FOIA 26-20: The aggregate case total, and the records that would let you count it

Watchdog Alerts

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

1. The office says the total “cannot be gleaned,” while naming seven reports that contain exactly the components needed to compute it. Why is a total that can be assembled from records the office already holds treated as a record that does not exist?
2. The 2023 report ends on November 30, 2023. Why does a full calendar year of data stop a month short, and where is December?
3. Four of the seven named documents were not produced under FOIA 25-94, one of the two requests the office relies on to say they were already furnished. Which request actually produced them, and on what date?
4. The letter cites Densmore as “213 Mich 363 (1994).” That volume is Michigan Supreme Court reports; the case is 203 Mich App 363. How was a citation this easy to check printed wrong?

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024. The request spans January 2023 through December 2025, so the 2023 portion predates the system. The absence of system-generated aggregate reports for 2023 is not treated here as a failure; the questions concern 2024–2025 and the office's reasoning about records it already holds.

On January 30, 2026, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a one-page request that asked for a single number: the total count of criminal cases the office filed between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2025. The request said, in plain terms, that it sought no names, no identifiers, no individual case files, and no personally identifiable information of any kind. It said that if the total already existed in a case management system, a database, a spreadsheet, or a report, the request covered any existing query result, export, or summary output. It said, expressly, that it did not require the creation of a new public record.

Six days later, on February 5, 2026, FOIA Coordinator Emily DeSalvo signed a denial. The office checked one box on its Notice of Denial form: Record Does Not Exist. It did not claim a statutory exemption. It did not redact anything. It did not quote a fee or demand a deposit. Instead it stacked three answers on top of one another: no document containing the total exists; creating one is not required by Michigan law; and in any event the total “can be gleaned from the previously provided documents” — seven documents that the same letter refuses to reproduce.

Each of those answers defeats the others. If the total can be gleaned from the documents, the documents have to be produced. If the documents are properly withheld as duplicative, then the “gleaned” answer fails and the request has not been answered at all. And the arithmetic settles the question on the face of the letter: measured against the thirty-six months the request covered, the seven named documents supply period coverage for nineteen months. Seventeen months have no period report behind them at all. A total for a thirty-six month period cannot be assembled from documents that skip seventeen of those months, and no amount of re-reading changes that.

The letter also cites a case for the proposition that the office need not produce records a second time. The citation is wrong on its face — it points to a volume and reporter that do not contain the decision — and the decision it means to cite does not stand for what the letter says it does. Densmore is about a prisoner asking two different custodians for a second copy of a memorandum he already held. It is not about a requester asking for a total and being told to compute it himself from records he has never received.

Summary

FOIA 26-20 is the shortest request in this archive and the most revealing denial. It asked for one aggregate figure over a three-year window. It received a three-part refusal that, taken apart, shows exactly where a public body's discretion over how to answer becomes a decision about whether to answer.

The timeline is compact. The request was faxed on Friday, January 30, 2026 at 10:49:47 a.m. Eastern, one page, to the county's FOIA fax line. Under MCL 15.235(1) a faxed request is not received until one business day after transmission, which makes the receipt date Monday, February 2, 2026. The office recorded exactly that date on its letter. It then issued its determination on Thursday, February 5 — three business days after receipt, comfortably inside the five-business-day window of MCL 15.235(2). No extension was taken. On the question of timeliness, the office got it right, and this page says so.

What the office did with that time is the subject of the rest of this page. It identified seven documents that it says are responsive to the request. It declined to produce any of them, on the theory that they had already been furnished in response to two earlier requests and that the requester had supplied no justification for a second copy. It then declined to produce a total, on the theory that no document containing a total exists and that generating one would be creating a new record. And it closed by observing that the total could be derived from the seven documents it had just declined to produce.

Three numbers organize everything that follows. The request covered 36 months. The seven named documents, by the date ranges printed in the letter itself, cover 19 months with at least one period report. 17 months — nearly half the requested window — have no period report behind them at all. Those three figures are the subject of Figure 2, and they are the reason the “gleaned” answer cannot be true as written.

