FLINT, Mich. — On Tuesday, the Michigan Supreme Court issued a resounding victory to three former state officials facing charges tied to the Flint water crisis.
The state’s former health director Nick Lyon, a former state Health and Human Services official Nancy Peeler and a former top aide to Governor Rick Snyder, Richard Baird, will all have their charges sent back down to a Genesee County Circuit Court for consideration.
Their indictments were invalidated by the state’s highest court over the manner in which they were issued. In one of her first acts as attorney general, Dana Nessel in 2019 began investigating possible criminal wrongdoing that led to the dangerous issue of lead-contamination in Flint’s drinking water.
At the outset of her investigation, Nessel got rid of a special prosecutor and put together a new team to investigate whether crimes were committed when lead contaminated Flint’s water system in 2014-15.
Eventually, charges were issued against Snyder and eight other members of his former administration. The charges were brought by Genesee County Circuit Judge David Newblatt in January 2021 through a process known as a one-man grand jury – a closed door investigative process that’s been challenged several times since its creation in the early-1900s.
“Because it’s a secret, private, almost star-chamber-like process where a defendant who is under investigation essentially has no rights whatsoever,” said Anastase Markou, Baird’s attorney, ecstatic over the court's Tuesday decision. “It was designed primarily to investigate cases where there might be corruption in the judiciary or with prosecutors. It was not meant to be a separate, distinct charging authority for a judge.”
The court’s justices concurred, saying in their opinion that state laws “authorize a judge to investigate, subpoena witnesses, and issue arrest warrants…but they do not authorize the judge to issue indictments.”
Markou argued, successfully, that the process denied his client and others an important step in the criminal process: a preliminary examination. The examination allows defendants charged in Michigan with a felony to defend the allegations against them, and see the prosecutor’s evidence, before trial.
“So they were trying to use this as a way to circumvent what is essentially a statutory right for all criminal defendants charged with felonies,” said Markou. “Once the judge found what the judge believed to be probable cause, the prosecutor should’ve filed a complaint against whatever defendants they chose to charge, and then each of those defendants would’ve been entitled to a preliminary examination.”
The issue over how the defendants were charged was first floated by the trio in May.
The charges will now be sent back down to the Genesee Circuit Court, where Markou fully expects them to be thrown out upon a preliminary hearing.
“I expect that’s what going to happen,” he said. “All the people who were charged in this case through the indictment process, by the one-man grand jury, those cases will be dismissed.”
In a statement to FOX17 on Tuesday, the attorney general’s office said only that “the prosecution team is reviewing the opinion from the court.”
