Damon Keith, a grandson of slaves who rose from humble beginnings in Detroit to become an internationally-revered champion for justice and a much-loved father-figure who launched countless legal careers, died Sunday morning at his home in Detroit.
Lawyers and legal scholars from all over the nation were drawn to his Detroit chambers, a place adorned with photos of the many famous people whose lives he touched, including Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela and President Barack Obama.
The longest-serving black judge in the nation, Keith was a leading citizen of Detroit — a confidant of elected officials, civic leaders and those who fight for social justice.
His impact on Detroit and his fight for equality under the law is visible from the Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University to his chambers in the federal building on Lafayette Avenue to the Wright Museum of African American History, which Keith rescued from closure several years ago.
Son of a factory worker
Keith himself often marveled at how he rose from the son of a Ford factory worker to friend and comrade of the Ford family. His story is well-told in a book that documents his life and work, “Crusader for Justice,” by Peter J. Hammer and Trevor Coleman, released in 2013.
Asked what he wants people to know about him after reading it, Keith said, “He did the best he could with his God-given talent, and he used his life and the law to try to make things better for all Americans.”
Keith burst onto the national stage in 1970 when, as a U.S. District Court judge, he ordered busing to desegregate Pontiac schools. It was the first decision on behalf of federal court-ordered busing outside of southern states.
On the District Court and later with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Keith wielded the Constitution as a weapon — handing down a remarkable series of landmark decisions that struck blows against segregated schools, employment and housing discrimination, and federal wiretapping policies.
“One cannot be around Damon for very long without sensing his commitment to all that is good about our country,” Judge Peter Fay, of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia, said in 1998 in nominating Keith for the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award.
“But unlike many, he does not limit his commitment to words — his actions speak volumes,” Fay added. “He gets involved. He spends the time. He does the work … there is nothing he will not do if he is convinced it will help others and strengthen our way of life.”
Among his landmark cases: In 1971, Keith ruled that President Richard Nixon and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell violated the U.S. Constitution by wiretapping student radicals in Ann Arbor without a court order. In 2002, he wrote one of the most quoted phrases in American legal history in Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, while he was on the US. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court ruled that deportation hearings held in private was unconstitutional. Keith put it this way:
“Democracies die behind closed doors.”
Faith and great role models
Whenever Keith was asked what drove him to achieve, his answer was the same — faith in God and great role models.
From a kid growing up on the segregated streets of Detroit to a student at an all-black college in West Virginia to a budding lawyer at Howard University, Keith credited those who had set the examples for him.
The inspiration began with his father Perry Keith, a $5-an-day Ford Rouge foundry worker who taught his son that he was somebody. It continued with black college professionals who helped Keith realize that he could triumph in a society that was not hospitable to the idea of equal treatment or opportunity for all.
And it took Thurgood Marshall, the fiery civil rights warrior and eventual U.S. Supreme Court justice, to show Keith how he could use the courts and the U.S. Constitution to battle segregation and Jim Crow laws.
“I just feel as though I have an obligation to do something to make things better for all people,” Keith told the Free Press in 2002. “God put me here for some purpose, and I don’t want to let Him down. And I don’t want to let myself down, or my family, my people — or my country.”
Keith often acted more like a politician than a federal judge. He made connections with community leaders of all backgrounds. He liked to surround himself with people and treated them with affection. He was a hugger.
Every year, he hosted a Soul Food Luncheon at the federal courthouse in Detroit where members of the legal community, elected officials, corporate leaders and celebrities showed up to network, have a good time and pay homage to a high community achiever that Keith singled out annually.
“It would be so easy to get isolated in these beautiful chambers where you don’t have to run for re-election or see anyone,” Keith once said. “It’s easy, when people are always saying, ’your honor’ and bowing and scraping, to get things out of balance. That’s why it’s important to get out in the community to mingle … and see what the problems are.”
Keith didn’t smoke or drink and rarely swore.
Former law clerks said he almost never lost his temper, and he prided himself on never using a gavel because he didn’t need it to control his courtroom.
Giving back
The Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights opened at Wayne State University in 2011. The $5.7-million addition to the WSU Law School chronicles Keith’s judicial career, the legal history of the civil rights movement and the accomplishments of African-American lawyers and judges.
