents are the statistics, in a form the office cannot characterize or summarize on its own terms.

The request is careful about redaction. It consents to redaction of personal identifiers under MCL 15.243(1)(a) — the privacy exemption the office relies on throughout this archive — but asks that the defendant's name, the case number, the charge statute, the charge description, and the authorization or filing date remain visible. Those are the fields that make the documents usable as a record of charging decisions. Strip them and the five documents become five anonymous pages that prove nothing. The request also asks for electronic delivery as PDF, a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234(1), and advance notice of any charge. All of that is ordinary, and all of it is the kind of thing the statute contemplates.

What $82.66 buys

The office's Detailed Cost Itemization is seven pages long and itemizes five lines. Three of them are zero. The other two are the whole fee. Read the numbers as the office wrote them, and the shape of the charge becomes clear: the office is not charging for paper. It is charging for time — the time to find the files and, far more expensively, the time to read them and black out what it decides to withhold.

Two things about this itemization are worth stating plainly. The first is that the arithmetic is internally consistent. Forty minutes at $24.82 an hour is $16.55, rounded to $16.53 by the quarter-hour increment method; 160 minutes at the same rate is $66.19, rounded to $66.13. The office is not inflating the numbers through bad math. The second is that the largest line, $66.13, is not a cost of producing records at all. It is the cost of deciding what not to produce. Under MCL 15.235(5), a public body that withholds exempt material must separate it and release the rest; the labor of that separation is a real cost, and the statute permits charging for it. But when four-fifths of a fee is the price of the office reviewing its own files, the fee is really a charge for the exercise of the office's own discretion about secrecy. The requester pays for the redactions the office chooses to make.

Three hundred fifty, or fifteen hundred?

Here is where the packet stops being a routine fee estimate and becomes something more interesting. The office's fee is built on a manual review of roughly twenty files. But the office's own prior statements about its felony volume do not fit neatly with a manual review of twenty files, and the requester said so before the office answered.

In the request, under a heading titled “Challenge to Manual Review Fee Basis,” the requester quotes the office's response to FOIA requests 26-100 through 26-105, which stated that “approximately 25-30 felony files are issued per month, totaling approximately 350 felony files per year,” yet simultaneously claimed the office must review all 1,500 total files. The requester calls this an internal contradiction and does the arithmetic: a request limited to felony cases filed in 2025 should return roughly 350 results, not 1,500. The requester then quotes the vendor documentation for ProsecutorByKarpel, the office's case-management system, which describes “Power Search: A powerful relational database that features broad search capabilities,” “hundreds of built-in canned reports,” “custom ad hoc reports,” and an “Inquiry Reporting feature [that] utilizes queries to generate lists and counts of data for ad hoc reporting.” A database with those capabilities, the requester argues, does not need a manual page-by-page review to answer a question about which 2025 cases were felony sex offenses.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary work of a requester who has read the statute and the office's prior answers and is trying to hold the office to a consistent story. What is notable is that the office's April 24 response does not engage with it. The letter states that the office identified approximately twenty files, that each would contain four to five responsive documents, and that the breadth of review justifies the charge. It does not say how the twenty were identified. It does not say whether a Karpel query produced them. It does not address the 350-versus-1,500 contradiction. It does not produce the Karpel documentation the requester asked for. It does not explain why a system its own vendor markets as supporting “broad search capabilities” and “custom ad hoc reports” would require a manual review of 160 to 200 pages. The request asked three specific questions; the response answers none of them and sends a bill instead.

There is a defensible version of the office's position, and it is worth stating so the criticism is fair. Redaction is real work. Even if Karpel can produce a list of twenty cases in seconds, someone still has to open each file, read each document, and black out the names, birth dates, addresses and LEIN data the office withholds. A database that finds the files does not redact them. So the $66.13 redaction line could be entirely honest even if the $16.53 locate line is inflated by a manual search that a query would have made unnecessary. The problem is that the office never separates the two. It never says “Karpel found the twenty files in a minute, but redacting them takes 160 minutes.” It presents the whole thing as one undifferentiated manual review, which is exactly the framing the requester's Karpel argument was designed to test.

April 17 to thirty days after the deposit

The response was timely. The request was dated Friday, April 17, 2026, and received Monday, April 20. The determination is dated Friday, April 24 — the fourth business day of the five the statute allows. There was no extension notice, no request for clarification, and no interim correspondence. On the response clock, the office did well. The second clock is the one that matters for production, and it does not start until the deposit arrives.