What was requested

The request is dated January 30, 2026 and captioned “Request for Aggregate Criminal Case Statistics.” It was transmitted by fax from a station identifier beginning 1719, through the IPFone fax platform, to [email protected]. The platform's delivery notification records transmission at January 30, 2026, 10:49:47 a.m. −05:00, one page received, and the notification itself appears twice in the response packet. The request asks for:

“The total number of criminal cases filed by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from the prosecutor's election date through December 31, 2025.”

Four provisions in the request matter to how it should have been read, and each of them anticipates an objection the office went on to make.

The first is the scope limitation. The request states: “This request seeks only an aggregate numerical total. I am not requesting individual case files, names, identifiers, or personally identifiable information.” That sentence removes the entire privacy apparatus from the analysis. There is no victim to protect, no defendant to shield, no juvenile record to segregate, no investigative file to weigh. A count of cases is about as close to a privacy-neutral record as a prosecutor's office can be asked to produce.

The second is the existing-record clause. The request states that if the information exists within “an electronic case management system, database, spreadsheet, or report,” the request “includes any existing query result, summary output, or export reflecting the requested total,” and that it “does not require the creation of a new public record.” This is a requester doing the office's work for it: naming the four places a total would plausibly live and asking for whatever already comes out of them.

The third is the fee provision. The request asks for a waiver under MCL 15.234 and, in the alternative, for an itemized estimate before any work is done. The fourth is the deadline citation: the request asks for a response within five business days under MCL 15.235(2), which is the correct provision.

One drafting point deserves mention because it shaped the office's answer. The request defines the start of the period as “the prosecutor's election date.” That phrase is imprecise — an election date and a term start date are different things. The office resolved the ambiguity in its own footnote, explaining that “prosecutor Wickman was elected in November 2022 General Election, and was sworn in for her term starting on January 1, 2023.” That footnote is the single most useful sentence in the packet, because it fixes the requested period at January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025 — thirty-six months. Every coverage calculation on this page runs from that number, and the number comes from the office, not from the requester.

The paper trail

January 30, 2026 — the fax

Documented: The IPFone delivery notification records a one-page transmission to [email protected] at 10:49:47 a.m. Eastern on Friday, January 30, 2026. The notification is generated by the fax platform, not by the requester, and it appears twice in the response packet — once in the body of the production and once as the final page, which is the original request as it came off the receiving machine. The last page of the packet is the request itself, with the fax header intact.

February 2, 2026 — the receipt date, correctly computed

Documented: The denial letter states that the request was “received by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on February 2, 2026.” The Notice of Denial form carries a field labeled “Date Received” that reads 01/30/2026.

Those two dates are not in conflict, and the apparent discrepancy is worth explaining because it is the kind of detail that gets misread as a procedural error when it is not one. Under MCL 15.235(1), a request delivered by fax or email “is not received by a public body's FOIA coordinator until 1 business day after the electronic transmission is made.” January 30, 2026 was a Friday. One business day later is Monday, February 2. The letter's receipt date is therefore the statutorily correct one, and the form's field — which captures the transmission date rather than the deemed receipt date — is simply mislabeled. The office computed this correctly, and the record should say so plainly.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The same provision has a second half that the office did not need to invoke here but that matters in other files: a public body must note both the time the request was delivered and the time the FOIA coordinator became aware of it, and the one-business-day rule does not protect a body that sat on a request it had actually seen. Here the transmission and the awareness appear to coincide, and the deemed receipt date is the one the office used. No issue arises.

February 5, 2026 — the denial, three business days in

Documented: The letter is dated February 5, 2026 and signed by Emily DeSalvo, identified in the signature block as FOIA Coordinator and elsewhere as Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. Counting business days from Monday, February 2, the fifth business day is Monday, February 9. The response issued on Thursday, February 5, which is the third business day. It was timely by two business days, and no extension was taken because none was needed.

