As Oakland County attorney
Timothy Corr sat in the private chambers of Novi District Judge Brian MacKenzie
in the spring of 2010, he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
The judge — in the presence of
a Walled Lake police officer — was encouraging Corr to get his client in a
drunken-driving case to back off from a related police brutality lawsuit. If
the client backed off, the implication was, the judge would go easier on his
sentencing, Corr recalled recently in an interview with the Free Press. If he
didn’t, he was going to jail.
“It was clear we had a sitting
judge telling me I had to violate my client’s rights by waiving his right to pursue
a civil rights violation against a police department,” said Corr, who was
representing Marquin Stanley. “I was astonished.”
Corr’s handwritten notes from
the March 24, 2010, meeting, which he shared with the Free Press, back the
claim. “If I relieve police of liability for brutality, they would dismiss the
charge,” the note read.
Corr took the deal back to
Stanley — who had been Tasered and kicked while in police custody — and advised
him to reject it, which Stanley did. Later that day, MacKenzie sentenced
Stanley to 93 days in jail, the maximum allowed.
MacKenzie, a well-known judge
who also serves as president-elect of the American Judges Association,
adamantly denies ever pressuring Corr or his client, saying he sentences all
drunken drivers to the maximum if they are caught again while on probation.
“The suggestion that I would
threaten Mr. Stanley is not only false, it’s offensive.” MacKenzie said.
A series of allegations
The case — a rare instance of a
practicing attorney speaking out publicly against a sitting judge — is the
latest in a series of allegations against MacKenzie, who has gained national
acclaim as one of the foremost advocates of the intensive probation style
treatment of drunken-driving suspects.
In December, the Free Press
reported that McKenzie’s son had worked for a drug and alcohol testing agency
that the judge often orders defendants to use and that his wife runs a
nonprofit that is funded in part by companies that provide services ordered by
the judge. MacKenzie denied any conflict of interest.
On Feb. 13, at the urging of
county Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, Oakland County Circuit Judge Colleen O’Brien
took superintending control of MacKenzie’s docket, saying the lower court judge
had flouted state law and “has given illegal sentences.”
“Judge MacKenzie has chosen not
to follow the law on at least eight occasions,” O’Brien wrote in her ruling. “A
judge cannot ignore the law.”
O’Brien ordered what she
described as the “extraordinary remedy” of taking superintending control of
MacKenzie’s docket, a measure that requires him to follow several strict
protocols when handling future domestic violence cases.
In asking O’Brien to take
control of the docket, Cooper accused MacKenzie of running a rogue court,
complete with illegal sentencing practices, hidden files and inaccurate
transcripts. Her office is also reviewing transcripts in the Stanley case,
although that case was not cited in the motion to have the circuit court take
superintending control.
In reporting this story, the
Free Press reviewed hundreds of public records, including police reports, court
filings and transcripts and conducted numerous interviews, which offer a
glimpse of the way things work in a judge’s private chambers, where no
transcripts are kept.
Video changes minds
Marquin Stanley was a
troublemaker. Arrested in 1996 at age 18, he spent two years behind bars on a
felony firearm charge. By the time Walled Lake police arrested him on Jan. 10,
2010, he had picked up a scattering of misdemeanors, including domestic assault.
And he was already on probation to MacKenzie for a 2009 drunken-driving
conviction.
When police took him to the
Wixom police station that night — Walled Lake uses the Wixom lockup to house
prisoners — Stanley was using offensive language, according to police reports.
As he stood in the booking area, talking on a pay phone, a video shows a police
officer taking the phone from him and hanging it up.
Stanley appears to argue with
the officer but then turns his back to the officer and begins emptying his pockets
onto a bench. The officer then walks behind Stanley and Tasers him in the back,
sending Stanley crashing into the bench, then onto the ground.
The video shows the officer
kicking Stanley over onto his stomach while he is on the ground convulsing. An
ambulance later took Stanley to a hospital where he was treated for facial
injuries.