This is the mechanical heart of a fee wall, and it is worth naming precisely. The statute's five-day clock governs the determination. It does not govern production when a fee is charged. Under MCL 15.234, a public body may require a good-faith deposit of up to half the estimated fee before producing records, and the production clock runs from the deposit. So an office can be perfectly timely — answer on day four, as this one did — and still put the records thirty days and $41.33 away. The five-day clock is satisfied; the records are not delivered. A requester who cannot or will not pay waits indefinitely, and the office has broken no deadline, because the only deadline that has run is the one for saying no.

Five documents, none produced yet

The determination grants the request in part. What that means, concretely, is that the office has agreed in principle to produce the five document types, subject to redaction and subject to the deposit. It has not produced them. The scorecard below lists the five documents the request named and the office's current position on each. Every one is promised. None has arrived.

The blank waiver box

The request asked for a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234(1). This is not a throwaway line. The statute permits a public body to waive or reduce a fee if it determines that doing so is in the public interest because it would be primarily beneficial to the general public as opposed to the person making the request. A request for five charging documents across every 2025 felony sex-offense case is about as close to a textbook public-interest request as a prosecutor's office is likely to receive: it is not about one person's grievance, it is about how an entire category of cases was charged and resolved.

The county's own Detailed Cost Itemization form has a section for exactly this. It is headed “Waiver: Public Interest,” and it contains two checkboxes: “All fees are waived” and “All fees are reduced by ___%.” On the 26-131 itemization, neither box is checked. The line for “Subtotal Fees After Waiver” is left blank. The form then proceeds directly to the deposit section, where 50 percent and $41.33 are filled in.

This is the quietest thing in the packet and, in some ways, the most revealing. The office did not deny the waiver in writing. It did not grant it. It did not check either box or write a reason. It simply left the section blank and moved on to the deposit. A requester reading the form would see no waiver decision at all, only a bill. Under MCL 15.234, a public body that denies a fee waiver is expected to state its reasons; leaving the section blank is not the same as denying it with reasons, and it is not the same as granting it. It is a third thing: a decision not to decide, recorded as a blank space on a form the office itself designed.

What the Notice of Denial says

The packet includes a Notice of Denial form dated April 24, 2026. It is worth reading closely, because it is more informative than the letter in one respect and less informative in another. The form checks three things. Box 1, “Exempt from Disclosure,” is checked, with the subsection marked “SEE MEMO,” and three reasons are listed: records of a personal nature whose disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; records compiled for law-enforcement purposes; and information otherwise exempt by statute, specifically MCL 28.214(5) LEIN information. Box 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” is not checked. Box 3, “Redaction,” is checked, with a description of what will be redacted: names, dates of birth, addresses, telephone numbers and similar identifiers.

That is a more candid form than the letter. The letter speaks only of breadth and cost; the form names the exemptions the office intends to invoke. But the form also does something the letter does not: it cites MCL 28.214(5), the LEIN confidentiality provision, as a ground of exemption. LEIN is the Law Enforcement Information Network, a restricted database. Citing it means the office intends to withhold not just identifiers but law-enforcement database information. That is a broader claim than “we will redact names and birth dates,” and it is the kind of claim that, in a production of charging documents, could be used to withhold more than a reader might expect. The request asked that the defendant's name, the case number, the charge statute, the charge description and the authorization date remain visible. The form does not say whether those specific fields will survive the LEIN redaction. It says only that LEIN information is exempt.

What the office got right

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this page as an indictment of everything in the packet. Several things here are done correctly, and they deserve to be said before the criticism.

The response was timely. Received Monday, April 20; answered Friday, April 24; the fourth business day of five. No extension, no delay, no request that the requester wait. On the response clock, the office met the statute without strain.

The response was specific. It did not answer a narrower question than the one asked. It acknowledged the request as written, stated that it had identified approximately twenty responsive files, and described what those files contain. It did not pretend the request was for something else, and it did not bury the determination in boilerplate.

The itemization is genuinely itemized. The office did not send a single lump-sum figure. It broke the fee into five lines, gave the hourly rate, the increment method, the per-file and per-document time estimates, and the page range. A requester can check every number on the form against the stated method, and the arithmetic holds. That is more transparency than many public bodies offer, and it is the reason this page can analyze the fee at all.

And the office produced a real record of its own reasoning. The letter states why it believes the charge is justified: that failing to charge for search, examination, review and deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information would result in unreasonably high costs to the county beyond those typically incurred. That is the statutory standard, stated in the statutory language. The office did not hide behind the fee; it explained the fee. The explanation may be contestable, but it is there.

The opinion: a fee wall with a receipt

Here is the argument of this page, stated as an argument. FOIA 26-131 is the fee wall in its purest form, and what makes it worth studying is that the wall is small, well-documented, and built on a question the office declined to answer.

