For well over a year, state officials knew Michigan’s computer-driven unemployment insurance system had wrongly accused thousands of workers of benefit fraud.
That didn’t stop lawyers for the state from working to derail a class action against the Unemployment Insurance Agency. They’ve succeeded – for now – after the Michigan Court of Appeals dismissed the case in July on a technicality, ruling that workers had waited too long to file their claims.
State lawyers have taken the same hard-line approach against individual workers. In one case, the state spent two years and deployed a team of attorneys to pry back $158 in benefits from a seasonal worker at Bloomfield Hills Country Club named Suzanne Lawrence – only to lose when an appeals court ruled in July there was not “even a scintilla of evidence” she had committed fraud.
Consider Flint. Government lawyers continue to contest a battery of lawsuits over the state’s role in the lead poisoning of Flint’s drinking water, acrisis that unfolded in 2014 when the impoverished city was under state control.
Michigan tenaciously fights the claims of Flint residents despite the findings of a state-appointed commission, which concluded state government was primarily to blame for the disaster. Thousands of children were exposed to toxic lead levels as a result of state employees’ neglect and refusal to take seriously complaints over contaminated drinking water.
On another front, Michigan aggressively contested allegations of sex abuse of female prisoners by state prison guards, well after the evidence became overwhelming. The class action was finally settled in 2009 for $100 million, following 13 years of litigation and two lost trials. A lawyer for the women said she had earlier offered to settle the cases for one-quarter of the eventually cost.