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

Watchdog Alerts

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

1. The office priced the work of counting at $1,653.33 and asked for $826.66 up front — to answer a request that asked for one number. The request had already told the office that if no such calculation is maintained, it should simply say so.
2. The same day, in a companion letter to the same requester, the office priced the same universe of open files at 500 files. Here it used 800. Both letters contain the identical sentence — ‘approximately 800 to 1000 files “open” at any one time’ — and then multiply by different numbers.
3. The itemization’s own arithmetic does not match its own rule. The form states that all partial time increments must be rounded down. At 800 files and 2 minutes per file, that is 1,600 minutes, or 106.67 quarter-hour increments, which rounds down to 106 increments and $657.20. The form printed 106.66 increments and $661.33 — a $4.13 overcharge, the identical figure and identical cause as in 26-29.
4. The letter says the office needs approximately 180 days. The itemization attached to it says 270 days. Both are on the office’s paper, dated the same day, and neither acknowledges the other.
5. A fee waiver was requested under MCL 15.234. The itemization’s ‘Waiver: Public Interest’ section is blank — the sixth consecutive response in this archive with no waiver determination recorded.
6. This is the request that 26-29 cites by number when defining ‘inherited.’ With 26-28 now published, that citation can be checked: the definition is a near-verbatim lift of this request’s own language, and the office’s reference holds up.

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024, and this request concerns cases pending on January 1, 2023, so the underlying records predate the system by design. Nothing on this page faults the office for how records were kept before the system existed. The relevant point is narrower. The office says a headcount of open cases on a given date is not a record it maintains, while granting the underlying data and pricing the search at 800 files. Whether a case-management system can produce that count as a query, rather than as a new document, is a question the record leaves open — and a question the office has not addressed.

On February 5, 2026, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a one-page request for a single number: the total number of criminal cases pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office. The request asked for aggregate data only, expressly disclaimed any request for individual case information, and stated that if no such calculation is maintained, the office should simply say so. The office received it on February 6 and answered on February 12, 2026.

This is the request that another file in this archive points to. When the office answered FOIA 26-29 — a companion request for the number of inherited cases that ended in conviction — it defined “inherited” by citing “a corresponding FOIA Request, specifically FOIA Request 26-28.” Until now that citation could not be checked, because 26-28 was not in the archive. It is now. The definition the office used in 26-29 is a near-verbatim lift of the language in this request, and that fact changes how both files should be read.

Summary

FOIA 26-28 is the first of the statistical cluster faxed to the office in early February 2026 — 26-28, 26-29, and 26-30, alongside the earlier 26-20, 26-21, and 26-22 — and it is the broadest of them. Where 26-29 asked how many inherited cases ended in conviction, 26-28 asked only how many cases were pending or in progress on the day the current prosecutor took office. It is a point-in-time headcount, the simplest possible question about a caseload, and it is the question whose phrasing the office later borrowed as its own dictionary.

Four numbers organize this file. 800 is the number of files the office used as its pricing baseline. 1,653.33 is the fee it quoted, in dollars. 826.66 is the deposit it demanded, in dollars. And zero is the number of pages of responsive records produced. Alongside those four numbers sit two that do not agree with each other: the response letter says the office will need approximately 180 days from receipt of the deposit, and the attached itemization says approximately 270 days. Both are on the office's own paper, dated the same day, and neither acknowledges the other.

The denial of the headcount may well be lawful. A total number of cases open on a given date is a calculation, not a document, and Michigan's Freedom of Information Act does not require a public body to create a record it has never created. The office says as much, and it attaches a certificate of nonexistence, which is the correct instrument for that answer. That part of the file deserves a fair reading, and this page gives it one. The fee is a different matter. The office has now priced the same underlying universe of “open files” at 800 files in this request and at 500 files in 26-29 — two letters dated the same day, to the same requester, about the same office, using the same paragraph structure and the same sentence about “800 to 1000 files open at any one time.” One of them then multiplies by 800. The other multiplies by 500. The record does not explain the difference.

