Nessel's quest for AG's office began on steps of U.S. Supreme Court

Kathleen Gray | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Dana Nessel talks about Michigan AG race Plymouth Democrat Dana Nessel talks about the race for Michigan's next Attorney General.

When Dana Nessel read the briefs filed by the Michigan Attorney General’s Office in the landmark case that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide, she was beside herself.

Not only were the briefs filed by expert witnesses hired by the state attacking her clients — Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer who were fighting for the right to marry and to legally adopt their children — the state’s arguments felt personal.

They said that children raised by same-sex couples were 35 percent less likely to make progress in school than children raised by opposite sex parents and that voters made it clear in 2004 that traditional marriage between one man and one woman was the only “normal” union for Michigan.

“I was distraught to read some of the arguments made on behalf of my state against my clients, but also against me and my children and my family,” Nessel said, referring to her wife, Alanna Maguire, and their twin sons.

Nessel won that case in U.S. District Court in Detroit in 2014 and the state appealed, taking it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.

While the victory was sweet and allowed her to marry Alanna and buy a house in Plymouth with a portion of the $2 million in legal fees the state was ordered to pay DeBoer’s and Rowse’s attorneys, it also fueled her desire to change her career path.

“It played a pivotal role for me in seeing that we needed to do things differently,” she said. “What a waste of our precious state resources to hurt good people in this state instead of helping them.”

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So she founded the nonprofit Fair Michigan in 2016 to advocate for the LGBTQ community and find justice for victims of hate crimes and decided last year to seek the office of Michigan attorney general.

“It didn’t necessarily need to be me for this position,” said Nessel, who would be the first lesbian to hold a statewide office if she wins. “But I need to know it was going to be someone who was going to fight aggressively against discrimination, not just against the LGBTQ community, but African-Americans, Latinos, and poor people, anyone who ends up on the short end of the stick.”

'To Kill a Mockingbird' inspiration

Born in West Bloomfield, the 49-year-old Nessel said her childhood was unremarkable, other than a spot on the West Bloomfield High School wall of fame from her time as an All-State soccer striker.

But when she was in the seventh grade, she read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the classic novel by Harper Lee about lawyer Atticus Finch and his defense of a black man wrongly accused of rape.

“I just loved that book. I read it a million times,” she said. “I just became sort of obsessed with the notion of being an attorney and being somebody who, for a living, was trying to provide justice to people.”

She loved the theatricality of the courtroom in that book and decided that after getting a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, she would go to law school. She ended up at Wayne State University and got an internship with the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office.

“One of the cases I got to work on while I was a law school student was the Highland Park serial killer case,” she said, referring to Benjamin Atkins, who was convicted of raping and killing 11 women in Highland Park and Detroit. “So, it was hard for me to not skip class because I thought what am I going to be learning at law school that's even a fraction as exciting as what I'm doing here. There’s only so many serial killer cases you get to work on in your career.”

That internship led to a decade-long run as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County, where she handled everything from homicides, armed robberies and child abuse cases to rapes and other sex crimes, carjackings and drug cases. Records from the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, which are not complete because of changes in the database used by the office, list her as the primary attorney on 1,665 cases.

“The list gives you only the very minimum amount of cases that she worked on — what it does give you is a snapshot of the many types of cases that she prosecuted,” said Maria Miller, spokeswoman for the office. “She was required to consistently carry large caseloads that included the most serious cases in the office.”

Her direct boss near the end of her time in the prosecutor’s office, Rod Hassinger, who was in charge of the auto crimes unit, said that he begged Nessel not to leave for private practice.

“I gave her the toughest cases we had because she handled them and she won,” he said. “I looked at my calendar from back then and I have it marked ‘Dana’s last day.' I tried to talk her out of it so hard, completely out of self interest.”

Kym Worthy, who worked with Nessel as an assistant prosecutor and was her boss when she became the county prosecutor, has a different perspective, because while Worthy was a Wayne County judge, she saw Nessel try cases in her courtroom.

“When I became I judge, I could actually see what the different prosecutors’ skills were,” Worthy said. “When we worked together, I always thought she was a good prosecutor. But it was only when I got to the bench that I discovered that she was a phenomenal one. She is wicked smart.”

Supporting a family

But Nessel was a single mom of twins at the time and needed to be able to provide better for her family, so she left a job she said she really loved and went into more lucrative private practice.

“I would still be working there if it hadn't been for the fact that I needed to support my family better than I could do as a civil servant, unfortunately,” she said.

So Nessel started practicing family and civil rights law and defending people accused of crimes, giving her a broader perspective about the criminal justice system.

“I guess it gave me a sense of empathy that you don't necessarily have as a prosecutor,” she said. “And it made me more determined to see if there was a way that I could use my work to really help people and whether that meant exploring diversionary options.”

