Ex-jail guard facing assault charges

Alleged incident involved inmate

A former corrections officer at the Isabella County Jail will stand trial on charges stemming from an alleged assault on an inmate in April 2020.

Judge Sara Spencer-noggle ordered Christopher Cluley bound over to circuit court in a written opinion issued Wednesday morning following the fifth and last day of a hearing to determine whether sufficient evidence existed to send him to trial.

Cluley was charged in October 2021 with two counts of misconduct in office, a five-year felony. Neither directly involved the alleged assault. Count one alleges that Cluley falsified reporting about the incident. Count two alleges that Cluley violated the policies of the Isabella County Sheriff’s Office.

His attorney, John Freeman, had argued that prosecutors hadn’t proved that Cluley had acted in a corrupt fashion. Spencer-noggle ruled that was a statement of fact, and the job of the jury is to establish facts.

In addition, he argued that the crime his client was accused of committing would have been the misdemeanor Willful Neglect of Duty. He also previously argued that his client was suspended before the report was technically completed, leaving it open to editing by other people with access to the jail’s reporting system.

Spencer-noggle ruled that prosecutors didn’t accuse Cluley of acting negligently, but that he committed deliberately falsified the report to minimize the alleged assault.

Freeman also argued that the filing of reports is covered under policies and that they can’t be used as the basis for a criminal charge. He repeated that during Wednesday’s hearing.

“The fundamental question is who makes the law,” he said. Not the court or prosecutors, he followed up.

Spencer-noggle disagreed, saying that judicial precedent says otherwise.

Freeman argued that the second count, which involved violating sheriff’s department policies, violated Cluley’s protections against multiple prosecutions for the same thing and that it was based on violating policy rather than law.

Christine Grand, speaking before Spencer-noggle issued her written opinion, argued that the charges didn’t violate Clulely’s protections against multiple prosecutions because he’d violated multiple department policies, particularly use of force against the inmate and separately mischaracterizing that use of force in an incident report.

Spencer-noggle agreed with her, and disagreed with Freeman that department policy couldn’t form the basis for criminal charges.

Cluley is accused of shoving an inmate to the floor on April 12, 2020, which ultimately broke the man’s knee.

The altercation took place while Cluley was trying to move the man to administrative segregation. It was captured on video and turned over to the Michigan State Police, which investigated it.

During the previous days of the hearing concluded Wednesday, the state police detective who investigated the case said that Cluley that force was necessary because the man turned on him with clenched fists and “crazy eyes,” which the detective said was not supported by video evidence.

The prosecution’s first witness was then-jail Administrator Kevin Dush II, who testified that Cluley violated several department policies during and after the policy.

A jail nurse also testified that Cluley was slow to report the inmate’s medical condition, which prompted her to not take it as seriously as she did after she actually examined him.

Cluley’s next step is formal charging at the circuit court level, after which the trial is scheduled.