What was requested

The request is dated February 5, 2026. It was transmitted by fax and reached the office the same afternoon; the fax notification in the packet records receipt at 4:01 p.m. Eastern on February 5, and the office's own Notice of Denial records a received date of 02/06/2026. The request is captioned “Request for Aggregate Criminal Case Statistics” and its operative text asks for:

“Total number of criminal cases pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office.”

Three features of the request matter to what followed. First, it asked for a headcount on a date — not a count of outcomes, not a count by charge, not a count by year, just how many files were open on January 1, 2023. A case-management system either can or cannot answer that as a query, and the answer is a single integer. Second, it asked only for what the office already has, and it said so twice: it sought “existing aggregate statistical information,” it specified “aggregate numerical data only,” and it added the sentence that governs the whole exchange: “If no such calculation is maintained, please indicate that no responsive record exists. This request does not require creation of a new record.” A requester who writes that sentence has done the office the courtesy of naming the outcome it is entitled to give. Third, the request asked for a waiver of all fees under MCL 15.234 and, anticipating that a fee might be quoted anyway, asked for a detailed written itemization before payment. The office supplied the itemization. It did not supply the waiver decision.

One small thing about the request itself, noted for completeness rather than fault. The form's response-time paragraph asks the office to respond “within five (5) business days as required by MCL 15.235(2).” The five-business-day period is in subsection (1); subsection (2) is the extension provision. The citation is the requester's, not the office's, and it had no effect on the response, which was timely under either reading.

What the office answered

The February 12 letter opens by stating the disposition in a single line — “Your request is GRANTED IN PART, DENIED IN PART” — and then makes four moves in sequence. The order matters.

First, it reports the search result and denies the count. “A review of existing records within the possession of or maintained by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office reveals that no existing record, document, or ‘aggregate statistical data’ exists that provides the ‘total number of criminal cases pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office.’ As such, the request for such an existing or identifiable record is DENIED.” The sentence then continues into the statutory certificate: “The undersigned hereby certifies that, after a search for records and to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief, the public record requested, and described above, does not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.” That is the certification contemplated by MCL 15.233(1), and it is present here in the correct form.

Second, it grants the underlying data. “The underlying data could be obtained which would allow the requester to obtain or calculate the requested ‘aggregate numerical data.’ As such, as to the underlying data the request is GRANTED, subject to any necessary separation of exempt from non-exempt information.” This is a real concession, and it should be read as one. The office is not saying the information is secret. It is saying the information exists in unassembled form, that the office will let the requester assemble it, and that the assembly will cost money.

Third, it explains the cost. Because of “the breadth of your request and the number of records (which must be searched for and reviewed to respond to such a request,” the office “has determined that failing to charge for the costs of the search, examination, review, and deletion and separation of exempt from non-exempt information would result in unreasonably high costs to the County beyond those typically incurred in responding to FOIA requests.” That is the statutory trigger for charging more than the ordinary fee, and the office invokes it explicitly. The supporting paragraph is where the pricing baseline appears.

Fourth, it demands a deposit and states a completion date. “Because the estimated fee in this case is great than fifty dollars ($50.00), the public body requires a deposit of fifty percent (50%) of the estimated fee to be paid before providing the responsive documents.” The letter then says the office “estimates it will take approximately 180 days from receipt of the deposit to provide you with the responsible, nonexempt public records.”

Two typographical features of the letter are worth recording, because they recur. The letter says the fee is “great than fifty dollars” and refers to “the responsible, nonexempt public records.” Both are the same two errors that appeared in the 26-21 correspondence and again in 26-29, in the same places, across multiple letters and multiple months. That tells the reader something about how the office's template is maintained. What it does not show is the garbling that marred 26-29, whose letter read “cannot located any record.” The equivalent sentence here reads cleanly — “no existing record, document, or ‘aggregate statistical data’ exists” — which suggests the 26-29 error was introduced during that letter's own editing, not baked into the template.

The request 26-29 was pointing at

FOIA 26-29 asked for the number of inherited criminal cases that ultimately resulted in conviction. Its letter explained what “inherited” meant: “the interpretation of this request for ‘inherited criminal cases’ is meaning cases that were pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office. This interpretation is based on the language used in a corresponding FOIA Request, specifically FOIA Request 26-28.”