The walls of Keith’s chambers are decorated with dozens and dozens of photos of celebrities and civil rights leaders Keith has known over the years, including the late Aretha Franklin and the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“This is a history of my life and experiences,” he once said. “When people come in, they see blacks and whites, rich and poor, the mayor, educators, Henry Ford II, Martin Luther King Jr.”
Keith did have his battles — he butted heads with longtime Detroit NAACP leader Wendell Anthony over management of the organization, which Keith helped pioneer years earlier. And he felt slighted by Wade McCree, the first black U.S. District Court judge in eastern Michigan (whose seat Keith filled in 1967) for not endorsing him for the federal bench.
One of Keith’s biographers, former Free Press editorial writer Trevor Coleman, said the judge sometimes had a difficult time overlooking slights because he was forever affected by those who said he wasn’t good enough to be a federal judge.
“Some implied that because he didn’t go to an Ivy League school, pass the bar exam the first time out, or work in government as a lawyer, that he wasn’t qualified,” Coleman said. “He spent his lifetime proving them wrong.”
He also spent a lifetime giving back.
When an intruder attacked Rosa Parks in her Detroit home in 1994, Keith arranged through his friend A. Alfred Taubman, the late shopping mall magnate, to have her move into a gated apartment complex on the riverfront.
When she was invited to Montgomery, Ala., to attend the opening of a museum named in her honor, Keith again called on Taubman to fly her in his private jet.
When Parks died in 2005, Keith chaired the group that planned funerals in three cities.
It was easy for Keith to go to Taubman, a philanthropist, because the two had developed a close bond over many years.
“He’s a highly intelligent man, very hard-working, very determined,” Taubman, a longtime friend, had said. “I have great admiration for him so it’s not unusual for us to be friends.”
Keith relished being a civic leader, even when it could have gotten him into trouble.
In 2004, he convened a meeting of Detroit political, business and civic leaders at the courthouse to raise $1 million to keep the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History afloat.
Keith insisted that he merely invited the guests but didn’t solicit money, which would have violated the federal judicial code. “We blacks who are in positions of power and authority … have an obligation to save this museum,” he said.
Said Rod Gillum, a General Motors Foundation chairman and museum board member who attended the meeting: “Judge Damon Keith is one of the few individuals who is capable of putting together a group of prominent citizens on such short notice.”
During the 1980s, there was talk that Keith might be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court like his hero, Thurgood Marshall. But it didn’t happen. Republicans controlled the White House in the 1980s, when Keith was in his prime.
If he was disappointed, he never let on publicly.
Overcoming racism
Though he experienced racism, Keith didn’t let it make him bitter.
When he began practicing law in the 1950s, there were few black lawyers and no black judges.
“Arguing a case before a judge was quite humiliating at times because of the way judges treated black lawyers at that time,“ Keith told the Free Press in 1984. “I’ve had judges in (Detroit) Recorders Court tell me to shut up or sit down or not go any further and, if I did, they’d hold me in contempt.”
The slights didn’t end when he became a judge.
He often told audiences about the time he attended a judicial conference in Virginia after becoming a federal appeals judge. While walking in the hotel parking lot with a white judge, a man drove up, tossed his keys to Keith and asked him to park his car.
Keith’s colleague was horrified, but Keith told him to calm down because he was accustomed to being reminded every day that he was black.
After graduating from law school in 1949, he twice failed his bar exam. He got his law license by appealing the second score and having his grade bumped up to a passing grade.
The episode caused some in Detroit’s black legal community to regard Keith as a legal lightweight and nearly prevented him from being appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. District Court in 1967.
“Up to that point, Damon was well-known for being about in the community, but the so-called conventional wisdom was that he was not a jurisprudential heavyweight,” the late Kenneth Cockrel Sr., the legendary activist lawyer and Detroit city councilman, told the Free Press in 1984. “Many people — and I include myself — were quite pleasantly surprised.”
Keith’s biggest setback came in January 2007. His wife of 53 years, Rachel Boone Keith, a retired internist and racial and gender trailblazer in Detroit’s medical community, collapsed and died.
