Our names are Nadia and Jace, and we’re law students at the University of Michigan Law School. Since October 2024, we have been working with Rodney, a 68 year old man serving a life sentence in Michigan. Rodney has been incarcerated since the 1980s and has shown extraordinary rehabilitation – he works steadily in prison as a plumber and janitor, is beloved for his kindness and love of animals, and makes handmade art out of popsicle sticks so that other incarcerated men can ship them to their children.

We have been preparing a commutation petition with Rodney so he has a chance at freedom after nearly four decades behind bars. To do this, we need Rodney’s trial transcripts from his 1986 state trial. However, those state trial transcripts have been missing since 1994 – they were never returned to the state trial court system after being loaned to the Michigan Attorney General. As such, Rodney has been looking for his transcripts for more than 30 years to no avail. Jace searched through thousands of pages in the Ann Arbor courthouse in January 2025, but Rodney's trial transcripts were gone.

This past summer, while Nadia was working at the New York Office of the Attorney General, her supervising attorney drew on knowledge of how federal records were handled in the 1990s and was able to find the first clue of where Rodney’s missing transcripts might be. After weeks of calling state offices, district courts, circuit courts, libraries, and federal archive centers around the U.S., we got a call from the Federal Records Center in Chicago saying they have every single document from the trial. For the first time in over 30 years, Rodney finally has a path to access them.

The challenge is cost. The Federal Records Center charges a $90 processing fee plus $22 for every 15 minutes of staff time. The total for Rodney’s transcripts is $464 – money that must be paid upfront before they will release the documents. As students, we don’t have the resources to cover this on our own. Every dollar donated will go directly toward retrieving Rodney’s trial transcripts. These records are essential to move forward and give him a real chance to come home.

If Rodney were to be released, he hopes to return to his former job of working with the elderly and disabled, adopt a dog from a shelter, and help raise and provide for his God-daughter’s two young children. Rodney is one of the sweetest people we have ever met – he checks in on us weekly, has pictures of our dogs hanging up in his room, gave us beautiful handmade stationery holders for Christmas, and gave us handmade frames with photos of our dogs as congratulations for finishing our first year of law school (photos attached!). We care for Rodney tremendously, and want to provide him with what should have been returned 31 years ago.

Thank you for helping us take this crucial step toward justice for Rodney. Even small contributions add up and bring us closer to putting his decades-old transcripts back in his hands.