That paragraph can now be checked against the document it cites, and it checks out. The operative line of 26-28 asks for the “total number of criminal cases pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office.” The 26-29 letter's definition of “inherited” is that phrase, repeated almost word for word. The office did not invent a definition for 26-29. It took the definition from this request, where the requester had stated it plainly.

That is a point in the office's favor, and this page states it as one. The earlier reading of 26-29 — that the office had adopted an unrequested definition and attributed it to a document the public could not see — was a fair reading of 26-29 standing alone. With 26-28 in the archive, the picture is more ordinary and less troubling: the office used the companion request's own wording as its dictionary, which is what a coordinator does when two requests from the same requester arrive together and use overlapping language.

What remains a genuine question is narrower, and it survives the correction. The two requests are not the same question. 26-28 asks how many cases were open on the day the prosecutor took office — a snapshot. 26-29 asks how many of those cases ultimately resulted in conviction — a snapshot plus an outcome filter, which is a subset of 26-28's universe. The office applied 26-28's definition to 26-29's narrower question, which is defensible, and then priced 26-29's search at 500 files while pricing 26-28's broader search at 800. A narrower question was priced against a smaller baseline than the broader question it was carved out of. The record does not explain why, and that is the discrepancy this file makes visible.

The 800-file baseline

The letter describes the universe it is pricing, and the description is worth quoting in full because it is the paragraph that 26-29 repeats almost verbatim while changing the number:

“The significant time and cost for search for and locating the records could require the location of pending/open files date back years. Pending cases would cover matters that would be considered in ‘warrant status’, in ‘bench warrant status’, pending arraignment, pending a court hearing, etc. Records responsive to this request could and would likely include cases that predate the current Prosecutor's Office staff. For example, a defendant was arraigned on a case at the end of 2025 on a case that had been authorized/issued in 2001. Based on information and belief it is estimated that our office has approximately 800 to 1000 files ‘open’ at any one time, at various stages. As an estimate to determine the exact number will use 800 files as a baseline. The final amount would be adjusted based on the actual number of files that are located and determined to be responsive of the request, consistent with Michigan FOIA.”

There is a logic here, and it is not unreasonable on its face. The office says it has somewhere between 800 and 1,000 open files at any moment, that many of those will turn out not to be responsive once the definition is applied, and that 800 is a defensible figure for estimating purposes, subject to adjustment to the actual count. A public body is entitled to estimate before it searches; the statute contemplates exactly that. The problem is not that the office estimated. The problem is the relationship between this estimate and the others.

The 2001 example is the most concrete thing in the packet, and it deserves a moment. The office volunteers that a defendant was arraigned at the end of 2025 on a case that had been authorized in 2001 — a twenty-four-year gap between charging decision and arraignment. That single sentence does more to explain why a point-in-time headcount is hard than any of the boilerplate around it, because it shows that a case “pending” in 2023 might have been authorized two decades earlier and might not reach a courtroom for years. It is also the only worked example of its kind in the cluster; 26-29's letter drops it entirely.

The volume figure the office has used for the same category of work

Request	Date	Stated volume	What it was used to price
25-279	2025	6,000 files	A review of case files across the requested period
26-21 (original)	Feb 5, 2026	1,500 files per year × 3 years = 4,500	Underlying files behind a conviction count
26-21 (amended)	Feb 12, 2026	1,100 files per year × 3 years = 3,300	The same production, fee unchanged
26-28	Feb 12, 2026	800 files	Underlying files behind a point-in-time headcount
26-29	Feb 12, 2026	500 files	Underlying files behind an inherited-conviction count

The 26-28 letter, the 26-29 letter, and the 26-21 amendment are dated the same day. All three describe the office's open caseload. Two of them contain the identical sentence — “approximately 800 to 1000 files ‘open’ at any one time” — and then choose different multipliers: 800 in one, 500 in the other. The 26-21 amendment, for its part, says the office processes roughly 1,100 files per year. A yearly throughput and a point-in-time open caseload are different measurements, so those figures are not necessarily inconsistent with each other. But 800 and 500 are the same measurement, drawn from the same sentence, on the same day, and they differ by 300 files and $620 in quoted fees. The record does not say why, and a requester cannot evaluate a fee without knowing which baseline is real.

The itemization

The Detailed Cost Itemization attached to the letter is seven pages long, and it is the most legible document in the packet. Its arithmetic can be checked line by line, and this page checks it.

What the itemization charges, and what the arithmetic produces

Line	Work described	Rate	Volume	Amount
1	Labor cost to locate	3 minutes per file; $6.20 per quarter hour; $24.82 hourly wage with fringe	2,400 minutes = 160 quarter-hour increments	$992.00
3a	Employee labor cost for separating exempt from non-exempt (redacting)	2 minutes per file; $6.20 per quarter hour	1,600 minutes = 106.66 quarter-hour increments	$661.33
—	Subtotal fees before waivers, discounts or deposits	—	—	$1,653.33
—	Good-faith deposit	50 percent of the estimated fee	—	$826.66
—	Estimated time frame to provide records	—	—	270 days (itemization); 180 days (letter)

Line 1 checks out. Eight hundred files at three minutes each is 2,400 minutes. Twenty-four hundred minutes divided by fifteen is 160 increments. One hundred sixty increments at $6.20 is $992.00. The office applied its own stated rate correctly.

Line 3a does not check out, and the error is small but instructive. Eight hundred files at two minutes each is 1,600 minutes. One thousand six hundred minutes divided by fifteen is 106.67 increments — and the itemization's own instruction says that “all partial time increments must be rounded down,” which produces 106 increments, not 106.66. One hundred six increments at $6.20 is $657.20. The office printed 106.66 increments and charged $661.33. The difference is $4.13.

That figure should be familiar to anyone who has read the 26-29 file. There, the office printed 66.66 increments against 1,000 minutes and charged $413.33 instead of $409.20 — a difference of $4.13, the same amount to the cent. It is the same amount because it is the same mistake: whenever the minutes divide into a fraction ending in .6667, the office bills the fraction instead of rounding it down, and the overcharge is always 0.6667 × $6.20, or $4.13. This is not a one-off slip. It is a reproducible defect in how the office fills out its own form, and it will recur on every itemization where the minute total is not divisible by fifteen. The amount is trivial; the pattern is not. A requester reading a seven-page itemization is being asked to trust the arithmetic. When the arithmetic does not follow the form's own rule, and does not follow it in the same direction every time, the trust has to be earned rather than assumed.

The hourly rate has a similar small seam, and this one runs the other way. The itemization prints an hourly wage with fringe benefit cost of $24.82 and a charge per quarter hour of $6.20. Twenty-four dollars and eighty-two cents divided by four is $6.205, which rounds to $6.21, not $6.20. The office rounded down, which favors the requester by a penny per increment — roughly $1.60 across this itemization. That is the right direction, and it is worth saying so, because it shows the office is capable of rounding in the requester's favor when it chooses to. It simply did not choose to on line 3a.

The deposit is 50 percent of $1,653.33, which is $826.665. The office printed $826.66, truncating rather than rounding up, again in the requester's favor by a cent. The letter describes the deposit correctly as “fifty percent (50%) of the estimated fee,” and the itemization's deposit field is consistent with that. There is no dispute about the deposit percentage.

The time frame is where the two documents part company. The letter says the office “estimates it will take approximately 180 days from receipt of the deposit to provide you with the responsible, nonexempt public records.” The itemization's “Estimated Time Frame to Provide Records” field says 270 days. Both documents are dated February 12, 2026, both were sent in the same envelope, and neither mentions the other's figure. A requester deciding whether to pay an $826.66 deposit is entitled to know whether the wait is six months or nine. The record does not tell him.

The waiver that was never decided

The itemization contains a waiver section headed “Waiver: Public Interest.” It has two checkboxes — “All fees are waived” and “All fees are reduced by ___%” — and a line reading “Subtotal Fees after Waiver: $_____.” On this itemization, the section is blank. No box is checked, no percentage is entered, and the after-waiver line is empty.

