A lot of big news happened this year across the state of Michigan. It may have been hard to keep up. We've rounded up some of 2024's major stories.
Years after her rape, investigators came knocking, and she had to make a choice
Between 2006 and 2014, a man named Lionel Wells sexually assaulted at least five teenage girls in Detroit. His DNA was recovered from the victims, and sealed in rape kits.
It took a decade to test all those kits, and prosecutors are still building cases based on the evidence they contained. But that requires reaching out to survivors of those crimes, and trying to earn their trust in a justice system that had already failed them once.
In this first of a two-part series on the backlog’s lingering legacy, one survivor shared her story — and what she did when faced with a painful choice.
The ACLU of Michigan announced that it reached a landmark legal settlement with the Detroit Police Department over the department’s use of facial recognition technology.
It stems from the case of Robert Williams, whose wrongful arrest in 2020 for allegedly stealing watches was one of the first and clearest known cases to highlight the dangers of police misuse of facial recognition. That settlement achieves some of what Williams and the ACLU were hoping for — but not everything.
Detroit man, sentenced to life in prison, freed after 22 years
LaVone Hill walked out of a Muskegon prison 22 years after he was sent there for a Detroit double murder he didn’t commit.
Hill’s lawyers with the University of Michigan’s Innocence Clinic call his case, which involved both police and prosecutorial misconduct, one of the most egregious they’ve come across. Hill became the 44th wrongfully-convicted person the Innocence Clinic has helped free from prison.
Hill was convicted of killing two people following a Detroit dice game in 2001. His conviction was based on the testimony of one man, who recanted it in court. But Detroit Police Sergeant Walter Bates had coerced that man's testimony, and he testified against Hill, who he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
More patients are coming to Michigan for abortions, two years after Dobbs
The number of abortions in Michigan increased slightly again last year, with thousands of people still coming from other states, including hundreds from as far away as Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia.
Nationally, the US has seen a surge in people traveling out of state for abortions since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with “more than 166,000 US abortion patients [having] traveled to other states to obtain care in 2023,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. That’s twice as many as those who traveled out-of-state in 2020.
As Michigan legalizes surrogacy, here's how families found ways around the ban
Michigan law made it a felony to arrange to pay a surrogate, and declared surrogacy agreements "void and unenforceable." The ban goes back to 1988, when the state's involvement in the infamous "Baby M" case motivated legislators to crack down on the early surrogacy industry.
Michigan was the only state that still had a broad criminal ban on surrogacy. Many families say that left them in legal limbo, forcing them to leave the state to have children, find strangers on Facebook who would carry their child, or needing to legally adopt their own biological children.
Earlier this year, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation repealing that criminal ban and legalizing surrogacy contracts and compensated surrogacy.
Ten years after Flint's water crisis began, Mayor Sheldon Neeley reflects on the past and present
On April 25, 2014, a state-appointed emergency manager switched the city of Flint’s drinking water source to the Flint River to save money.
The river water was not properly treated and it released lead from aging pipes into the city’s drinking water, and caused a deadly bacterial outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
Now, 10 years later, the Flint water crisis still looms large over the city.
Flint’s current mayor, Sheldon Neeley, joined Morning Edition host Doug Tribou to discuss the ongoing pipe-replacement program, the timeline for settlement payments to residents, and Neeley's frustrations about the handling of criminal prosecutions related to the crisis.
Bonus Content: Check out this TikTok video about the 10-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis.
Police officers clear encampment on Ann Arbor's UM Diag
Police in Ann Arbor removed protesters on the University of Michigan Diag.
The protesters were opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza and had been calling for the university to divest from businesses with ties to Israel.
Police used pepper spray to move the people back.
"I was sprayed directly in the face," said Josiah Walker. Walker says once the protesters were cleared the police began indiscriminately throwing everything in to dump trucks, including people's personal belongings.
In a letter to the university community, University of Michigan President Santa Ono cited fire hazards and other safety concerns as one reason for the move.
Bonus Content: Check out this TikTok about the protests at the University of Michigan
As storms intensify, ghost streams and wetlands haunt homes and businesses built over them
Intense rainfall events are becoming more common due to climate change. With these events, drain systems can get overwhelmed and severe flooding can occur. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declared a state of emergency in Michigan following catastrophic flooding last summer. Water filled streets and basements in areas that aren’t even near a river or waterway.
Some neighborhoods got hit harder than others, and that may be due in part to ghost wetlands and ghost streams.
Jacob Napieralski is a professor of geology at the University of Michigan Dearborn, specializing in flood risk equity. He spoke with Michigan Public's Katheryne Friske on Weekend Edition.
