Judge tosses charges against 7 people in Flint water crisis

A Michigan judge dismissed felony charges Tuesday against seven people in the Flint water scandal, including two former state health officials blamed for deaths from Legionnaires’ disease.

The judge’s dismissal was significant but not a complete surprise after the Michigan Supreme Court in June unanimously said a different judge acting as a one-person grand jury had no authority to issue indictments.

Judge Elizabeth Kelly rejected efforts by the attorney general’s office to just send the cases to Flint District Court and turn them into criminal complaints, the typical path to filing felony charges in Michigan. It was a last-gasp effort to keep things afloat.

“Anything arising out of the invalid indictments are irreconcilably tainted from inception. …Simply put, there are no valid charges,” Kelly said.

Kelly’s decision doesn’t affect former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. That’s only because he was charged with two misdemeanors — willful neglect of duty — and his case is being handled by another judge. But he, too, was indicted in a process declared invalid by the Supreme Court. His next hearing is Oct. 26.

In 2014, Flint managers appointed by Snyder took the city out of a regional water system and began using the Flint River to save money while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was being built. But the river water wasn’t treated to reduce its corrosive qualities. Lead broke off from old pipes and contaminated the system for more than a year.

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission said it was the result of systemic racism, doubting that the water switch and the brush-off of complaints in the majority-Black city would have occurred in a white, prosperous community.

Separately, the water was blamed for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which typically spreads through heating and cooling systems.

Former state health director Nick Lyon and former chief medical executive Eden Wells were charged with involuntary manslaughter in nine deaths linked to Legionnaires’. They were accused of failing to timely warn the Flint area about the outbreak.

Lyon’s attorneys praised Kelly’s decision and urged the attorney general’s office to close a “misguided prosecution.”

Besides Lyon and Wells, charges were dismissed against Snyder’s longtime fixer, Rich Baird; former senior aide Jarrod Agen; former Flint managers Gerald Ambrose and Darnell Earley; and Nancy Peeler, a health department manager.

An effort to hold people criminally responsible for Flint’s lead-in-water disaster has lasted years and produced little.