Documented anomaly: The Notice of Denial form carries a field labeled “Date of This Notice” that reads 01/13/2026. That date precedes the request by seventeen days and the response by twenty-three. It is not possible for a notice issued on February 5 to bear a date of January 13. The most likely explanation is a clerical default carried over from a prior form, and it has no effect on the substance of the denial. It is recorded here because the date on the face of a notice is the date a requester is entitled to rely on, and because a form that misdates itself is a form whose other fields deserve to be checked rather than assumed.

What was produced, and what was named but withheld

Nothing was produced. FOIA 26-20 is a zero-page production: no documents, no data, no export, no summary, no count. What the packet contains is ten pages of process — a two-page denial letter, a one-page Notice of Denial form, two copies of the MCL 15.240 statutory excerpt, a blank FOIA appeal form, a page of county FOIA policy, two pages of fax notification, and the original one-page request.

Within that process, however, the office did something useful. It listed the documents it considered responsive to the request and then explained why it would not reproduce them. That list is the most informative thing in the file, because it is the office's own account of what records exist on this subject. It names seven distinct documents, with date ranges, and one of them appears twice.

Documents the office identified as responsive but declined to reproduce, with the period each covers

Document named in the letter	Date range stated	Months covered	Supplies a case count?
Warrants Authorized by Agency	01/01/2023 – 11/30/2023	11	No — counts warrants authorized, not cases filed
Charges on Authorized Misdemeanor Case Report	01/01/2023 – 12/31/2023	12	No — counts charges, not cases filed
Charges on Authorized Felony Case Report	01/01/2023 – 12/31/2023	12	No — counts charges, not cases filed
21st Century Report (first)	01/01/2024 – 01/31/2024	1	Period report, one month only
21st Century Report (second)	01/01/2025 – 07/03/2025	6	Period report, six months only
Budget Request, FY 2024–2025, memo dated 07/17/2024, and attachments	Fiscal year document	—	No — not a period report
Budget Request, FY 2023–2024, memo dated 09/10/2023, and attachments	Fiscal year document	—	No — not a period report
Distinct months with at least one period report behind them		19	of 36 requested

Two features of that table matter more than any other part of the response.

The first is that the office's own list establishes, without argument, that period reports of this kind already exist and are routinely generated. A “21st Century Report” covering a defined date range is precisely the sort of document that aggregates case activity over a period. The office did not say that producing aggregate figures is beyond its system. It said that two such reports exist, for January 2024 and for the first half of 2025, and that they had already been given to the requester. That is a significant admission: the office's case management system evidently produces aggregate period reporting as a matter of course. The question in FOIA 26-20 is therefore not whether the office can produce aggregate counts. It is why the same report was not generated for the other seventeen months.

The second is that the two 2023 “Charges” reports and the 2023 “Warrants Authorized” report do not answer the question that was asked. The request sought the number of criminal cases filed. A report of charges counts charges, and a single case can carry several charges; a report of warrants authorized counts warrants, which are a different event in a different procedural posture. Neither is a case-filed count, and the letter does not claim they are. It simply lists them as responsive and then withholds them, which leaves the requested metric unaddressed even for the months those reports cover.

And the “Warrants Authorized by Agency” report stops at November 30, 2023. December 2023 is covered by the Charges reports, which measure something else. So even inside the twelve months of 2023, the only document that comes closest to the office's own authorization activity runs one month short of the year.

The three grounds of denial

The letter is short, but it makes three distinct arguments, and they are worth separating because they are not equally strong and because they are not consistent with each other.

