Resolving Michigan DUI cases during Covid-19 - Being proactive with the prosecutor and court

During these difficult times of uncertainly, clients wonder what will happen with their criminal cases.  We have clients who were charged months ago with their court dates delayed, and new clients recently arrested during the Covid-19 crisis in Michigan.  Courthouses are mostly closed to the public with very limited staffing, and cases have sat frozen for weeks and months.  

In recent days, courts and prosecutors have decided that it's time to begin clearing out some backlog and figure out a way to re-open the court process for cases.  Courts are still not ready to welcome a large general public into the building, so many courts are relying on technology such as video conferencing.  This causes a challenge because many cases are worked out between lawyers sitting in a conference room, swapping ideas, sharing information and figuring things out prior to seeing the judge.  With Zoom, we're all just thrown into a bin of lawyers, clients, staff and judge; we lose some of that personal touch that benefited clients in the past.  

So what do we do? The answer is, I take the same philosophy of my proactive criminal defense program, and adopt a similar mentality when it comes to the prosecutor and judge. Because my clients have been proactive for weeks and months, we have an outstanding foundation to begin the conversation remotely. 

Over the past few days and weeks, I've proactively reached out to prosecutors on my client's cases and checking in with them; I have shared my clients impressive progress over this downtime, and opened up the doors to resolution.  By having productive conversations with the prosecutor days and weeks before court, these same conversations can be had, sometimes even to a greater extent. Prosecutors are sitting at home like the rest of us, and trying to sort out the huge stack of cases.  

With this downtime, prosecutors have had more time to review my client's progress and helped us resolve some complex cases and situations with common sense outcomes that meet my clients goals.  I am able to go back and forth with the prosecutor and my client and hash things out ahead of time.  We then reach out to the court, and let them know that all parties (prosecutor, client and myself) are all satisfied with the outcome, and we want to finalize it with the judge in a video conference setting.   The court views this as very helpful; they have a greater stack of files, heck a building filled up of pending cases, and by helping them close out some of these files, they are very receptive to getting the job done.  We control the narrative and make things straight forward and easy for others to follow.  

By not being in the courtroom, we lose some personal touch with the court staff, and the opportunity to hand papers, documents and items for review to the judge in court, but I make sure the judge has things in advance if I need to reference something over video chat.  It's good to reach out to the judge's clerk ahead of time and get things organized and pieced together.  When things can be hashed out in advance, the video conference becomes a mere formality which my client is very prepared to complete.  

Most would consider the present situation to be a negative for criminal cases, I've done the exact opposite; we turned a negative into a positive for our clients.