Perspectives
Delay, Deny, Defend Michigan’s governmental immunity laws have long stymied families of victims who have been killed by law enforcement officials, while homeowners face an uphill battle in their fight for property damages allegedly caused by public officials.
BY NORM SINCLAIR ILLUSTRATION BY BIJOU KARMAN
32 DBUSINESS || JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2026
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he gruesome deaths of two unarmed young men fleeing police on foot in the Grand Rapids area in April 2024 — one was pinned against a wall by a police vehicle, while the other was hit and run over — are among numerous cases pending in state courts challenging a decades-old law protecting local government, tribal agencies, and their employees from civil lawsuits. Governmental, or sovereign, immunity is a legal concept that frequently blocks civil lawsuits against government authorities that arise from actions they take in carrying out official functions. In turn, a subset of the law — qualified immunity — is often more specific to individual officials, mainly those in law enforcement. The overall immunity privilege has, for decades, been a controversial issue among state lawmakers, the courts, and plaintiff lawyers seeking recourse for victims who they say were harmed or killed by government incompetence or neglect. Consider, governmental immunity was the central issue and protective shield for school administrators accused of negligence by survivors and their lawyer in the tragic November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford Township, where a 15-year-old student, Ethan Crumbley, opened fire with a handgun and murdered four classmates and wounded seven others. More than a dozen civil cases alleging negligence by school administrators were filed by a handful of lawyers, including Ven Johnson Law in Detroit, on behalf of the victims and their families. In quick order, two lower courts cited governmental immunity in rebuffing the firm’s lawsuits. In May 2025, the Michigan Supreme Court, in a two-sentence order, declined to hear appeals of those rulings, ending further legal action. “After all these years, the Michigan Supreme Court decided to kick out the cases without even issuing a formal opinion on why,” says Ven Johnson, principal of Ven Johnson Law. “There’s no better example of the travesty of justice that governmental immunity imposes on all of us than this case. “It’s a textbook example of what’s wrong with our state jurisprudence system. My clients not only did not get their day in court and did not get their right to a jury trial, but their case was thrown out by judges on three levels.” Johnson represents the families of two deceased students and several other wounded survivors. His firm also is taking on governmental immunity defenses in cases as varied as police-related deaths involving fleeing unarmed suspects and allegations of negligence in widespread destruction of property caused by massive flooding incidents in the Midland area and Wayne County. As for the two young men killed in Grand Rapids in 2024, Johnson and nationally known civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, of Florida, represent the families of Samuel Sterling, 25, and Riley Doggett, 17, who were crushed by police vehicles in separate incidents.