Ground one: no document containing the total exists

The agency's position: The letter states that “no document currently exists detailing the ‘aggregate numerical total’ of criminal cases filed” for the requested period, and it includes the certificate contemplated by MCL 15.233(1) — that the record does not exist under the name given in the request or any other name reasonably known to the office.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: That certificate is the most consequential sentence a public body can write in a FOIA response, because it ends the inquiry. It is also, in this file, a statement about a specific artifact: a document whose title or content is “the aggregate numerical total.” The request did not ask for a document with that title. It asked for the total, and it specified that any existing query result, export, or summary output would satisfy the request. A certificate that no document is titled “aggregate numerical total” is therefore true and beside the point. The operative question is whether the office's system can produce the number as an output, and the letter does not address that question at all.

Ground two: producing a total would mean creating a new record

The agency's position: The letter states that the request “would require the generation or creation of a new public record” and that “such creation is not required under Michigan FOIA,” citing MCL 15.233(5).

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The citation is accurate as far as it goes. MCL 15.233(5) provides that the act “does not require a public body to create a new public record, except as required in section 11, and to the extent required by this act for the furnishing of copies, or edited copies pursuant to section 14(1), of an already existing public record.” But the office omitted the companion provision that is at least as relevant. MCL 15.233(4) separately 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.” If the concern is that assembling a total would be a “compilation” or a “summary,” subsection (4) is the provision that says so, and the office did not cite it.

More importantly, both provisions are about what the act does not compel. Neither says that a public body may refuse to disclose an output its own system already generates. The request was drafted around exactly that distinction: it asked for “any existing query result, summary output, or export.” The office's answer is that no such output exists. That may be true. But the letter does not describe the system, name the reports it can run, or explain what happens when someone in the office asks it for a count. It asserts the conclusion and moves on. And the presence of two “21st Century Reports” in the office's own responsive list is direct evidence that the system produces period aggregates on request.

Ground three: the documents were already provided, so they will not be provided again

The agency's position: As to the seven named documents, the letter states that “these documents have already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-94 and FOIA Request 25-195,” that the requester has “not provided any justification or need for the documents to be reproduced,” and that “the public body will not be producing theses records for a second time” under Densmore v Department of Corrections, 213 Mich 363 (1994).

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: This is the ground that does the most work in the letter and the one that is weakest on examination, for three reasons examined in the sections that follow: the citation is wrong, the case does not reach this situation, and the factual premise about prior production is contradicted by this archive's own record of FOIA 25-94.

The coverage gap: why the total cannot be “gleaned”

Having declined to produce the documents, the office closed its letter by telling the requester where the answer could be found: “the ‘aggregate numerical total’ as requested can be gleaned from the previously provided documents.” That sentence is the hinge of the whole response, because it is the office's own statement that the information is available. If it is available, the request is not a request to create a record. It is a request to disclose one.

So the claim can be tested arithmetically, using nothing but the dates printed in the letter.

The requested period is thirty-six months, from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025. Against that window, the named documents cover:

2023. The Warrants Authorized report covers January 1 through November 30 — eleven months. The two Charges reports cover January 1 through December 31 — twelve months. Taking the widest coverage for each month, all twelve months of 2023 have at least one document behind them. But the documents measure warrants and charges, not cases filed.

2024. The first 21st Century Report covers January 1 through January 31 — one month. Nothing in the list covers February through December 2024. That is eleven consecutive months with no period report of any kind. The two budget memos are fiscal-year documents; they are not period reports and they do not supply a case count for any month.

2025. The second 21st Century Report covers January 1 through July 3 — six months. Nothing covers July 4 through December 31, 2025. That is approximately six months with no period report.

Add it up. Nineteen months have at least one period document behind them. Seventeen do not. Nearly half of the period the request asked about has no document that could supply the number, and the seventeen uncovered months are not scattered — they are two clean blocks, one at the end of 2024 and one at the end of 2025.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: This is not a technicality about document titles. It is a direct contradiction inside a single letter. The office says the total can be derived from the named documents. The named documents, by their own stated date ranges, cannot produce a total for seventeen of the thirty-six months. Either the office holds period reports it did not list — in which case the responsive list is incomplete — or it does not, in which case the “gleaned” answer is wrong. There is no third possibility in which both statements are true.

There is a further problem with the “gleaned” theory even for the months that are covered. The 2023 documents count warrants and charges. The 2024 and 2025 documents are period reports whose internal metric the letter does not describe. To produce a single case-filed total across three years, a reader would have to convert warrants to cases, convert charges to cases, and reconcile whatever the 21st Century Reports measure against both — without ever seeing any of the three documents. A total assembled that way would not be the office's count. It would be the requester's estimate, dressed up as a record.

The Densmore citation

The letter's third ground rests on a single case, and the citation to it is wrong in a way that is easy to check.

Documented: The letter cites “Densmore v Department of Corrections, 213 Mich 363 (1994).” The decision it evidently means is Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich App 363; 512 NW2d 72 (1994), Docket No. 148418, decided January 19, 1994, by the Michigan Court of Appeals.

The differences are not typographical niceties. “213 Mich” is a citation to a volume of Michigan Supreme Court reports, not to the Court of Appeals. A 1994 decision by the Court of Appeals would not appear there at all, and a search of that volume does not produce this case. The correct reporter is Mich App, the volume is 203, and the page is 363. A reader who tried to verify the letter's authority using the citation as printed would not find it.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: More consequential than the citation is the holding. Densmore involved a prisoner who requested the same memorandum from two different custodians within the Department of Corrections. One request was granted and the document was produced. The other was denied, and the denial was challenged. The Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal, reasoning by analogy to the court rules governing prisoner filings and adopting the approach of the D.C. Circuit in Crooker v United States Department of State, 628 F.2d 9 (D.C. Cir. 1980): where records “have already been furnished,” it is “abusive and a dissipation of agency and court resources to make and process a second claim.”

Crucially, the court did not announce a blanket rule that a public body may refuse all repeat requests. It required “some explanation why the first copy did not suffice… e.g., that it was lost or stolen, or perhaps destroyed by someone other than the requester.” The doctrine is about a requester who already holds a record asking for another copy of the same record, and it is conditioned on the requester having the first copy in hand.

Neither condition is met here. The requester did not ask for a second copy of the seven documents. The requester asked for a total. The seven documents appear in the letter only as the source from which the total might be computed — they are named as inputs, not as the thing requested. A refusal to reproduce an input is not a refusal to disclose the output, and Densmore says nothing about outputs that were never produced in the first place.

Read generously, the office's argument is that it need not hand over documents the requester already has, and that the requester should compute the total from them. But that argument only works if the requester actually has them, and if they actually contain the number. The first premise is contradicted by this archive's record of FOIA 25-94. The second is contradicted by the coverage gap above.

The prior-production claim, checked against the record

Documented: The letter says all seven documents were provided in response to FOIA 25-94 and FOIA 25-195. This archive documents FOIA 25-94 in full. That request was submitted on May 23, 2025 and answered on June 5, 2025, and its production consisted of three “Warrants Authorized by Agency” reports — for 2021, for 2022, and for January 1 through November 30, 2023. It did not include the two 21st Century Reports, did not include either Charges report, and did not include either budget memo.

FOIA 25-195 is not documented in this archive, so this page cannot say what it produced. What it can say is that at least four of the seven documents named in FOIA 26-20 — both 21st Century Reports and both Charges reports — were not produced under 25-94, which is one of the two requests the letter relies on. If 25-195 supplied them, the letter does not say so and the requester would have to reconstruct that from a separate file.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: A public body invoking Densmore bears the burden of establishing that the records were in fact furnished. The letter asserts it in a single sentence, without identifying which document came from which request, without dates, and without page references. Against a documented record showing that 25-94 produced three warrants reports and nothing else, that assertion is at least incomplete and possibly inaccurate as to four of the seven documents.