His wife, the daughter of Baptist missionaries, was born in Liberia. A mutual friend introduced them while she was finishing her residency at Detroit Receiving Hospital. They married two years later, in 1953.
They had three children: Cecile Keith-Brown, Debbie Keith and Gilda Keith and two granddaughters, Nia Keith Brown and Camara Keith Brown. Throughout their marriage, he trekked most Saturday mornings to Eastern Market to buy flowers for her. On Saturday afternoons, they had a standing date to go to the movies.
During four decades on the bench, he hired more women and minority law clerks — African Americans, Hispanics, Asians — than any federal judge. He encouraged them to help others as he had helped them.
“A network of people throughout Michigan and the United States have obtained gainful employment, gone to college or graduate or professional school, secured personal loans, or advanced their careers at crucial stages, as a direct result of selfless efforts by Judge Keith,” said U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay, who clerked for Keith in 1972-73.
Early years
Damon Jerome Keith was born in Detroit on July 4, 1922, in a house near the present I-96 and I-94 freeway interchange.
He was the youngest of seven children of Perry and Annie Louise (Williams) Keith. His father had moved the family from Georgia in the 1920s to get a job in a Ford plant.
Keith once said that “most kids in my neighborhood did not go to college — most went to Jackson prison.” His father insisted that college was in young Damon’s future.
After graduating from Northwestern High in 1939, Keith enrolled at West Virginia State College and worked his way through college by cleaning the chapel and waiting tables in a dining hall.
In 1943, after watching his son graduate, Perry Keith told him: “One of my children has a college degree. Now I can die happy.”
Less than a week later, Perry Keith was dead.
“My father was the finest man I’ve ever known,” Keith told the Free Press in 1998.
After college, Keith was drafted into the segregated U.S. Army and spent three years driving a truck in the Quartermaster Corps during World War II in Europe. Keith called it an “absolutely degrading,” partly because the “all-colored” unit didn’t have a single black officer.
He was discharged in 1946 as a sergeant.
“After coming back and having to ride on the back of buses while seeing German soldiers ride in the front and seeing German soldiers go into restaurants in the South that I could not go into, I made up my mind I was going to become a lawyer,” he said in 2002.
He enrolled on the GI Bill at Howard University in Washington. He helped research civil rights cases, participated in mock trials and watched rising legal stars like Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, practice his legal arguments and argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
From janitor to federal judge
After getting his law degree in 1949, Keith worked as a janitor at the Detroit News while studying for his bar exam.
He became a $15-a-week clerk for Loomis, Jones, Piper & Colden, a black law firm, and later returned to the firm as a full-fledged lawyer. He received a Master’s in Law in 1956 from Wayne State University and in 1964 opened his own law firm, which eventually became known as Keith, Conyers, Anderson, Brown & Wahls.
His partners included Nathan Conyers, the eventual Detroit car dealer and brother of former U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. The firm moved into the Guardian Building, becoming the first black law firm in the city’s all-white legal district.
Keith, a Democrat, also served as a Wayne County commissioner (1958-63), president of the Detroit Housing Commission (1958-67) and co-chair of the state’s first Civil Rights Commission (1964-67).
His big break came in 1967 after President Johnson elevated McCree to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Keith wanted to fill McCree’s slot, and Johnson wound up selecting him at the request of U.S. Rep. Philip Hart, D-Mich., after Otis Smith, the first black to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court, dropped out to become the first black member of General Motors’ legal staff.
Legal rulings
In 1970, after Keith ordered citywide busing to desegregate Pontiac public schools, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to kill him — prompting federal marshals to guard his home. Keith didn’t back down.
“I have not lost one hour of sleep,” he said. “I thrive on making difficult decisions. That is why I enjoy being a federal judge.”
In 1971, Keith ruled that President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell violated the constitutional rights of three radical White Panther Party members, whose phones were tapped without a court order during an investigation of the bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ruling, which became known as the “Keith Case.”
The same year, Keith ordered the city of Hamtramck to build low-income housing after razing black neighborhoods to make way for the Chrysler Freeway. Keith said the city engaged in “Negro removal” in the name of urban renewal.
