(WWJ) – After the Michigan Supreme Court’s announcement Tuesday a judge had no power to issue indictments against nine officials in the Flint water scandal, the state’s Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud says the citizens of Flint “should know that these cases are not over.”
Hammoud says public commentary to the contrary is “presumptive and rash.”
The unanimous ruling, made on Tuesday morning, effectively dismissed charges against former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, his health director and seven other people, the Associated Press reported.
The water crisis began in 2014 after officials authorized switching from the Detroit water system to the Flint River as a water source for Flint in a money-saving move, the AP reported. Lead infiltrated the system through aging pipes, leading to dangerously high lead levels in drinking water in the city. The issue was then blamed for an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease that left 12 Genesee County residents dead.
A public health emergency was finally declared in Flint in 2016.
Hammoud says her office understands that the Court’s opinion “interprets the one-man grand jury process to require charges to be filed at the district court and include a preliminary examination.”
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But Hammoud says her team is prepared to move forward through that process.
“We relied upon settled law and the well-established prosecutorial tool of the one-man grand jury, used for decades, to bring forward charges against the nine defendants in the Flint water crisis.”
“We still believe these charges can and will be proven in court,” she added.
Justice Richard Bernstein noted Tuesday that if the allegations can be proven, “it is impossible to fully state the magnitude of the damage state actors have caused to an innocent group of people – a group of people that they were entrusted to serve.”