That criminal defense work has been used against her by Republicans, who say she defended sexual predators and that on her law firm’s website, her partner touted the fact that they could get accused criminals off by tripping up witnesses. Those entries have since been removed from the firm’s website.

A super PAC that is supporting Republican Tom Leonard for the attorney general’s job has given her the nickname “Dangerous Dana” and has been sending out “Defendant of the Day” emails to the media. The Michigan Republican Party paid for a digital ad that included images of accused sexual predators Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar and Bill Cosby in an ad trashing Nessel, who has not defended any of those men.

“I appreciate the fact that there are some people who absolutely need to be separated from the rest of us in society because they endanger us and are a threat to our families,” she said. “But I think that defense work has allowed me to differentiate that there are other means of making society sleep better at night besides just putting people in jail.”

Her experience on both sides of the criminal justice system makes her a more well-rounded candidate for the job, Nessel said. “To have somebody in that position that denigrates the role of criminal defense attorneys — that scares me, that should scare everyone.”

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Fighting for rights

Nessel's campaign has been helped by her status as a fighter for the LGBTQ community and her progressive viewpoints. She was able to beat former U.S. Attorney Pat Miles, a candidate favored by the Democratic establishment, by out-organizing him before a Democratic Party endorsement convention in April.

But she also has been hurt by some missteps. Her first ad, which appeared only online, touted the fact that she may be better-positioned to fight cases of sexual harassment in the age of the #MeToo movement because she doesn’t have a penis. And in the highly charged environment of a competitive statewide race, she has been plagued by not only a large amount of staff turnover, but former employees, some on the record, some anonymous, who have gone public with complaints of how demanding Nessel is and the “toxic environment” she created.

Brian Stone, who lasted 48 hours on the campaign, said the campaign staffers “developed coping strategies,” such as sticking to text messages and emails to avoid face-to-face confrontations with Nessel.

Maggie Lourdes, a former fundraiser for Nessel who left to work for independent attorney general candidate Chris Graveline, posted on Leonard’s Facebook page that Nessel had threatened to slap her with a personal protection order if she didn’t stop trying to contact Nessel.

Nessel said the early days of the campaign were filled with workers coming and going, some of whom were volunteers and some who were paid.

“We definitely had a learning curve during the course of the campaign,” she said. “But you can talk to people that I've worked beside for decades and decades. And I think they will all tell you that I'm a consummate professional to work with.”

Robert Sedler, a constitutional law professor at WSU who worked with Nessel on the same-sex marriage case, attested to that, saying she "was the driving force behind the litigation and we got along very well. We were on the same wavelength.”

If she becomes attorney general, Nessel said she will be a tireless fighter for the underdogs in society and won’t use the office to punish people. She becomes incredibly passionate when she talks about cases such as the unemployment benefit snafu in which more than 40,000 people were falsely accused of fraud by the state because of a computer glitch. Current Attorney General Bill Schuette has continued to fight the case because some of the victims didn’t file their restitution claims in a timely manner.

“That to me encapsulates everything of why I decided to run," she told an audience in Battle Creek last month. "This is not how your state government is supposed to treat you. You should be giving that money back to people with interest. It just seems so obvious to me.”

Some of the other priorities for Nessel if she’s elected:

Beefing up the environmental law section of the office to deal with things such as the Flint water crisis and other contaminants leaching into the waterways of the state. She also said she would look at the criminal prosecutions that are ongoing under Schuette to determine whether they should be continued or if more people need to be charged. She also would use in-house assistant attorney general staff on the cases instead of paying millions to outside attorneys.

She supports the ballot proposal to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes and would put a list of people convicted of marijuana crimes, which would no longer be illegal if the measure passes, on the next governor’s desk and seek either expungement of records or pardons.

She would not hesitate to join lawsuits against federal government policies that she felt hurt Michigan residents, such as the one filed by current Democratic attorneys general across the nation that would ensure that insurance companies covered pre-existing conditions.

If the U.S. Supreme Court moved to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that affirmed a constitutional right to abortion, and the issue came back to the states, she would find a way to argue that Michigan’s current law, which bans abortion, is a threat to public health and safety.

Create a unit that would handle cases such as police-involved shootings or some public corruption cases so local county prosecutors would not have to try cases against those that they may have to work with in the future.

Establish a hate crimes division to handle cases of crimes against minority communities.

For Nessel, an intense and passionate attorney who often speaks off the cuff without handlers trying to temper her words, justice isn't always about a conviction or appealing a ruling.

"Justice is about what outcome is most appropriate," she told a crowd of supporters in Southfield last week. "But just continuing to fight and fight and fight to try and make a point doesn’t help the taxpayers. You’re hurting Michigan residents who you’re supposed to be protecting and you’re not helping the taxpayers."

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal