Illustration for FOIA 26-31: Eight documents, no number
FOIA 26-31 · 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

On February 6, 2026, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a one-page request that asked for a single thing: a number. How many times, from the prosecutor taking office on January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2025, was a prosecutor or an assistant prosecutor physically present at a crime scene. The request said “Aggregate numerical data only,” and it said what to do if the answer was not kept: “If no such calculation is maintained, please indicate that no responsive record exists. This request does not require creation of a new record.” The office acknowledged receipt on February 9 and answered on February 12, 2026 — three business days, inside the statutory period. It did not supply a number. It supplied a list of eight records and then refused to produce them, on the ground that they had already been given to the requester in a different FOIA case and that the requester had “not provided any justification or need” for copies. The request was DENIED.

Three things make this file worth reading. The first is that a list of eight items is a count: the office demonstrated, in the act of denying, that it could answer the question it declined to answer. The second is that every dated item on the list falls in 2024, though five years were requested, and the letter never says whether the list is complete for the other four. The third is that the denial rests entirely on a prior production — FOIA 25-267 — that appears nowhere in this archive, and on eight documents, not one of which is among the 210 PDFs published here.

How to read this page

Documented facts come from the released records and are dated and quoted. The agency's position is what the office asserted or did. Legal interpretation is analysis of Michigan's Freedom of Information Act and is labelled as such. Open questions are issues the record does not resolve. Nothing on this page asserts that the office was legally required to reproduce the eight documents, that Densmore was misapplied, or that anyone acted in bad faith. Where the record supports only a question, only a question is stated.

Summary

Four numbers organise this file. One is the number of pages faxed, received at 10:15 a.m. on February 6, 2026 according to the office's own fax notification. Three is the number of business days between the office's recorded receipt on February 9 and its response on February 12. Eight is the number of records the office identified as responsive. Zero is the number of those records it produced, and zero is also the number of times it answered the question that was asked.

The request was not complicated, and it was written to be easy to answer. It asked for “any existing logs, report, calendars, or aggregate records reflecting instances in which a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor was physically present at a crime scene,” and it specified “aggregate numerical data only.” That phrasing is a deliberate concession: it tells the office that the requester does not want narratives, names or case files, only a figure. It even volunteers the fallback — if no such calculation is maintained, say so — and expressly disclaims any request that would require the office to build something new.

The response took none of those openings. It performed a review, found eight records, listed them by name, and then declined to hand any of them over because they were, in its word, “duplicative.” What it never did was say how many instances the eight records reflect, or whether eight is the total for the period, or whether the office keeps any log or calendar of prosecutor crime-scene attendance at all.

What was requested

The request is headed “Prosecutor Attendance at Crime Scenes” and is addressed to the Delta County Prosecutor's Office, dated February 6, 2026. Its operative text asks for disclosure of “the following existing aggregate statistical information”:

“Any existing logs, reports, calendars, or aggregate records reflecting instances in which a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor was physically present at a crime scene, after the prosecutor assumed office through December 31, 2025.

Aggregate numerical data only.

If no such calculation is maintained, please indicate that no responsive record exists. This request does not require creation of a new record.”

It then asks for “a waiver of all fees pursuant to MCL 15.234,” for a detailed written fee estimate before processing if any fee is anticipated, and for a response “within five (5) business days as required by MCL 15.235(2).” The request is one page, and the whole of it is reproduced in the packet twice, because the office's fax system generated two notifications for the same transmission.

The period is worth stating in plain terms, because the response does not. The prosecutor took office on January 1, 2021. Through December 31, 2025, that is five full calendar years — 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. A request covering five years is not a small request, but it is a bounded one, and the thing being counted — a prosecutor standing at a crime scene — is not an event that happens thousands of times a year in a county of Delta's size.

What the office answered

The letter is dated February 12, 2026 and acknowledges “receipt of your Freedom of Information Act request dated February 6, 2026, and received by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on February 9, 2026.” It then quotes the request in full and describes what the review found:

“A review of existing records within the possession of or maintained by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office reveals that records of ‘[a]ny existing logs, report, calendars, or aggregate records reflecting instances in which a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor was physically present at a crime scene, after the prosecutor assumed office through December 31, 2025’ has located the following responsive records:”

What follows is a list of eight items. It is reproduced below exactly as the letter sets it out, because the list is the most informative thing in the packet.

The eight records the office identified as responsive to FOIA 26-31
#Item as listed in the February 12, 2026 letterType
1MSP Report 80-03-24 and attachmentsPolice report
2Email communication 05/24/2024E-mail
3Email communication 02/05/2024E-mail
4Email communication 02/06/2024E-mail
5Petition for Appointment of Special ProsecutorCourt filing
6Order for Special ProsecutorCourt order
7Email communication 05/30/2024E-mail
8Statement of No Action from Mackinac County ProsecutorOut-of-county declination

Having listed them, the letter refuses them:

“However, these documents have already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-267. As you have not provided any justification or need for the documents to be reproduced to you, the public body will not be producing theses records for a second time pursuant to Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994). Due to the responsive records being duplicative, your request is DENIED.”

The attached Notice of Denial, dated 02/12/2026 and recording “Date Received: 02/09/2026,” checks box 1 — “Exempt from Disclosure” — and fills the reason line with “DUPLICATIVE REQUEST. PURSUANT TO DENSMORE v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994).” The line for “FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___,” which sits immediately beside the box, is left blank. Boxes 2 and 3 are unmarked. The letter closes with the standard paragraph on appeal rights under MCL 15.240, encloses the statutory excerpt and a blank Denial Appeal Form, and notes the county web address for FOIA policies, guidelines and forms.

A list is a count

Start with the plainest observation in the file. The request asked for a number. The response contains a number. It is not presented as one, and it is not labelled as one, but the office counted to eight in the course of saying it could not count.

That is not a lawyer's trick; it is the ordinary consequence of the office's own method. To list responsive records, someone had to search for instances of prosecutor crime-scene attendance, decide which instances qualified, and enumerate them. The enumeration is the answer to the question. If the office had written “eight” at the top of the letter instead of the bottom, the request would have been granted in full.

The office may object that eight records is not eight instances — that several e-mails could describe one crime scene, and that a police report and an order could belong to the same matter. That is fair, and it is exactly the kind of judgment the office is equipped to make and the requester is not. Which is the point: the office had the information, the requester did not, and the office declined to convert one into the other on the ground that the requester had not shown a “need.”

There is a second, quieter observation inside the list. The request asked for “any existing logs, report, calendars, or aggregate records.” What came back is four e-mails, one police report, two special-prosecutor documents and one out-of-county declination. There is no log on the list, and no calendar. On the face of the response, the Delta County Prosecutor's Office does not keep a log or a calendar of prosecutor attendance at crime scenes. That is a real and useful finding, and the office could have said it in one sentence.

One year out of five

Every dated item on the list falls in 2024. The four e-mails are dated February 5, February 6, May 24 and May 30, 2024. The Michigan State Police report number ends in “24,” and the special-prosecutor petition and order that appear alongside it are consistent with a 2024 matter. The Mackinac County statement is undated on the list.

The request covered January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2025. The response covers 2024. Nowhere does the letter say that the list is exhaustive for the whole period, and nowhere does it say that no responsive record exists for 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2025. It simply lists what a review “has located” and then denies the request in full.

This matters for a reason that is easy to miss. A denial that says “these eight records are duplicative” is a denial of the eight records. It is not a denial of the other four years. If a prosecutor attended a crime scene in 2021 and the office holds a record of it, that record is not on the list, is not covered by the Densmore objection, and has not been addressed at all. The public cannot tell from this letter whether such records exist, because the letter never says what the search covered.

It is possible that the eight records are the complete answer — that in five years there were only these instances, all of them in 2024, all of them connected to a single matter. If that is so, the office could have said it. Instead the letter leaves a reader to infer a five-year result from a one-year list.

The production this archive cannot find

The denial stands entirely on a prior production. The office says the eight records “have already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-267.” That sentence does the whole work of the decision: if the records were produced in 25-267, Densmore applies and the office need not produce them again; if they were not, the sentence is the only thing standing between the requester and eight public records.

This archive holds no record of FOIA 25-267. It is not among the 42 requests published here before this one, and no document in the archive refers to it. More than that: none of the eight named documents appears among the 210 PDFs published on this site. A text search across every published document for “80-03-24” and for “Mackinac County Prosecutor” returns nothing.

That absence is not proof that the records were never produced. This archive is a record of the requests it has made, not a complete index of every FOIA the office has answered, and a production made in a case this site has not published would not appear here. But it does mean the public cannot check the premise of the denial. The office's position is that the requester already has these eight documents. The requester's position, implicit in having asked again, is that he does not. Nothing in the packet resolves it: the letter does not attach the earlier production, does not cite a page or a date within it, and does not describe how it verified that the eight records were in it.

There is a further wrinkle worth recording carefully. This archive does contain a special-prosecutor production — FOIA 25-241, which released the office's own 2022 petition for a special prosecutor, the Attorney General's reply, and the 2024 memo declining to ask again. That production also contains a document headed “Petition for Appointment of Special Prosecutor” and e-mails to Michigan State Police troopers referring to MSP incident numbers 84-1384-22 and 84-717-24. The MSP report named in 26-31 is numbered 80-03-24, which is neither of those. So the two productions are not the same, and the presence of a similarly titled petition in 25-241 does not establish that 26-31's list was produced in 25-267. It only shows that this office generates special-prosecutor paperwork more than once.

Densmore, and the box that does not fit

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich App 363 (1994), is a Michigan Court of Appeals decision holding that the Freedom of Information Act does not require a public body to provide copies of records it has already provided to the same requester. Its logic is that the Act's purpose is to open records to public inspection, not to function as a free copying service for repeat requests, and that a requester who already has the documents has already received what the Act guarantees. The case is real, it is routinely cited by public bodies, and the office is entitled to rely on it.

What Densmore does not do is make a duplicative request “exempt from disclosure” under section 13. That is the mismatch on the face of the Denial Form. Box 1 reads: “Exempt from Disclosure: This item is exempt from disclosure under FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___, because ___.” The office checked the box and wrote Densmore on the reason line, but left the subsection blank — because there is no subsection to write. Section 13 of the Act, MCL 15.243, lists the exemptions: personal privacy, law-enforcement investigatory records, attorney-client privilege, and so on. “You already have it” is not among them. Densmore is a judicial construction of what the Act requires, not a statutory exemption from disclosure.

The distinction is not pedantic, because it changes what the office has to establish. An exemption claim is a claim about the record: the record exists, and a specific provision excuses its disclosure. A Densmore claim is a claim about the requester: the record exists, the requester already has it, and the Act does not make the office hand it over twice. The second claim requires the office to know what the requester has. Here the office asserts that knowledge — “already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-267” — without showing its work.

The letter adds a second condition that the Act does not obviously impose: “As you have not provided any justification or need for the documents to be reproduced to you, the public body will not be producing theses records for a second time.” Michigan's Act does not ask a requester to justify a request. MCL 15.233(1) entitles a person to inspect or receive a copy of a public record upon “describing the public record sufficiently to enable the public body to find it”; the statute is about description, not need. A requester's purpose is relevant in one place only — the public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234 — and there it is the public's interest that is assessed, not the requester's personal reason. Densmore itself does not turn on need; it turns on possession. So the sentence reads as a condition the office added, and it is the kind of condition that, applied generally, would let any public body demand a justification before copying anything.

None of this makes the denial unlawful. If the eight records were in fact produced in 25-267, the office has a solid answer under Densmore, and this page does not claim otherwise. What the record shows is a decision built on an unverified premise, recorded in a box designed for a different kind of decision, with an extra condition attached that the statute does not state.

The timeline

FOIA 26-31, dated
DateEventSource
February 6, 2026, 10:15 a.m.Request faxed; one page received on the office's fax lineRequest form; IPFone notification
February 9, 2026Date the office records the request as receivedResponse letter; Denial Form
February 12, 2026Response letter and Notice of Denial dated; request denied in full as duplicative; box 1 checkedResponse letter; Denial Form

The dates here are consistent and the response is timely, and both facts should be recorded plainly. The request was faxed on a Friday morning and recorded as received on the following Monday, which is the next business day and a reasonable receipt date. Counted from February 9, the response on February 12 falls on the third business day, well inside the five that MCL 15.235(2) allows. There is no timeliness question in this file, and this page does not manufacture one.

The packet itself is also complete in a way that several files in this archive are not. It contains the letter, the denial form, the statutory excerpt, the appeal form, the policy notice, both fax notifications, the fax detail sheets and two copies of the original request. The office enclosed the appeal paperwork without being asked. That is the minimum the Act requires and it was done.

What the record shows

The office answered a request for a number with a list. The request asked for “aggregate numerical data only.” The response enumerates eight records and supplies no figure. Eight is a number the office plainly had, and stating it would have required nothing more than a sentence.

The list covers one year of five, and the letter does not say so. Every dated item falls in 2024. The request covered 2021 through 2025. The denial of eight records is not a denial of the other four years, and the letter never states whether the search was limited, whether records exist for the earlier years, or whether the list is the complete answer for the whole period.

No log and no calendar appear on the list. The request asked for “any existing logs, report, calendars, or aggregate records.” The response identifies reports, e-mails, court filings and a declination. On the face of the response, the office keeps no attendance log and no calendar of prosecutor crime-scene visits. That is a finding the office could have stated and did not.

The denial rests on a production this archive cannot locate. The office says the eight records were already provided in FOIA 25-267. This archive holds no record of 25-267, and none of the eight named documents is among its 210 published PDFs. The office does not attach the earlier production, cite a page within it, or describe how it confirmed the overlap.

The wrong box is checked. The Denial Form marks “Exempt from Disclosure” under “FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___,” and leaves the subsection blank. Densmore is not a section 13 exemption; it is a judicial limit on what the Act requires a public body to copy twice.

The office asked the requester to justify his need. The letter refuses reproduction because the requester gave “no justification or need.” The Act conditions disclosure on a description sufficient to find the record, not on a statement of purpose, and Densmore turns on possession rather than need.

One thing the office did right. It acknowledged receipt on February 9 and answered on February 12 — three business days, inside the statutory period — and it enclosed the denial form, the statutory excerpt, the appeal form and the policy notice without being asked.

Eight is a number

There is a version of this file in which the office looks careful and the requester looks unreasonable, and it is not a fantasy. A man asked for records about prosecutor attendance at crime scenes. The office searched, found eight documents, recognised them as documents it had already given him in a prior case, and declined to copy them a second time. That is what Densmore is for. Copying costs money and staff time, and a public body is not obliged to run a duplication service for a requester who already has the material. Read that way, the letter is a model of restraint: it names every record, explains the authority, encloses the appeal paperwork and answers in three business days.

But look again at what was asked. Not for the documents. For “aggregate numerical data only.” The request is almost apologetic about it — it volunteers that the office need not create anything, and offers the office an exit if no calculation is maintained. A requester who writes that sentence is trying to make the request easy. The office's answer was to hand him back the haystack and tell him he already had it.

And here is the part that should bother a reader more than the denial itself. In the course of refusing, the office counted. Eight records. Four e-mails, a police report, a petition, an order, and a statement of no action from a prosecutor in another county. That list is not nothing. It tells the public that at least once in the prosecutor's tenure, a crime scene was attended by a prosecutor in a matter that generated a Michigan State Police report, a special-prosecutor petition and order, and a declination from Mackinac County. That is a story about how a conflict was handled, and it is visible only because the office listed the documents it would not produce.

Now consider what the office could have written instead. “Our records show eight responsive items, all from 2024: four e-mails, one MSP report, a special-prosecutor petition and order, and a Mackinac County statement of no action. We keep no log or calendar of prosecutor crime-scene attendance. These documents were produced to you in FOIA 25-267 and we decline to reproduce them under Densmore.” That paragraph would have answered the request, documented the search, identified the absence of a log, and preserved the Densmore objection. It is shorter than the letter that was sent. It required no new record. It cost nothing.

Instead the public gets a list with no total, a five-year request answered with a one-year list, a denial form with the wrong box checked, and a sentence telling a requester he should have explained why he wanted to know. Each of those is small. Together they produce a file in which the office demonstrably knew the answer, wrote the answer down in the form of an inventory, and then declined to say the number out loud.

That is the pattern this archive keeps finding, and it is worth naming precisely because it is not corruption. It is the ordinary inertia of an office that treats a FOIA request as a document to be processed rather than a question to be answered. A document request can be denied, and a denial is a closed file. A question has to be answered, and an answer is a public fact. The office's forms, its exemptions, its Densmore citations and its “justification or need” language all point in the same direction: toward processing the paper and away from answering the question. The requester asked how many times. The office replied that he already had the documents. Both statements are true, and only one of them is responsive.

None of this requires anyone to have acted in bad faith. It requires a coordinator with a fax queue, a form with three boxes, a case file from a prior request, and a reasonable belief that the job is to move paper rather than to inform the public. Under those conditions, a list of eight becomes a denial instead of an answer, and the number the requester wanted stays where it was — in the office, unstated.

What this record does not show

This page does not show that the eight records were never produced in FOIA 25-267. The office says they were. This archive cannot confirm or refute that, because it holds no record of 25-267 and none of the eight documents. The absence here is an absence in this archive, not proof about the office's files.

It does not show that Densmore was misapplied. If the records were previously produced to the same requester, Densmore supplies a defensible ground for declining to copy them again, and the office is entitled to rely on it.

