Court of Appeals Concludes Prosecutor Beth Hand Failed to Lawfully Produce Records

[XLFD]

Back in April 2025, this reporter filed a FOIA lawsuit in the 51st Circuit Court against Mason County Prosecutor Beth Hand for failure to provide public records, namely the body cams of two deputies responding to a call on election day back in November 2024, where a would-be voter was arrested and charged with two counts of resisting/opposing arrest (charges dropped in March 2025) along with two other misdemeanors that the prosecutor would not be able to get past a jury, losing the case fully in late 2025 when the people decided no crime at all had been committed.  

In the course of that trial, I effectively won the first round of dueling summary dispositions, with acting judge Eric Fox deciding that my arguments for an in camera review of the records were appropriate, the problem was that he reviewed the footage and decided it was properly withheld from disclosure.  This was objectively wrong, the nature of the records (by then shown and known at the jury trial of the woman) and the actual recordings were not protected from disclosure for the most part (especially the part of the footage I specifically requested).  The final opinion suggested that the footage would still be exempt even after the jury trial, which totally avoided the dropped R&O charges.

Thus, it was necessary to address this terrible decision by filing with the Michigan Court of Appeals.  This requires a payment of $450 for filing fees and hundreds of dollars more for court transcripts and many, many hours of legal research in filing a brief, reviewing the defendant's response brief, and crafting a reply brief.  After all that hard work and expense, the court met with Beth Hand's publicly-funded attorneys on July 8th (I was not present for oral argument in person, figuring my legal arguments were solid enough) and after 19 days of drafting, received a COA opinion in my favor:  the Mason County prosecutor had unlawfully withheld the records, the court remanded the case back to the 51st Circuit Court in order to adopt that finding of prevailing in my case, provide the records, and to find what costs were applicable.  I won the final round, only failing to get punitive/bad faith damages.

Knocking out this unethical, horrible prosecutor in court has become a necessary hobby of mine.  Consider, Prosecutor Beth Hand has arraigned me on four specious and likely retaliatory criminal charges at three different times starting in September 2024.  The results thus far:

In September 2025, a charge of trespassing at Cartier Park was dismissed by Judge John Middlebrook after a hearing where the court decided the city had an illegal authoritarian policy that bypassed any due process for a citizen who was denied the right of entering a public park that their taxes pay for.

In June 2026, a charge of Driving While Licensed Suspended/Revoked (DWLS) was withdrawn after it was clear that my license had never been suspended or revoked. 

Also in June 2026, I won a jury trial's "not guilty" verdict for a disturbing the peace/disrupting a public meeting charge, when they decided that a police captain threatening me with arrest for standing quietly outside of a door doing nothing was some kind of crime. 

Why would Beth Hand team up with a more-than-willing Ludington Police Department to harass a journalist whose main goal is to expose corruption and advocate for transparency, and withhold records from that same journalist in a way that was unlawful, at least according to a panel of judges from the Michigan Court of Appeals?  The answer seems fairly obvious: both Hand and the LPD are as corrupt and unprofessional as I have portrayed them over the last few years.  The facts we bring to the table and the reflexive actions betray their innocence.  

This was a much easier appeal than the FOIA fee appeal I had with the City of Ludington simply because conduct and final opinion of the trial judge in that case (Susan Sniegowski, husband of city official Tom Sniegowski) necessarily obfuscated the facts and legal arguments, which could not be ignored in the appeal.  Oceana Probate Judge Eric Fox had no such underlying factors in this case under appeal, his opinion was just found to be erroneous when law and legal precedent was considered.

A brief summary of the opinion:  after stating the relevant facts of the case, the court accepts and adopts the basic arguments I presented to them that exemptions must be stated with a degree of specificity, not just reiterate statutory language, and that it "would" (not just "could" or "might") interfere with law enforcement proceedings-- and other exemptions the prosecutor would later try to use. 

One thing they did not accept was the extent of my request.  Had I wanted the full body cam video of the two deputies, I would have sent a FOIA request to the sheriff, but what I wanted was just the portion of that record "used for the purpose by the MCPA to decide charging two counts of R&O back in November 2024."  An admission by Beth Hand in her original motion was that she alleges she never used any information from that footage to decide on putting two felony charges against the woman who was exonerated on all charges.  This is an admission of prosecutorial misconduct, perhaps the biggest outcome of this case was that Beth Hand admitted to not reviewing a key piece of evidence, instead subjecting the victim of her malpractice to months of facing years in prison for nothing when exculpatory materials were ignored and not provided through discovery to the defendant. 

After reviewing the law and seminal precedents that I introduced, the court reached a logical conclusion.  It should be noted that I never figured to reach the threshold where the judicial panel would award punitive damages, but in arguing for that I was able to illustrate Beth Hand's total lack of ethical conduct in the other case and provide a reason why she would go out of her way to deny the public the ability to review the records. 

[Freedom Seeker]

YAY! X! Imo, Fox is too close to Ludington to be fair and impartial and may have his nose to the wind in case he may ever need help from the henhouse in the north.

Way to persevere!

[XLFD]

Thanks, this was actually a lot easier to persevere than my FOIA fee case for body cams with the City of Ludington, with about 18 months of circuit court motion hearings and over $600 in transcript costs in that one, ultimately failing on appeal because Judge Sniegowski was the defendant COL's best attorney and the judicial panel failed to recognize that fact.

Judge Eric Fox, who also adjudicated an earlier FOIA fee case with the City of Ludington for one year of inspecting credit card records proved himself inconstant towards common sense, actually agreeing to raise the fee they wanted to charge to over $80.  To inspect the 2024 credit card statements of credit cards issued to city officials for making official purchases.   His opinion on this FOIA disclosure case, as noted by the appeals court panel, was lacking a serious amount of rigor in going against multiple MI Supreme Court cases. 

I would have liked to ascribe the poor decisions to his inexperience with FOIA cases before these two, but the opinions suggested to me that he is basically a tool of the establishment, assigned to make decisions that were worthy of Judge Sniegowski's impartial jursprudence. 

[Freedom Seeker]

"... a tool of the establishment..." sums it up, unfortunately. You may be correct about Fox's ignorance of FOIA law. I hope this appeal against his ruling sends him a good message to study harder and judge more fairly, along with the rest of the establishment.

[XLFD]

The main problem is I shouldn't have to take it to court with compromised judges and then to appeals court, after the trial court fails to respect FOIA principles.  These issues should be addressed in the administrative appeal to council, but they just assign the city attorneys to write up opinions that they rubber stamp approval of.  They never address the obvious problems with their responses, which are totally against FOIA, unlike in that brief period of Ludington history when we had Mayor Miller, City Manager Foster, and Angela Serna recognizing that the records belonged to the public, and exemptions needed to be explained.