In 1973, he ordered Detroit Edison to pay $4 million to black employees who were victims of job discrimination and ordered it to create an affirmative action program. He also ordered the union to pay $250,000 for failing to protect the workers.
“I began to think the blind draw wasn’t blind,” Keith said about being randomly assigned to so many high-profile cases.
In 1974, Keith’s work was recognized by the NAACP, which awarded him its highest honor — the Spingarn Medal.
Then-President Jimmy Carter elevated Keith to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1977.
In 1979, Keith wrote an opinion upholding a lower court decision ordering the Detroit Police Department to carry out Coleman Young’s plan to integrate the department.
And in 2002, seven years after going on senior — part-time — status, Keith wrote another opinion that made history, finding that Attorney General John Ashcroft and the George W. Bush administration had to open up deportation proceedings for people linked to terrorism.
The famous line from that opinion — “Democracies die behind closed doors” — became a rallying cry for news organizations battling federal secrecy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In recounting his legal career, Keith once said: “I really didn’t know what kind of judge I’d be… I knew I wanted to try to be the kind of judge that would make attorneys want to be in his court.
“Putting on the robes can be an awesome responsibility. You have the chance to find out a lot about yourself.
“It’s like Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘If you want to know what a man really is, give him power.’”
In 2009, a CNN reporter ran into Keith and his granddaughter, Camara, who was 12 at the time, while they were in Washington for President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“I’m here today to see this man become president of the United States,” Keith told the reporter, on the verge of tears.
“It’s a great event,” he said. “It shows what can happen in America. We’re a good people.”
One of his proudest moments happened several years ago, May 2013, when his granddaughter, Nia Keith Brown, graduated from Emory University School of Law. The proud grandpa hooded his granddaughter during the ceremony in Atlanta. A few months later he held a private family ceremony in a federal courtroom where he swore her into the Michigan Bar.
Keith lived the advice he said he’d give today to young lawyers such as Nia.
“I tell them — and this is a phrase that’s so important — they are walking on floors they did not scrub and they’re going through doors they did not open … open doors that didn’t open for you so others can come through. We’ve got to leave a legacy.”
Sources :
Cassandra Spratling and David Ashenfelter, “Federal judge, civil rights icon Damon Keith dies at age 96“, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2019.
Mitch Albom, “Judge Damon Keith, an extraordinary man, who stared down hate”, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2019.
Longtime “Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak is spinning his way up the ladder at Hillsdale College, and has landed in the chairman’s seat.
The small liberal arts college about 60 miles southeast of Battle Creek announced the well-known television game show host will lead the governing board. Sajak has been vice chairman of the board there for 15 years, according to the school’s campus newspaper, The Collegian.
Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn described Sajak has having a “wicked wit,” and displaying “calm and steady judgment,” according to the Associated Press.
Sajak, who is not a Hillsdale graduate, said he has been spending more time on campus in the last year, talking to students and staff, according to the AP. He told The Collegian that he’s been preparing for months to succeed the board’s past chairman, William Brodbeck.
Source : Kaylee McGhee, MLive, April 28, 2018.
On April 29, 1835, the Detroit Free Press carried an article (top of column three) describing Michigan militia efforts to confront Ohio surveyers as the battle for the southern portion of Michigan heats up. “Col. Hawkins, the Ohio surveyor, and nine armed men were taken prisoner and escorted to Tecumseh!” Another article (column 1) states the Toledo Gazette has made several scurrilous, abusive, and erroneous statements about the efforts of Michigan to impede surveyors of Ohio laying claim to Michigan territory. At any rate the Toledo War seems to be in full swing, at least in the newspapers of the day.
George Collin Baker of Chicago came to Detroit in January of 1892 with a detailed agenda. He checked into the Cadillac Hotel and set to work perfecting his plans to try out his wooden submarine torpedo boat in the Rouge River.
According to George Baker the submarine had a wooden hull, but it leaked only at the rate of two gallons in twenty-four hours. When the boat floated on the surface about sixteen inches of the top stuck out of the water, and the propeller wheel was driven by an engine with steam. When submerged a storage battery, one of the largest of its kind and possessing the power of fifty horses, furnished the power. The storage battery also furnished electric light under water, “a good strong light,” according to Baker. The submarine had reached a speed of eight miles per hour practically submerged.
George Baker had a visionary imagination as far as the utility of his submarine. He thought that it could be used to plant torpedoes beneath a war vessel. The Civil War navies had begun to explore this avenue of underwater warfare with the Hunley and Housatonic, but George Baker seemed to foretell the Navy Seals of the two twentieth century world wars. He thought his submarine could also be used to locate wrecks. It would assist the explorations of divers by using a powerful electric light that threw a bright light a distance of sixteen feet when the boat was under water. The light was manipulated from an iron projection from the top of the boat known as a conning tower. Baker described it further by saying, “The tower is much the size and shape of a stiff hat and is provided with peep-holes on all sides, the glass being heavy plate an inch thick.”
On Saturday, April 2, 1892, George Baker conducted an experimental run of his submarine in the River Rouge near the exposition grounds. He had counted on fifteen and a half feet of water, but heavy northeast winds had blown for at least a day before the trial and the wooden submarine scraped on the bottom when it submerged. Undaunted, Baker planned another trial for the following week. On April 29, 1892, he ran a successful trial with Goddard, his construction foreman. They submerged the Baker Boat for an hour and fifty minutes in the River Rouge.
Sources :
Kathy Warnes, “Submarine Trials in the Rouge River”, Definitely Downriver Blog, April 2012.
Kathy Warnes, “Baker’s Boat”, Michigan History, November/December 2013., pp.20-23.
On this day, the John Phillip Sousa Band played his new march, Stars and Stripes Forever at the corner of Larner and Brush streets in Detroit.
Source : Historical Society of Michigan
Also see John Philip Sousa wikipedia entry
Deborah Ann Stabenow ; née Greer, born April 29, 1950) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Michigan, a seat she has held since 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she became the state’s first female U.S. senator after defeating Republican incumbent Spencer Abraham in the 2000 election. Before her election to the Senate, she was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Michigan’s 8th congressional district from 1997 to 2001. Previously, she served on the Ingham County Board of Commissioners and in the Michigan State Legislature.
Stabenow was reelected to Senate in 2006, 2012 and 2018. She became the state’s senior U.S. senator upon Carl Levin’s retirement in 2015. Stabenow chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee from 2011 to 2015 and again since 2021. She became chair of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in 2017. At the start of the 118th Congress, Stabenow became the dean of the Michigan congressional delegation, upon the retirement of Representative Fred Upton. In January 2023, she announced that she would not seek reelection in 2024.
Source : Debbie Stabenow wikipedia entry.
On April 29, 2004 the final Oldsmobile drove off the line at General Motors’ Lansing Car Assembly plant.
That dark cherry Alero sedan represented the send-off to a nameplate founded in the city more than a century ago by the son of a machinist.
It was a bitter farewell, the Lansing State Journal reports, but one tempered by the promise of new car industry jobs in Lansing for years to come in the form of new plants making other GM brands.
The Detroit automaker was criticized locally for killing the Oldsmobile division, but it might have turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
GM now has four nameplates, all of which have at least one vehicle built in Lansing: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.
Source : “Final Oldsmobile rolled off Lansing line 10 years ago”, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2014.
Also see Laurie Hollinger, “From the Archives: Oldsmobile through the years – Coming in Sunday’s LSJ: A look at the 10 years since the end of Olds”, Lansing State Journal, April 25, 2014.
The Flag of the State of Michigan depicts the state’s coat-of-arms on a dark blue field, as set forth by Michigan state law. The state coat of arms depicts a light blue shield, upon which the sun rises over a lake and peninsula, and a man with raised hand and holding a long gun representing peace and the ability to defend his rights. As supporters the elk and moose are derived from the Hudson’s Bay Company coat of arms, the first defacto government of Michigan when it was called Canada, and depict great animals of Michigan. The bald eagle represents the United States which formed the State of Michigan from the Northwest Territory.