This is now the sixth consecutive response in this archive in which a public-interest fee waiver was requested and no determination on it appears anywhere in the packet. The request asked for a waiver under MCL 15.234. The statute directs a public body to reduce or waive a fee if it determines that doing so is in the public interest because it would primarily benefit the general public, and it requires the body to establish procedures and guidelines for that determination. A blank waiver section is not a denial of a waiver, and it is not a grant. It is the absence of a decision, recorded on a form that has a place for one.

That matters more here than in a case where the fee is small. An $826.66 deposit is not an impossible sum, but it is a real barrier for an individual requester asking a question about public office performance, which is the classic case the public-interest waiver was written for. And the question here is about as public-interest as a FOIA request gets: how many criminal cases were open on the day an elected prosecutor took office is a fact about the inheritance she accepted and the workload she now carries. The office had the opportunity to decide whether the public should bear the cost of answering it, and it left the line empty.

Two appeal forms in one packet

The packet includes the county's standard Notice of Denial form, with the request number 26-28, a received date of 02/06/2026, a notice date of 02/12/2026, and a contact line naming the FOIA coordinator at 906-789-5100. The form is the county's pre-printed document; the same form appears across this archive, and this page does not attempt to read which of its pre-printed reason boxes carry a mark, because the marks are part of the form's printed artwork and cannot be reliably distinguished from a check in a scan.

What the form does establish is that a written denial was issued, that it was dated within the statutory response window, and that it identifies a contact for questions. What the letter establishes is the reason: the office could not locate a record containing the requested headcount. Those two documents together are the office's answer, and they are internally consistent with each other.

Then comes the part that is new to this archive. The packet includes two blank appeal forms, not one: a “FOIA Appeal Form — To Appeal a Denial of Records” and a “FOIA Appeal Form — To Appeal an Excess Fee.” The denial form carries the request number 26-28; the fee form is included as a template for the requester to complete. No earlier packet in this archive has supplied both forms together, and the pairing is exactly right for this response, because this response does two things at once: it denies a record and it quotes a fee.

The fee-appeal form exists for one purpose. Under MCL 15.240a, a requester who believes a fee exceeds the amount permitted may challenge it, and the statute sets out a procedure for doing so, including the treatment of a deposit as a fee for purposes of the challenge. Including the form alongside a fee the requester has not yet paid is a small act of procedural completeness, and it deserves to be noted as one. A requester who thinks $1,653.33 is too high now has the paper in his hand to say so — and, because the deposit is treated as a fee, he can say so before paying it.

The timeline

FOIA 26-28, from fax to answer

Date	Event	Source
February 5, 2026	Request dated and faxed	The request as received
February 5, 2026, 4:01:46 p.m. Eastern	Fax received; notification and cover sheet record the transmission	Zimbra/IPFone notification, page 3; fax cover sheet, page 4
February 6, 2026	Office records receipt	Notice of Denial, page 6
February 12, 2026	Response letter, Notice of Denial, and fee itemization issued	Pages 1–20

The response is timely. Under MCL 15.235(1), a public body must respond within five business days of receipt. Counting from Friday, February 6, the fifth business day is Thursday, February 12 — the day the office answered. No extension was taken and none was needed. This page does not suggest any timing violation, because on this record there is none.

What the record shows

The definition 26-29 cited is real, and it came from here. The office's reading of “inherited” in 26-29 is a near-verbatim lift of this request's own language. That correction matters, because it removes the suggestion that the office invented a definition out of nothing. What survives is a narrower question: the office applied a broad snapshot definition to a narrower outcome-filtered request, and priced the narrower request against a smaller baseline than the broader one.

Eight hundred here, five hundred there, same day, same sentence. Both letters contain the identical clause — “approximately 800 to 1000 files ‘open’ at any one time” — and then multiply by different numbers. The broader request (this one, a plain headcount) is priced at 800 files. The narrower request (26-29, a headcount filtered by conviction) is priced at 500. That is backwards from what the volume of work would suggest, and the record does not explain it.