Procedural and substantive concerns

The closed loop. The three grounds cannot all be true at once, and the letter does not notice. If no document containing the total exists and none may be created, then the request cannot be satisfied by producing documents, because the documents do not contain the answer. If the documents do contain the answer, then they must be produced, because the request is for the answer. The office asserted the first proposition and the third, and used the third to justify withholding the second. A requester reading the letter is told simultaneously that the answer is unavailable and that it is sitting in documents he may not have.

Subsection (4) went unmentioned. The office cited MCL 15.233(5), the no-duty-to-create provision, but not MCL 15.233(4), the no-duty-to-compile provision. That omission matters because the request was framed to avoid both: it asked for existing outputs rather than a new compilation. By citing only the creation provision, the letter answers an objection the request had already conceded, and leaves the actual question — whether an existing export exists — unaddressed.

The system is not described. This archive established in FOIA 25-201 that the Delta County Prosecutor's Office runs PROSECUTORbyKarpel, a case management system supplied by Karpel Computer Systems and implemented with a go-live date of June 10, 2024. That is a modern prosecutorial case management platform, and the contract produced in 25-201 describes it as covering case tracking, records management, and reporting functions. The office told the public in 2025 that it had bought a system of this kind. In 2026 it told the public that a case count for a three-year period could not be produced from it, without describing what the system can and cannot output. Those two positions are not necessarily inconsistent — a system can track cases without shipping a canned three-year total report — but the letter does not attempt to reconcile them, and a reader is entitled to ask what reports the system does generate.

The two 21st Century Reports prove the capability. This is the strongest documentary point in the file and it comes entirely from the office's own list. The office says it possesses a period report for January 2024 and a period report for January through early July 2025. Those are aggregate period reports. Their existence establishes that aggregate period reporting is something the office does. The letter's silence on why the same report was not run for February through December 2024, or for the second half of 2025, is the gap that a follow-up request should target.

The packet's own assembly. The response contains the MCL 15.240 statutory excerpt twice, on pages 4 and 6, in identical form. It contains a FOIA appeal form on page 5 that is blank and undated. It contains a page of general county FOIA policy. That is five of ten pages devoted to boilerplate about how to appeal a decision, in a packet that produced no records. The attention went to the appeal instructions rather than to the search.

The remedy recited is incomplete. The letter's appeal paragraph tells the requester that a court may award “punitive damages of $1,000.00.” That figure is real — MCL 15.240(7) provides for punitive damages against a public body that arbitrarily and capriciously violates the act. But the same subsection also provides for a civil fine of $1,000, and the letter omits it. A requester weighing whether to sue should know the full statutory exposure, not half of it.

No fee, and therefore no fee appeal. The office quoted no fee, required no deposit, and collected nothing. That is the correct outcome for a request that produced no records, and it means the fee-appeal track of MCL 15.240a is not available here. It also means there is no MCL 15.234(8) deposit question and no MCL 15.234(14) abandonment issue. On fees, the file is clean.

What this record does not show

The record does not show that the office possesses a document containing the requested total. It is entirely possible that no one has ever run that query, and that the office's certificate is literally true as to the artifact it describes.

The record does not show that the office's case management system can produce a three-year case-filed total on demand. It shows that the system produced two period reports with defined date ranges. Whether it can produce a single figure spanning thirty-six months, and whether that figure would count cases or charges, is not established by anything in the packet.

The record does not show what FOIA 25-195 produced. That request is referenced in the letter and is not documented in this archive, so the prior-production claim cannot be fully tested in either direction.

The record does not show bad faith. A coordinator working inside a five-day deadline, presented with a request for a number that no document contains, could reasonably conclude that the honest answer is that the record does not exist. The criticism this page makes is not that the office lied. It is that the office answered three different questions in one letter, cited a case for a proposition it does not hold, and left the requester with an instruction to compute a total from documents he had not been given.

And the record does not show that the denial was unlawful. A court could accept the certificate, accept the no-creation argument, and accept the Densmore analogy. What the record does show is that each of those conclusions would have to be reached without the support the letter claims for it.

