The Court passed on the cases. The separate statements are the story.

The Michigan Supreme Court denied leave in three criminal cases on March 6. But tucked inside those denial orders were reminders that some legal questions lower courts treat as settled are anything but. The statements signaled where the law may be creaking, where doctrine may be too complacent, and where future litigants ought to press harder.

1. People v Larry (168645): Old forensics do not get a free pass for being old

Start with People v Larry. Leave denied. End of case, yes. End of conversation, not even close.

Justice Kimberly Thomas wrote separately to push back on a disturbingly casual idea: that a challenge to firearm-identification evidence must be weak because the technique has been around forever. That kind of reasoning has a certain stale authority to it. It also has a problem. It is wrong.

A method does not become reliable because it has been used for years. It does not become scientific because courts got used to hearing it. And it does not satisfy Daubert just because everyone in the room recognizes the vocabulary.

That was the force of Justice Thomas’s statement. The question is not whether toolmark evidence enjoys a long shelf life. The question is whether the methodology is reliable and whether the expert in this case applied it in a reliable way. Those are different questions. Too often, courts blur them together.

Her concurrence matters because it treats firearm-identification evidence not as a settled artifact, but as a live evidentiary issue. Around the country, judges have grown more skeptical of overstated “matches,” more attentive to the limits of the discipline, and less willing to confuse courtroom habit with scientific rigor.

The takeaway is clear: lawyers should stop acting as though these challenges are decorative. They are not.

2. People v Evans (168727): Taking someone’s phone is not some minor inconvenience

Then came People v Evans, where the Court denied leave and Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote separately about the seizure of a cell phone.

Because courts still sometimes talk about phones as though they are ordinary physical objects that just happen to contain information. They are not. A phone is not a wallet. It is not a backpack. It is not a neutral item sitting in an evidence bag while everyone shrugs about timing.

It is, for most people, the control panel for modern life.

Justice Welch framed the seizure issue in human terms without losing doctrinal precision. A phone is how people call for help, access work, manage money, navigate travel, retrieve records, satisfy two-factor authentication, and keep the machinery of everyday life running. Take it away, even temporarily, and you may be doing far more than preserving evidence. You may be cutting someone off from the practical contents of their life.

That is why the five-day delay in getting a warrant mattered, even if not enough here to justify review on the arguments presented. Welch’s point was larger: once police seize a phone, diligence matters. Delay matters. Possessory interests matter.

And they may matter more than courts have been willing to admit.

The deeper message in Evans is that the Fourth Amendment problem does not begin only when the government starts scrolling through the device. Sometimes it begins the moment the device disappears into state custody.

3. People v Ford (169177): Michigan may not be done with the right to resist unlawful force

Finally, People v Ford.

Again, leave denied. Again, a notable separate statement from Justice Welch. And again, the message was that lower courts may be reading Michigan law too narrowly.

The issue is the legacy of People v Moreno, 491 Mich 38 (2012), the decision holding that the resisting-and-obstructing statute did not erase the common-law right to resist unlawful police conduct. Some courts seem to have treated Moreno as mostly an unlawful-arrest case: if the arrest itself was lawful, end of analysis.

Justice Welch suggested that the matter is not so simple.

What if the arrest begins lawfully, but the officer then uses excessive force? Is the officer still “performing his or her duties” under the statute? And if not, does the common-law right to reasonably resist unlawful conduct still have something to say?

Those are not academic questions. They go to the core of what resisting-and-obstructing law is for, and what it is not for. A statute criminalizing interference with police work is one thing. A statute transformed into a one-way ratchet protecting unlawful force is another.

Welch did not resolve the question in Ford. She did something more useful for future litigants: she marked the issue, identified the doctrinal gap, and made plain that the Court may need to address it in a better case.

That is how appellate law moves sometimes—not through a sweeping opinion, but through a carefully placed warning shot.

The bigger point

These were denials. But they were not empty denials.

In Larry, Justice Thomas warned against mistaking forensic familiarity for scientific reliability.

In Evans, Justice Welch treated the seizure of a cell phone as the serious constitutional intrusion it often is.

In Ford, she suggested Michigan courts may be underselling the continuing force of the common-law right to resist unlawful police violence.

So yes, the Court passed on the cases.

But it also left behind a set of markers: challenge shaky science, take cell-phone seizures seriously, and do not assume the law of resisting arrest has finished developing.

For those paying attention, these statements are roadmaps.