Oakland County’s prosecutor will ask courts to sentence 16 people to life without parole again, a spokesperson for the county prosecutor’s office told Michigan Public.
These individuals are part of a cohort of “lifers” who have been given a chance to get shorter sentences following a series of rulings by the Michigan Supreme Court last year.
The 16 make up about 20% of the county’s remaining resentencing caseload as of January 5. In Oakland and across the state, dozens have already been resentenced to less than life.
In some cases, though, the prosecutor's office said a primary reason for asking for life is a lack of information key to the decision-making process.
In an emailed statement, the prosecutor’s office said it has argued in some motions to resentence people to life that Supreme Court rulings placed the prosecutor in a catch-22: The court said that mandatory life sentences for people who committed crimes at 18, 19 and 20 were unconstitutional. It required people to be resentenced and set a “very high burden” of proof for resentencing any of them to life. But it also “provides almost no means for the prosecution to obtain relevant information prior to” deciding whether to ask for life.
So, the prosecutor is asking for life now, in order to get information that may or may not result in them asking for a lighter sentence later.
In the statement, Prosecutor Karen McDonald said she believes her office’s “recommendations accurately reflect our best understanding of each case. However, the order to review dozens of closed cases, some decades old, created a challenging process to ensure victims received justice.”
Oakland County had the second-largest number of cases in the state following the state Supreme Court’s rulings.
The lifers who are now getting a second chance at freedom were all convicted of first degree murder. Some were directly responsible for planning and executing a killing. Others were charged for aiding and abetting.
Kent County, which has the fifth-largest caseload, is asking for life in 15 cases, prosecutor Chris Becker told Michigan Public in an email Monday. That’s just under half of the total number of eligible people awaiting resentencing in the West Michigan county.
The Michigan Supreme Court’s rulings found that mandatory life sentences for crimes committed at ages 18, 19, and 20 were "cruel and unusual," citing scientific evidence that suggests young people’s brains are not fully developed yet.
In a set of April 2025 decisions, the court set deadlines for the first major step in the resentencing process: county prosecutors deciding whether to ask judges to resentence people to life or to ask for a term of years. The second of the two deadlines passed on Monday, January 5.
Under these rulings, young people can still get life without parole if a judge chooses to give them that — provided that the judge considers factors related to their age.
This is why the 15-year-old boy who was sentenced to life without parole for killing four people in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting is not among those being resentenced in Oakland County. His sentence came in 2023, years after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down mandatory life sentences for people who were 17 or younger at the time of their crime. Prosecutors in that case successfully argued that his crime is one of the rare instances in which a youth should be sentenced to life without parole.
According to a Michigan Public analysis of publicly available state prison records, Oakland County whittled away at the total by resentencing over a dozen people as of late December — leaving just under 80 individuals waiting for a judge to decide their new sentence term.
“Life without parole is reserved for only the worst crimes and is never given lightly. There are certainly a handful of these cases where resentencing seems appropriate,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, with too many of these cases, we risk retraumatizing victims by allowing their loved one’s killer a chance at freedom because the burden placed on prosecutors and lower court judges is too high to keep them locked up,” McDonald’s statement continued.
Including people who have already been resentenced in Oakland, the prosecutor's office says a total of 79 will get less than life.
Kent County had just over 30 cases remaining as of January.
It’s not yet clear which exact cases the Oakland and Kent prosecutors have requested life sentences in. In a December interview, Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker told Michigan Public he expected more recent cases would see “battles” because case documentation is more readily available and defendants won’t benefit from long prison stays filled with examples of “rehabilitative” behavior.
The process of resentencing all of the individuals following the initial deadlines could drag on for years, Becker said.
Resentencing is not a guarantee of freedom. The minimum sentence for first degree murder is still 25 years. Based on that, Michigan Public found about 21% of the people affected by the state Supreme Court rulings will not be eligible for release until at least 2035. At least 60% are already 50 or older.
Prosecutors in Oakland County have fewer than half as many cases that need resentencing compared to neighboring Wayne County, the state’s most populous.
In December, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy told Michigan Public her office has made decisions on at least 104 cases ahead of the deadlines. Worthy said she did not ask for life sentences in most of those cases.
“There's a number of people where we're recommending a term of years that we think should continue to do life in prison, but the factors that we have to look at … dictate our decision making,” she said.
The state Supreme Court rulings came with five factors that judges must consider before sentencing someone to life without parole for crimes they committed at 18, 19, or 20. Worthy and other prosecutors told Michigan Public those factors "overwhelmingly” favor defendants.
For the few hundred cases her office won’t have time to review by the deadline, Worthy said her office will ask for life sentences, to preserve the option until staff can actually review the cases. She expects to change that position in many cases.
Jessica Zimbelman, deputy director at the State Appellate Defender Office, said existing court precedent dictates life sentences in these cases should be “rare”.
Michigan Public’s Zena Issa and Steve Carmody contributed reporting.
