James Biernat
Commercial
MACOMB COUNTY – Since becoming a member of the bench in 2011, Macomb County Chief Decide James Biernat has been concerned in various memorable instances.
In 2013, he watched a jury discover Daniel Daniels responsible of bodily and sexually abusing his two daughters. And in 2023, he watched a jury attain an almost $10 million settlement towards Henry Ford Macomb Hospital after a jury discovered {that a} 41-year-old girl died after her surgical wound an infection was not correctly handled by a physician.
“That stood out as a result of I’ve by no means had a jury award close to $10 million, and I do not assume there’s been a jury verdict over $10 million in Macomb County,” Biernat mentioned.
Biernat additionally remembers main the case of “The Backpage Murders,” a collection of murders dedicated by James Brown in Macomb County in 2014.
Brown murdered 4 ladies he met by way of an grownup web site, backpage.com, and stuffed their our bodies into automotive trunks. In accordance with Biernat, the method took greater than a month. In the end, Brown regularly refused to attend the sentencing.
“He was actually scared for the sufferer’s household. It was the one time I can consider, particularly in a capital case, the place the defendant refused to look on the sentencing,” he mentioned.
Biernat was elected choose in 2012. In 2015, he started serving as chief justice after former Chief Justice John Foster retired. Since 2016, he has been reappointed as chief justice each two years.
Since then, Biernat has overseen large-scale renovation initiatives, together with the transfer of all the county’s circuit and probate courts to 1 location downtown.
“Once I first grew to become chief in April 2015, we had been within the strategy of an enormous multimillion-dollar building venture that I helped inaugurate,” he mentioned. “And bringing all of the probate judges right here into one constructing, together with constructing out all of the archaic constructions we had right here and serving to to complete our downtown campus, so to talk.”
He has additionally seen the addition of different courts, such because the sobriety and psychological well being courts.
On November 14, Biernat was reappointed chief justice by the Michigan Supreme Courtroom.
“It’s my honor to be reappointed as chief choose of those Macomb County courts,” Biernat mentioned in an announcement.
As chief choose, he not solely oversees the docket, which he says is about 90% as massive as that of his fellow judges, but additionally oversees the employees who administer the courtroom system.
“That does not imply I haven’t got a job,” he mentioned. “I nonetheless have trials.”
Biernat can also be the chief choose of the Macomb County Probate Courtroom and the forty second District Courtroom in New Baltimore and Romeo. Together with his reappointment, he may even function chief choose of the thirty eighth District Courtroom in Eastpointe, though he won’t be added as a choose till accepted by the Home of Representatives, the Senate and the governor, and the Eastpointe Metropolis Council.
Wanting forward, along with discovering area so as to add one other choose in Eastpointe, Biernat can also be searching for more room to develop the probate courtroom.
“If that new area is deliberate, it could possibly be within the constructing we’re in, or in a brand new constructing, so that will be the brand new venture going ahead. The place is Probate going, what area does Probate want now, how can we obtain that as a result of Macomb County is clearly rising,” he mentioned.
You might also be all for
Commercial