The design features three Latin mottos. From top-to-bottom they are:
1. On red ribbon: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of many, one”, a motto of the United States
2. On light blue shield: Tuebor, “I will defend”
3. On white ribbon: Si Quæris Peninsulam Amœnam Circumspice, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you” (the official state motto)
The present flag, adopted in 1911, is the third state flag. The first flag featured a portrait of Michigan’s first governor, Stevens T. Mason, on one side and the state coat of arms and “a soldier and a lady” on the other side. The second flag, adopted in 1865, displayed the state coat of arms on one side and the United States coat of arms on the other.
The current Michigan flag was actually adopted on June 26, 1911, but April 29 was a slow Michigan fact day, so what the heck.
For more information, see State of Michigan Flag wikipedia entry
Since Macomb County helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump, he decided to return the favor Saturday night.
He came to Washington Township to tout his record since being inaugurated in 2017 and urge a huge crowd at the Total Sports Park arena to get to the polls in November to elect Republicans.
While the 80-minute speech was filled with talk of the need for a wall at the southern border and a continuation of removing regulations and cutting taxes, Trump also made some news for Michigan at the rally when he said he wants the federal government to fix the badly deteriorating Soo Locks, which connect Lake Superior and Lake Huron in Sault Ste. Marie. The locks are crucial to the shipping industry in Michigan.
“Your lock, it’s not looking too well,” Trump told the crowd, pledging, “We’re going to start (on an upgrade) as soon as I get back” to Washington, D.C.
In fact, depending on how long his speech ran, he said he might even call the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about the project Saturday night, though it might not happen until Sunday.
Trump has only made one visit to Michigan as president — an event in Ypsilanti Township in March 2017, when he talked about revisiting fuel standards for vehicles and renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
For the full article, see Kathleen Gray, Aleanna Siacon, Paul Egan, “President Donald Trump tells Michigan crowd: I love this state“, Detroit Free Press, April 29, 2018.
For another see Jonathon Oosting and Beth LeBlanc, “Trump: Let’s fix the Soo Locks“, Detroit News, April 29, 2018.
A Michigan judge found that while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order does “temporary harm” to the constitutional rights of Michigan residents, the harm doesn’t outweigh the public health risk posed by the coronavirus outbreak.\
Steve Martinko, owner of an Oakland County landscaping business, and four other Michigan residents filed a lawsuit against the governor and other state officials claiming the stay-at-home order infringes on their constitutional rights and should be declared invalid. The “mandatory quarantine” and in-state travel restrictions violate due process rights, the plaintiffs argued.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Murray ruled in favor of Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Department of Natural Resources Director Daniel Eichinger on Wednesday, April 29.
“Our fellow residents have an interest to remain unharmed by a highly communicable and deadly virus,” Murray wrote in his opinion. “And since the state entered the Union in 1837, it has had the broad power to act for the public health of the entire state when faced with a public crisis.”
The stay-at-home order was first put in place March 24, suspending activities “not necessary to sustain or protect life.” It’s been extended through May 15 – with fewer restrictions.
Martinko is the owner of Contender’s Tree and Lawn Service in Waterford and Farmington Hills. He’s also part of a separate lawsuit filed in federal court, which also seeks a court order to end the stay-at-home order as well as financial damages. That lawsuit is still pending.
Forcing Whitmer to end the stay-at-home order would not “serve in the public interest,” Murray ruled.
The plaintiffs in the Court of Claims case also attacked Michigan’s Emergency Management Act for giving the governor “uncontrolled, arbitrary power.” Murray disagreed, saying the act lays out specific procedures and criteria for the governor to declare a state of emergency.
“I am pleased with the court’s decision,” Nessel said in a news release. “This pandemic has already taken more than 3,600 lives in Michigan and many more around the world. The primary goal of the Stay Home, Stay Safe order has always been to protect human life.”
Plaintiffs also argued Whitmer should have only quarantined people who have the virus, or impose restrictions on certain regions of the state.
“Monday morning quarterbacking is the role of sports fans, not courts reviewing the factual basis supporting executive action to protect the public health,” Murray said. “Instead, it is the role of the executive and legislative branches to determine what steps are necessary when faced with a public health crisis.
Source : Taylor DesOrmeau, “Judge rules Michigan stay-at-home order doesn’t infringe on constitutional rights“, MLive, April 29, 2020.