Police sought warrants charging
Stanley with resisting and obstructing arrest, a felony, along with driving
while drunk and driving with a suspended license. Oakland County prosecutors
issued the warrants.
But when prosecutors viewed the
video on March 12, 2010, they changed their mind. They concluded that Stanley
had not resisted arrest and decided to drop that charge, leaving him with only
misdemeanors.
Prosecutor’s office records
show the assistant prosecutor told that to MacKenzie and defense attorney Corr
in MacKenzie’s chamber on March 24, 2010.
Corr said MacKenzie waited
until the assistant prosecutor left the chambers on another matter, then made
the pitch. By that time, the Walled Lake police officer in charge of the case
was present in the judge’s chambers, Corr said.
The judge’s proposal was clear,
Corr said. “If I didn’t have Marquin admit resisting and obstructing, then he’s
going to give him 93 days in jail,” the maximum sentence allowed.
Corr said they weren’t
pressuring Stanley to plead guilty to a felony, but merely to acknowledge it on
the record. Such an on-the-record statement would clearly be used to torpedo
Stanley’s upcoming civil suit, which claimed he was Tasered for no reason.
A year and a half later, Walled
Lake police and other defendants in the civil rights suit agreed to pay Stanley
$150,000 to settle it, though they denied any wrongdoing.
Conversation denied
While both the assistant
prosecutor and the defense attorney say that MacKenzie was told in chambers the
felony charges were being dropped, MacKenzie denied to the Free Press that such
a conversation occurred.
“The prosecutor never notified
me, prior to May 13, 2010 (when the felony dismissal was put on the formal
record), that they would be moving to dismiss the case,” MacKenzie said. And he
denied he waited until the assistant prosecutor was out of the chambers to make
his pitch.
“Mr. Corr has said a number of
things in this claim that are problematic. He has said that he and I engaged in
unethical ex parte conversation. That didn’t happen,” MacKenzie said. “I don’t
engage in prohibited ex parte discussions with either the prosecutor or the
defense counsel on pending matters.”
Ex parte communications are
when one party to a pending case talks to a judge without the other party
present.
MacKenzie said it was the
prosecutor who had offered a deal, a claim that Chief Assistant Prosecutor Paul
Walton said is a lie.
“There was no deal, there was
never a discussion of a deal,” Walton said.
Corr said that he never
discussed a deal with prosecutors, and that the only deal on the table was the
one MacKenzie was offering behind closed doors.
MacKenzie points to a
transcript of the hearing, during which he says, from the bench, “the
prosecutor will not reduce the charge without the understanding mentioned to
him, he chooses not do that, I can’t solve the problem.”
Walton said that statement was
“absolutely false.”
MacKenzie told the Free Press
he would have had no motive to try to harm Stanley’s civil rights case in
federal court. But both the defense attorney and prosecutor say Walled Lake
police were pushing hard to find a way to avoid the suit.
According to prosecutor’s
office records, the Walled Lake officer in charge, in urging prosecutors to
reconsider their decision not to charge Stanley with resisting arrest, claimed
MacKenzie had already promised to bind Stanley over for trial in circuit court
on that charge, even though there had been no evidence presented. That officer,
who has since been laid off from the department, could not be reached for
comment for this story.
And defense attorney Corr said
he took notes as he overheard the police officer in the hallway trying to
convince the assistant prosecutor to keep the charges or pursue new ones.
That same police officer was
sitting in MacKenzie’s chambers, Corr said, when MacKenzie offered the deal a
short time later.
After his release from jail,
Stanley was placed on two years of probation. In 2012, with less than two
months to complete probation, MacKenzie found him in violation after he left
the Novi courthouse without completing a drug test. This time, MacKenzie
sentenced him to the Oakland Couny Jail for a year. He served 270 days, then
was released after earning good time.
Stanley, now living in Detroit
after MacKenzie ordered him to stay out of Walled Lake, says the ordeal was a
string of injustices, first the Tasering, then MacKenzie’s heavy-handed deal,
then the jailing. “They did me wrong,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been
drinking, but there was no cause to do all that.”