Start with the request. It is a model of narrowing. The requester took a broad ask, cut it to one calendar year, cut it to five named documents, disclaimed any request for analysis or compilation, consented to privacy redactions, asked for electronic delivery, asked for a fee waiver, and asked to be told in advance of any charge. Then the requester did something unusual: it put the office's own prior statements on the record and asked the office to reconcile them. It quoted the 350-versus-1,500 contradiction. It quoted Karpel's vendor documentation. It asked three numbered questions, each of which had a yes-or-no answer. This is not a vexatious requester. This is a requester doing the office's homework for it.

Now look at the answer. The office grants in part, identifies twenty files, and sends a bill. It does not answer the three questions. It does not mention Karpel. It does not explain how the twenty files were found, whether by query or by hand. It does not reconcile 350 with 1,500. It does not produce the Karpel documentation the requester asked for. It does not check either box in the public-interest waiver section. It demands $41.33 and thirty days. The determination is timely and the itemization is honest, and none of that changes the fact that the office answered a request for records with a request for money, and answered a request for explanation with silence.

This is how a fee wall works when it is built well. It does not have to be a four-figure quote that invites a lawsuit. It can be $82.66 with a $41.33 deposit — small enough that paying is the rational choice, large enough that the records are no longer free, and structured so that the only clock that runs is the one for saying no. The five-day response clock is satisfied on day four. The production clock does not start until the deposit arrives. The office has met every deadline that applies to it and delivered nothing. That is not a violation. It is a design.

And the design has a tell. The tell is the blank waiver box. A public body that believed its fee was justified in the public-interest sense would have checked “denied” and written a reason, because a written reason is the office's own protection on appeal. A public body that wanted to avoid the question altogether would leave the box blank and move to the deposit. The 26-131 itemization leaves the box blank. That is not proof of bad faith; it is evidence of a choice. The office chose not to decide the one question the statute asks it to decide about the public's interest, and it chose that in the same packet in which it decided, in detail, how much the public would pay.

The larger point is about what these five documents are for. A charging document, a plea sheet, a judgment of sentence, a nolle prosequi order and a verdict form, taken together across every 2025 felony sex-offense case, are the prosecutor's statistics in documentary form. They show what was charged, what was dropped, what was pleaded, and what was sentenced — without the office having to compile, summarize, or characterize anything. That is precisely why a requester would want them and precisely why an office might prefer to price them. The office cannot refuse to produce them, because they are public records and the request is well-formed. But it can make producing them cost $82.66 and thirty days, and it can leave the public-interest question blank. Over enough requests, that is a strategy. This page does not claim the office is running that strategy deliberately. It claims the record is consistent with it, and that the blank box is where the strategy would show if it were there.

The fair reading of this packet is therefore narrower than “the office broke the law” and broader than “the office did fine.” The office answered on time, itemized honestly, and produced a real record of its reasoning. It also declined to answer the three questions the requester actually asked, left the public-interest waiver undecided, and put the records behind a deposit. The first set of facts is what the office will point to. The second set is what the record shows. Both are true, and the gap between them is the story.

The timing caveat

ProsecutorByKarpel went live on June 10, 2024. This request was deliberately limited to cases authorized or filed in calendar year 2025, after that go-live date, so that every responsive case would have been entered natively into Karpel's relational database. The requester said so in the request and asked the office to confirm whether a filtered Karpel query was run. The April 24, 2026 response does not mention Karpel, does not confirm or deny the query, and does not explain why a database its own vendor describes as supporting “broad search capabilities” and “custom ad hoc reports” would require a manual review of 160 to 200 pages. Nothing on this page faults the office for how pre-2024 records were stored. The criticism is confined to how a 2025-only request was priced and answered.

Appeal status

No appeal is recorded in the documents produced. The response enclosed appeal rights, a reproduction of MCL 15.240 and a blank FOIA appeal form, and it also enclosed the Fee Appeal Form and the text of MCL 15.240a, which governs appeals of a fee. The 180-day window to sue under MCL 15.240 runs from the April 24, 2026 response, so a court challenge to either the denial or the fee remains available on this record.

The appeal status on this page is shown as N/A rather than as “none” because this archive holds only what the office produced. An appeal may have been filed and not yet reflected in any document in this file. Absence of evidence in this packet is not evidence of absence, and this archive does not convert one into the other.

What the statute required

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(2) requires a public body to respond to a request within five business days, either by granting it, denying it, or issuing a notice extending the period by up to ten additional business days. The clock runs from receipt. The office states receipt on April 20, 2026 and issued its determination on April 24, the fourth business day. No extension notice appears in the packet, and none was required. The response was timely on the face of the documents.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(4) requires that a denial state the reason for it and inform the requester of the right to appeal to the public body's governing body or to bring an action in circuit court. The office provided appeal information and a blank appeal form, which satisfies the notice requirement. Whether the reasons stated — breadth, cost, and the exemptions listed on the Notice of Denial form — satisfy the requirement to state the reason for a partial denial is a closer question, but the office did state reasons, and the reasons are specific enough to be tested.