The count was denied and the counting was sold. The office says no document contains the headcount, which may well be true, and then offers to let the requester assemble it from underlying files at a price. That is a lawful structure under the Act, and this page does not call it unlawful. But it produces a strange result: the public cannot learn a number the office could produce by running a query, because the number is not written down anywhere, and the alternative is a $1,653.33 invoice for a search that has not happened yet.

The $4.13 is back. The line 3a overcharge in this itemization is the same $4.13 as in 26-29, produced by the same failure to round down a .6667 fraction. Two itemizations, two identical errors, same direction. That is a defect in the form's completion, not a rounding judgment call.

Two time frames, one envelope. The letter says 180 days. The itemization says 270. Both are dated February 12, 2026. The difference is ninety days, and it is the kind of discrepancy that a requester notices when deciding whether to write a check.

The waiver line is still blank. Six requests, six blank waiver sections. The office has a form with a place to record a public-interest determination and has not used it.

The question that should have been the easiest to answer

Of all the statistical requests in this cluster, this one should have been the simplest. It does not ask how many cases ended in conviction, or how many were charged at a particular level, or how the office's outcomes compare to anyone else's. It asks how many files were open on a single date. Every prosecutor's office knows, or can find out in an afternoon, how many cases it inherited. It is the first thing a new administration learns, because it is the workload it has to staff. The office's own letter concedes the data exists — it grants “the underlying data” — while denying that any document states the total.

There is a version of this response that is entirely defensible, and it is worth stating plainly before criticizing the version that was sent. A prosecutor's office is not required to maintain a statistic called “cases pending at the time the prosecutor assumed office.” That phrase is the requester's framing, not a field in any case-management system. If the office has never created such a tally, FOIA does not make it create one, and the certificate of nonexistence is the honest and correct answer. The office gave that answer, in the right form, with the right citation. On the narrow question of whether a document exists, the office is probably right.

What it did next is where the problem lives. Having correctly said the number is not written down, the office priced the work of deriving it at $1,653.33 with an $826.66 deposit, on a baseline of 800 files that it had just described as somewhere between 800 and 1,000, and then — in a companion letter written the same day, to the same requester, about a narrower question — priced the same universe at 500 files. Each step is individually lawful. Taken together, they produce a response that is hard to evaluate and easy to misread, and a member of the public reading it would be forgiven for concluding that the office had answered a question nobody asked.

The deeper issue is the relationship between the denial and the invoice. The office's position is that the number does not exist as a document but does exist as a derivable fact, and that deriving it is work the requester may purchase. That position has a certain internal logic, but it puts the public in an odd place. The office is the only party that can run the query. It has the case-management system, the file room, and the staff. It knows, or can know in an afternoon, how many cases were open when the prosecutor took office. Instead of telling the public, it offers to let the public pay $1,653.33 for a search whose result the office could state in a sentence. That is not secrecy. It is something subtler: the information is technically available and practically out of reach, and the price of reaching it is set by the party that already knows the answer.

None of this requires a finding of bad faith, and this page makes none. The office applied a template, filled in a baseline, and attached two forms. Templates are how small offices survive FOIA. But a template that produces a different caseload figure every time it is used, and a time estimate that changes between the cover letter and the attachment, and a rounding rule that is stated on the form and then not followed in the same direction twice, is a template that has stopped being a check on the answer and started being a substitute for one. The public-interest waiver line, blank for the sixth time, is the clearest sign of that: the form has a place to ask whether the public should bear this cost, and the office has stopped filling it in.

There is one thing this file does that no earlier file could. It closes a loop. The 26-29 page once had to say that the office's definition of “inherited” pointed at a document the public could not see. Now the document is here, the definition is confirmed, and the office's citation holds up. That is worth recording as a genuine point of transparency: when the office said its reading came from 26-28, it was telling the truth. The trouble is everything that came after the definition — the baseline that doubled without explanation, the fee that repeated the same $4.13 error, the waiver that was never decided. A public body can be accurate about its reasoning and still leave the public unable to check its arithmetic. This file is both at once.

