Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (left) speaks to media during an end-of-year roundtable discussion in Lansing, Michigan on Jan. 6, 2025. Photo | Anna Liz Nichols
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said this week that 2024 was a banner year for the department, touting momentum on her legal battle against Line 5 as well as finding justice for crime victims and increasing public safety.
The department handles about 40,000 cases each year and not every case makes headlines, Nessel noted to members of the media during an end-of-year roundtable Monday, so it’s good to call attention to the less publicized efforts that have made a difference in the lives of Michigan families.
Nessel offered status reports on large cases during the two-hour roundtable with media and remarked on her displeasure in the state lawmakers, who also play a large role in the safety of residents in the state, who decided to boycott the end of session, killing several legislative efforts in their path.
Requests for an Oxford investigation
November marked three years since four students were murdered by a classmate in a shooting at Oxford High School. The families of the students killed and other survivors have reached a boiling point in requesting that the shooting and the events leading up to it be investigated.
‘Fix the damn system’: Parents of Oxford shooting victims call for state investigation
The shooter is serving a life sentence, and his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, are serving out 10 to 15 year sentences for involuntary manslaughter. But members of the Oxford High School community are demanding that entities like leadership of the school be investigated for any failures to prevent the tragedy.
After finger-pointing between local law enforcement agencies and the Attorney General’s Office about next steps in investigating the events leading up to the shooting, Nessel said that she’d be willing to mobilize her office to investigate.
“We especially want to move forward trying to figure out, from a policy standpoint … it’s not just about what should have been done differently, it’s about what can we do differently in the future to make sure we don’t have another Oxford and I think that should be the priority and the main focus,” Nessel said.
Nessel said that one investigation released by Guidepost Solutions in 2023 was “incomplete,” although it found that the shooting could have been prevented by leaders at the school. About half of the individuals that investigators requested to talk to declined to be interviewed for the report.
The Legislature hasn’t allocated any additional funds to support an Oxford investigation, Nessel said. Although that’s not an impossible barrier to traverse, it’s now a matter of what investigators does her office pull from other cases and what resources does it divert from current objectives.
“It’s not that we don’t want to do the investigation. We are planning on moving forward, and we are at this point, trying to coordinate with those offices to make sure that we have all their documents,” Nessel said. “We’re gonna be making plans to sit down with family members, and obviously we have to review everything that’s already been done, but also we have to figure out how we’re gonna do it with no additional resources.”
Environmental work and Line 5 case
When Nessel was first running for attorney general in 2018, she promised to shut down the Line 5 oil pipeline running through the Straits of Mackinac.
Nessel originally sued Enbridge, the pipeline’s owner, in state court in 2019 and a lengthy legal battle landed the dispute in a federal district court, a less favorable venue for Nessel’s case than state court.
But following oral arguments in a federal appellate court in March, the case was returned to state court to the jubilation of her office and environmental advocates.
Oral arguments on the case are scheduled for Jan. 27 in Michigan’s 30th Circuit Court in Lansing.
“We don’t believe that Line 5 poses any less risk now than it did when this case was originally filed back in 2019, and we’re hoping for some success on this case,” Nessel said. “Again, important for people to know and understand that our hope, our request, is that Line 5 is shut down in an orderly fashion.”
Another environmental issue facing Michigan is Asian carp. Nessel said she was grateful to work with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as Michigan and Illinois entered into an agreement in the summer unlocking funding to tackle invasive carp entering into the Great Lakes.
She also said she looks forward to continuing work to limit PFAS contamination in water, hoping to reach settlements on several PFAS contamination cases before her term ends in 2027 noting previous settlements including the Keeler Brass Company Grand Rapids area contamination settlement reached in 2024.
Organized Retail Crime Unit and FORCE Team
Since 2023, the Organized Retail Crime Unit and FORCE Team within the Attorney General’s office has worked to tackle organized retail crime impacting the state’s businesses and consumers.