It does not show that the office was required to compute a total. The request asked for existing records and disclaimed any request for a new one. Whether a count derived from eight documents is a “new record” or simply the content of records the office already holds is a question the Act does not answer cleanly, and this page does not resolve it.

It does not show that no records exist for 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2025. It shows only that the letter lists none and does not say whether the search covered those years.

It does not show that the special-prosecutor documents relate to a case the public should be concerned about. The list establishes that a petition and an order exist and that Mackinac County issued a statement of no action. It does not establish what the underlying matter was, and this page does not speculate.

It does not show that the response was late. It was not. Three business days is inside the statutory period, and the office enclosed the appeal paperwork without being asked.

What to ask next

The first follow-up is the number itself, asked as narrowly as it can be asked. Not “any existing logs, reports, calendars or aggregate records,” but: state the number of instances in which a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor was physically present at a crime scene in calendar year 2024, and state separately whether any such instance occurred in 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2025. A per-year count cannot be answered with a list, and a “zero” for a year is an answer that can be checked.

The second is the search record. Ask for any record describing the search conducted in response to 26-31: the systems queried, the terms used, the custodians consulted, the date range applied, and the date the search was performed. If no such record exists, that answer is itself the finding — a five-year request answered from a search with no documented scope.

The third is the prior production. Ask for the response letter and the index of documents produced in FOIA 25-267, so that the premise of the 26-31 denial can be checked. This is a request for an existing record about a prior request, and it is the cheapest way to test whether the eight documents really were provided.

The fourth is the log question, asked directly. Ask whether the office maintains any log, calendar, roster or tracking record of prosecutor or assistant prosecutor attendance at crime scenes, and if it does, for the record itself. If the answer is no, the public learns something concrete: the office does not track when its prosecutors go to crime scenes, which is itself a fact about supervision and about the Giglio and Brady obligations that follow from prosecutorial involvement in an investigation.

The fifth is procedural and applies to the archive as a whole. Ask the office to identify the section of the Act it relies on when it refuses a request as duplicative, given that the Denial Form's box 1 cites “FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___” and no subsection is supplied. A written answer would tell the public whether the office regards Densmore as an exemption or as a limit on the duty to copy — a distinction that determines what the office must show before refusing.

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.; MCL 15.233(1) (a person may inspect or receive a copy of a public record upon describing it sufficiently to enable the public body to find it); MCL 15.234 (fees, deposits, and the public-interest waiver invoked by the request); MCL 15.235(2) (five-business-day response period, cited by the request); MCL 15.240 (appeal to the chairperson of the county board of commissioners or judicial review in circuit court, as stated in the response letter, together with the statutory note that a prevailing requester may recover attorney fees, costs and disbursements, actual or compensatory damages, and punitive damages of $1,000.00); MCL 15.243 (the section 13 exemptions, cited on the Denial Form as the basis for box 1).

Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich App 363 (1994), cited in the response letter and on the Denial Form as the authority for refusing to reproduce records previously provided. The letter prints the citation as “203 Mich 363”; the Court of Appeals decision is reported at 203 Mich App 363.

Documents relied on: the February 12, 2026 response letter (two pages); the Notice of Denial form dated 02/12/2026, recording receipt on 02/09/2026 and checking box 1; the excerpt of MCL 15.240; the blank Denial Appeal Form; the county's FOIA policy notice; two IPFone fax notifications and two fax detail sheets recording one page received at 10:15 a.m. on February 6, 2026; and two copies of the request form dated February 6, 2026. All thirteen pages are published below with the requester's identifying information redacted.

Redactions. The requester's name, street address, city, state, ZIP code, telephone number, e-mail address and the fax sender identifier have been redacted from the published packet. Everything else — the letter, the eight-item list, the Densmore citation, the certificate language, the denial form, the dates and the request's operative text — is legible. No responsive documents were released in this file, because the office's position is that the eight records were previously produced and need not be produced again.

No interactive figure on this page. The response produced a denial, a list of eight records that were not released, and no data set. Under this site's rule, interactive graphics are built when a release contains documents or data worth examining; a denial that supplies only an inventory of withheld items is presented as text and tables.

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.

Response letter, Notice of Denial and statutory enclosures (redacted) Thirteen pages: the two-page response letter dated February 12, 2026; the IPFone fax notification and detail sheet recording the request at 10:15:09 a.m. on February 6, 2026; the request form as received; the Notice of Denial with box 1 checked and the section 13 subsection left blank; an excerpt of MCL 15.240; a blank Denial Appeal Form; and the county's FOIA policy notice. Requester name, address, telephone, e-mail and fax identifiers redacted.