What this record does not show

This record does not show that the office maintains a headcount of cases pending when the prosecutor took office and is hiding it. The letter says it does not, and nothing in the packet contradicts that.

It does not show that the fee is unlawful. The office invoked the unreasonably-high-cost provision and itemized its work. Whether $1,653.33 is a reasonable estimate for searching 800 files is a judgment the record does not settle, and a requester who disputes it has the appeal form in hand.

It does not show why the baseline is 800 here and 500 in 26-29. Both letters contain the same open-file range and the same paragraph structure; only the multiplier differs. The record offers no explanation, and this page does not supply one.

It does not show whether the 180-day or the 270-day estimate is the operative one, or how either was calculated. Both figures appear on the office's own paper and neither is explained.

It does not show that the requester's definition of “pending or in progress” would have produced a record under a different reading. The office adopted the plain meaning of the request's own words; whether a narrower or broader reading would have found a document is unknown.

What to ask next

The record suggests three follow-up requests, each narrow enough to be answered without a fee dispute.

The first would ask the office to state, in writing and without a search, whether its case-management system can produce a count of open cases as of a specified date — a question about system capability, not about a specific number. If the answer is yes, the “no document exists” position becomes a question about the office's choice not to run the query. If the answer is no, the public learns something real about the limits of the system.

The second would ask the office to reconcile its own volume figures: the number of files open at any one time, the number processed per year, and the basis for the 800-file, 500-file, 3,300-file, and 6,000-file baselines used in 26-28, 26-29, 26-21, and 25-279. That is a request for the office's own estimating methodology, and it should be cheap to answer because the methodology is the office's own.

The third would ask for the office's written procedures and guidelines governing the public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234, including any form or checklist staff use to decide whether to grant one. Six blank waiver sections suggest either that no procedure exists or that it is not being followed, and the document that would settle which is a policy document, not a case file.

All three are catalogued in our internal working list, with the specific wording and the record that supports each one. They are not published here.

Authorities and sources cited on this page

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

Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq. The following provisions are cited above: MCL 15.233(1) (certification that a record does not exist); MCL 15.233(5) (no duty to create a compilation, summary, or new record); MCL 15.234 (fees, itemization, deposits, and waivers, including the actual-cost limit, the lowest-paid-capable-employee rate, the public-interest waiver, and the good-faith deposit provision); MCL 15.235 (response deadlines, including the five-business-day period in subsection (1) and the ten-business-day extension in subsection (2)); MCL 15.240 (appeals and civil actions, including the 30-day appeal period and the disclosure deadline in subsection (6)); and MCL 15.240a (fee challenges, including the treatment of a deposit as a fee for purposes of a challenge).

Documents in the packet. The response is twenty pages: pages 1–2 the February 12 response letter; page 3 a Zimbra/IPFone fax notification; page 4 the fax cover sheet; page 5 the request as received; page 6 the Notice of Denial; page 7 an excerpt of MCL 15.240; page 8 a blank FOIA Appeal Form — To Appeal a Denial of Records; page 9 a duplicate excerpt of MCL 15.240; page 10 a FOIA Written Policies notice; pages 11–17 the Detailed Cost Itemization; page 18 a blank FOIA Appeal Form — To Appeal an Excess Fee; page 19 an excerpt of MCL 15.240a; and page 20 a duplicate FOIA Written Policies notice.

Public records relied on for figures. The $992.00 line 1 charge, the $661.33 line 3a charge, the $1,653.33 subtotal, the $826.66 deposit, the 160 and 106.66 quarter-hour counts, the $6.20 quarter-hour charge, the $24.82 hourly wage with fringe, and the 270-day estimate are all taken from the Detailed Cost Itemization. The 180-day estimate, the 800-to-1,000 open-file range, the 800-file baseline, and the 2001-to-2025 arraignment example are taken from the February 12 response letter. The $657.20 figure is computed on this page from the itemization's own rate and its own rounding rule, and is labeled as a computation, not as a statement by the office. The comparison to 26-29 relies on that request's response letter and itemization, both published in this archive.

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 26-22 — 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)