LANSING, Mich. (WZMQ) – More than a decade after Flint’s water was switched to the Flint River, exposing residents to lead, no state or local official has ever been convicted of a crime connected to the crisis. A new report from the Michigan Department of Attorney General, released Tuesday, explains why.
In 2021, Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office charged nine former officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, using a process called a one-person grand jury. In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court threw that process out, ruling that defendants charged that way were owed a hearing they never got. All nine cases were dismissed as a result.
“A single ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court, one that upended a century of legal precedent involving one-person grand jurors, would ultimately put an end to our pathway into a court of law on these criminal allegations,” Nessel said.
Why prosecutors didn’t start over
Restarting the cases would have meant reviewing roughly 17 million seized documents through a special legal screening process, according to the report.
“If we had 100 attorneys working nine to five, it would cost just over $37 million and would have taken a little over two years to do,” an assistant attorney general said.
Facing that cost and timeline, on top of statute of limitations concerns, the office chose to close the cases for good.
“While I absolutely regret the outcome all these years later, I wish more than anything in the world that I could provide for the residents of Flint the justice that was due to them,” Nessel said.
What the charges were
The nine defendants faced a range of charges. Former state health director Nick Lyon and former Chief Medical Executive Dr. Eden Wells each faced nine counts of involuntary manslaughter tied to Legionnaires’ disease deaths linked to the water switch. Snyder faced two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty. The rest, Jarrod Agen, Gerald Ambrose, Richard Baird, Howard Croft, Darnell Earley and Nancy Peeler, faced charges ranging from misconduct in office to perjury and extortion.
Those manslaughter counts came from a medical review the prosecution team ordered after taking over the case in 2019. The previous investigation had only tied charges to two deaths.
“They reviewed 40 people who had contracted Legionella during the water crisis who had since died,” said Danielle Heidman Clarke, chief of the attorney general’s criminal justice bureau, describing the medical panel’s work. Through that review, prosecutors were able to charge nine deaths instead of two.
None of the nine were ever convicted, and under the law, they’re presumed innocent of the allegations against them.
A pointed conclusion
The report notes the one-person grand jury process had been used in Michigan since the 1920s without a successful legal challenge, and that the state Supreme Court had declined to even hear a challenge to it in 2018, just three years before reversing course.
It also points out that three justices on the court that decided the case had been appointed by Snyder himself. One of them, then-Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement, had previously served as Snyder’s chief legal counsel and recused herself. Asked about that connection, Nessel said she doesn’t think it can be separated from the outcome.
“What an uncomfortable situation when the colleagues of Justice Clement had the ability to just make this all go away and spare their colleague,” Nessel said.
Asked whether her own office bore any blame, including its 2019 decision to scrap the earlier investigation and start fresh, Nessel defended the team’s choices, saying no one could have predicted the court would reverse decades of settled practice.
“I don’t blame people who worked on this case, either as prosecutors or as investigators. I think they did all the best that they possibly could, given the information they had at the time,” Nessel said.
Where things stand now
Much of the evidence gathered by the grand jury remains legally sealed and can’t be released outside a criminal trial, which will now never happen. Nessel said she’s encouraged lawmakers to change that law so the record can eventually come out, but nothing has moved yet.
Separately, Flint’s civil settlement, one of the largest in state history at $626 million, is still being paid out to victims years after it was finalized. And this summer, the city finished replacing its last known lead pipe, closing out a decade-long infrastructure fix.