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 for, examining, reviewing, and separating exempt from nonexempt material, and it permits a good-faith deposit of up to one-half the estimated fee before production. The office's itemization follows the form the statute contemplates: it separates search, review and copying, gives an hourly rate and an increment method, and computes a 50 percent deposit. The arithmetic is internally consistent. The statute does not require the office to accept the requester's preferred method of search, so the Karpel argument, however strong, is an argument about the reasonableness of the estimate rather than a claim that the office violated a specific command.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(1) also permits a public body to waive or reduce a fee if it determines that doing so is in the public interest because it would be primarily beneficial to the general public. The requester asked for a waiver. The county's own itemization form contains a waiver section with two checkboxes. Neither is checked, and the “Subtotal Fees After Waiver” line is blank. The statute does not prescribe a form for a waiver decision, but a public body that neither grants nor denies a waiver in writing leaves the question unresolved on the record. That is a documentation gap, and it is the gap this page treats as the most significant in the packet.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.243(1)(a) exempts information of a personal nature where public disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy. The office invokes it to redact names, birth dates, addresses and telephone numbers, which is a conventional application. The request consented to exactly this and asked only that the defendant's name, case number, charge statute, charge description and authorization date remain visible. Whether the office's redaction will preserve those fields cannot be determined from the packet, because no redacted records have been produced. The Notice of Denial form's citation of MCL 28.214(5) LEIN information adds a second, broader basis that could sweep in more than identifiers, and the office has not said how far it will reach.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(5) requires that if a public record contains material exempt from disclosure, the public body must separate the exempt material and make the nonexempt material available. The office has committed to redaction rather than wholesale withholding, which is the correct approach. The cost of that separation is the $66.13 line. The statute permits charging for the separation, so the fee is not improper on its face; the question is whether the separation genuinely requires 160 to 200 pages of review, which is the question the Karpel argument raises and the office did not answer.

Authorities consulted

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

• Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq.
• MCL 15.233(1) — certification that a public record does not exist.
• MCL 15.234 — fees, good-faith deposits, and public-interest waiver or reduction.
• MCL 15.234(1) — public-interest standard for waiver or reduction of fees.
• MCL 15.235(2) — five-business-day response period and ten-day extension on notice.
• MCL 15.235(4) — contents of a denial and notice of appeal rights.
• MCL 15.235(5) — segregation of exempt from nonexempt material.
• MCL 15.240 — appeal to the public body and action in circuit court; 180-day limitation.
• MCL 15.240a — appeal of a fee.
• MCL 15.243(1)(a) — personal information whose disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.
• MCL 28.214(5) — confidentiality of Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN) information.
• MCL 750.520b through 750.520e — Criminal Sexual Conduct, as named in the request.
• Delta County Prosecutor's Office, response letter dated April 24, 2026, signed Emily DeSalvo, FOIA Coordinator.
• Delta County Prosecutor's Office, Notice of Denial and Detailed Cost Itemization dated April 24, 2026, for FOIA request 26-131.
• Delta County written FOIA policies, guidelines and forms, as enclosed with the response.
• Requester's FOIA 26-131 request letter dated April 17, 2026, including the Challenge to Manual Review Fee Basis and the quotations from the office's response to FOIAs 26-100 through 26-105.

What would settle the open questions

Four things would close the gaps on this page, and all four are within the office's power to produce without any new legal obligation.

A sentence confirming whether a Karpel query filtered by case type equals felony and authorization date from January 1 to December 31, 2025 was run, and what it returned. If the query was run and returned twenty cases, the $16.53 locate line is hard to justify. If it was not run, the office should say why not. Either answer is more useful than silence.

A reconciliation of the twenty responsive files with the 350-felony-files-per-year figure the office used in its response to requests 26-100 through 26-105. Twenty is a plausible subset of 350; the question is how the subset was identified, and whether the same method would produce a different number for a different requester.

A checked box and a written reason in the public-interest waiver section of the itemization, or an explicit statement that the office declines to consider a waiver. Either would convert a blank space into a decision that can be reviewed.

And a statement of how far the MCL 28.214(5) LEIN redaction will reach, specifically whether the defendant's name, case number, charge statute, charge description and authorization date — the five fields the request asked to preserve — will survive it. That is the difference between a redacted charging document that is still a record of a charging decision and one that is not.

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 26-35 — 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 25-137 — FOIA 25-137: The average time from charge to disposition, certified not to exist — after a ten-day extension for “voluminous” 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)