Since its inception, the office has charged more than 80 defendants in 42 separate cases and recovered over $10 million in merchandise in addition to millions more recovered in cash and cryptocurrency, Nessel said, making Michigan a recognized leader in curbing retail crime.
In the first organized retail crime case her office charged, a 22-year-old was sentenced to five to 20 years in prison for orchestrating hijacking hundreds of customers Meijer grocery store mPerks accounts, robbing customers of reward accruals and causing more than 1 million in corporate losses.
“It was a really good way to start off the work, to demonstrate that we were really serious about doing this kind of work, and also to make sure that the people who had been ripped off were properly indemnified,” Nessel said.
Operation Survivor Justice and other victim-centered initiatives
One area Nessel expressed particular pride in for 2024 was the work her office did in carving additional pathways for survivors of violence to find justice — whether that was inside a courthouse or not.
Since kicking into gear in August, Operation Survivor Justice in the Michigan Attorney General’s Office has supported local law enforcement in extraditing 16 defendants back to Michigan to face charges of sexual violence. The program works to connect county prosecutors to the federal resources and state funding accessible by Nessel’s office to get individuals back to Michigan whereas local agencies often have little budget to do so.
Nessel also said she looks forward to the newly formed Missing or Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) Task Force to come up with strategies to address disproportionate rates of violence Indigenous people face in Michigan.
Three more clergy abuse reports outlining accusations and convictions in the state’s Catholic clergy sex abuse investigation were released in 2024. The reports outline finding from the Diocese of Lansing, Gaylord and Kalamazoo totalling more than 600 pages and more than 100 people accused of sexual violence in hundreds of tips. More than 500 people are noted as victims in allegations.
“I know that it was really impactful for those individuals, even in cases where we couldn’t bring criminal charges because the statute of limitations had run, or in some cases, the clergy member was deceased at that point. It’s still a means of bringing justice to people and affirming to people the fact that we recognize that this happened to you, and for a lot of people, that’s really been life-altering,” Nessel said. “There’s more than just prosecuting a perpetrator in terms of helping somebody who’s been victimized.”
Outside of her office’s work in court, Nessel said she personally visited 20 domestic violence shelters and victim advocacy groups across the state, noting conversation about the Address Confidentiality Program which launched in September 2023. The program, which works to shield the addresses of survivors of sexual and domestic violence and stalking now has 296 participants, Nessel said.
Donald Trump made his policies very, very clear, and I’m not here to be an arbiter of whether I like those policies or not. You might know I did not support him for president, but he won, and so I assume there were a lot of people, both in Michigan and throughout the United States, that wanted to see those policies come into being. And if those policies are promulgated in a way where they are entirely legal, they don’t violate the EPA, they don’t violate people’s due process rights or equal protection rights, then you know, elections have consequences.
– Attorney General Dana Nessel
The year ahead
In 2025, President-elect Donald Trump will once again be at the helm, just like at the beginning of Nessel’s term. She discussed how her office will handle decisions that come out of his administration.
Nessel said she will uphold her duty to defend the people of Michigan against policies that are promulgated from the Trump administration that are either illegal in nature or negatively affect the people of Michigan. But she noted that Michigan voted for Trump in 2024.
“Donald Trump made his policies very, very clear, and I’m not here to be an arbiter of whether I like those policies or not. You might know I did not support him for president, but he won, and so I assume there were a lot of people, both in Michigan and throughout the United States, that wanted to see those policies come into being,” Nessel said. “And if those policies are promulgated in a way where they are entirely legal, they don’t violate the EPA [Environmental Protection Act], they don’t violate people’s due process rights or equal protection rights, then you know, elections have consequences.”
And Democrats have accepted the results of the 2024 election, Nessel said, albeit with disappointment. But unlike Trump’s supporters, who she said sowed misinformation and mistrust on the election process, Democrats are honoring the democratic process.
Nessel also said her office’s prosecution of Republicans charged with submitting fraudulent electoral results on behalf of Michigan in 2020, who falsely claimed that Trump won the state will continue to be prosecuted.
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