Next steps and remedies

The clocks. The denial issued on February 5, 2026. Under MCL 15.240(1)(b) a civil action to compel disclosure must be filed within 180 days of the final determination, which ran to August 4, 2026. That date has passed. As of the publication of this page the judicial-review window for FOIA 26-20 is closed, and a lawsuit on this request alone is no longer available.

A written appeal to the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners is a different matter. MCL 15.240(1)(a) provides for an appeal to the head of the public body, and the statute sets no deadline for filing it — the ten-business-day limit runs from the body's receipt of the appeal, not from the denial. That route therefore remains formally open, though its practical value is limited now that the court window has closed.

The better move is a new request, drafted around what the record now shows. Four targets follow directly from the letter's own admissions.

First, ask for the report catalog of the office's case management system: the list of standard reports PROSECUTORbyKarpel can generate, with the fields each report includes. That request does not ask for a compilation or a new record. It asks for a document that a system of this kind normally ships with, and it would settle whether a case-filed total is an available output or genuinely is not.

Second, ask separately and specifically for the 21st Century Reports for February 1 through December 31, 2024, and for July 4 through December 31, 2025. Those are the seventeen uncovered months, named as date ranges rather than as a computed total. If the reports exist, they must be produced. If they do not, the office must say so month by month, and the answer will be far more informative than a general certificate.

Third, ask for any export, query result, or data file — in CSV, Excel, or PDF — reflecting the count of cases filed, by month, for the requested period, expressly invoking MCL 15.244 and asking that any exempt field be segregated rather than the whole record withheld. Framing the request as a request for an existing file, rather than for a number, removes the no-creation objection from the table.

Fourth, ask for the correspondence and internal routing for FOIA 26-20 itself: the search records showing what was searched, by whom, and when. MCL 15.235 does not require a public body to document its search, but many do, and the answer would show whether anyone actually queried the system before certifying that the record does not exist.

On the Densmore point. Any follow-up should state plainly that the requester is not seeking a second copy of any document, and that Densmore is inapplicable because the requested record — a total — has never been produced. Naming the correct citation, 203 Mich App 363, and quoting the court's requirement of “some explanation why the first copy did not suffice” puts the office on notice that the analogy is contested.

On the fee waiver. Any new request should repeat the MCL 15.234 public-interest request and ask, in the alternative, for an itemized estimate before processing. If a fee is quoted and the requester disputes it, MCL 15.240a supplies a separate appeal track that requires the word “appeal,” runs on a ten-business-day decision clock, and allows a civil action within forty-five days.

Authorities consulted

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

The statutory analysis rests on the text of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act as published by the Michigan Legislature. The provisions most directly engaged are MCL 15.233(1) (the certificate that a record does not exist under the name given or another name reasonably known), MCL 15.233(4) (no duty to make a compilation, summary, or report of information), MCL 15.233(5) (no duty to create a new public record, except as required for copies of an existing record), MCL 15.234 (fee limits, itemization, public-interest waiver, and the rule that a required deposit is a fee), MCL 15.235(1) (a faxed or emailed request is not received until one business day after transmission), MCL 15.235(2) (five business days, with one extension of up to ten business days), MCL 15.240 (written appeal, 180-day civil action, de novo review, attorney fees, $1,000 civil fine and $1,000 punitive damages), MCL 15.240a (fee appeals), and MCL 15.244 (segregation of exempt material and release of the remainder).

The case law discussed is Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich App 363; 512 NW2d 72 (1994), and the decision it adopts, Crooker v United States Department of State, 628 F.2d 9 (D.C. Cir. 1980). The letter's citation to “213 Mich 363” does not correspond to the reported decision.

The cross-reference to the office's case management system rests on the records produced in FOIA 25-201, documented separately on this site: the Karpel Computer Systems agreement, its Appendix A cost schedule, the three Karpel invoices, and the June 10, 2024 go-live date recorded in the implementation documents.

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 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)