Spotlight on: Christine Pagac

From the December 2023 Criminal Defense Newsletter
You worked for many years as an Assistant Defender at SADO, and you are now in private practice, with your own law firm. What type of cases are you working on now?

This is actually a return to private practice for me, although it’s my first time in a solo practice. Before my years at SADO, I spent over a decade working in Chicago and Los Angeles doing civil litigation work at both the trial and appellate levels. Currently, I am working on essentially the same kind of cases I handled at SADO: direct appeals and other post-conviction work in the Michigan state courts. I also have been doing something new to me: retained misdemeanor appeals. I wish I were doing more Michigan Supreme Court work, and I have been considering branching out into federal criminal cases and perhaps getting back into civil appeals. 

You have worked on many noteworthy cases, including exonerations. Please tell us about one of your interesting cases.

Exonerations are a bit of the Holy Grail of criminal appeals. Virtually every client tells me they are innocent, although statistically that can’t be true. One of my exonerations did come out of a Michigan Supreme Court case, People v Grissom, and it is the sort of case that movies might be made from. A woman named Sara Ylen falsely accused James Grissom of raping her in the middle of the day in her minivan in the parking lot of a Meijer near Port Huron. I’m not going to talk about the legal rules from the case because anyone can read the opinion, but the issue before the Supreme Court was whether impeachment evidence could be the basis for a new trial. Spoiler alert: it can and was for Mr. Grissom.

The backstory here makes it even more interesting. After trial, Ms. Ylen spoke to a local reporter whose four-part article “Sara’s Story” won awards. In that article, and at trial, Ms. Ylen claimed to have gotten cancer from the rape. By the time I became involved in the case, during Mr. Grissom’s 6.500 appeal, Ms. Ylen said she was dying from the cancer. She was holding fundraisers and telling people she was being treated at the Cancer Treatment Center of America.

I was pretty suspicious about this cancer claim and had been trying to figure out how to get at the truth of it. One afternoon, the answer fell into my lap. I received a call from the general counsel for the Cancer Treatment Center. He wanted to talk to me, Wolverine to Wolverine (Go Blue!). He explained that his father had represented Danny Escobedo in the U.S. Supreme Court. (For readers who are law geeks, Escobedo v Illinois will be familiar as a precursor to Miranda.) The general counsel said that his father had told him that Danny Escobedo may have committed crimes but was innocent of this crime, and that it was important that no one be sent to prison for a crime they did not commit. That advice had stuck with him, and he tracked me down to tell me that Ms. Ylen was lying about going to their facilities for treatment and that she had in fact committed an elaborate fraud. He had testified at her divorce trial about the lengths she had gone to. I tried without any luck to get evidence about this before the Michigan Supreme Court. The prosecutor opposed it as a “fishing expedition,” and the Court denied a remand to expand the record. Even though I was unsuccessful, I do like to think that letting the prosecutor know about the evidence (and letting them know that I knew about it) helped them decide to drop the charges against Mr. Grissom, although later events probably played into this as well. 

The Michigan Supreme Court did not grant Mr. Grissom a new trial outright, but instead sent his case back to the trial court to decide whether to grant a new trial. While the remand was pending, Ms. Ylen falsely accused two more men of rape. The men were lucky to have solid alibis: they had time-stamped cards proving they were at work when Ms. Ylen claimed the assault occurred. Also, when she went to the doctor to be treated, bruising Ms. Ylen claimed was a result of the assault turned out to be makeup, which came off when disinfectant was used to clean the wound. 

Ultimately, Ms. Ylen went to prison for those new false allegations, but never for the one that sent Mr. Grissom to prison for years. Ms. Ylen was also convicted of fraud in connection with the fake cancer claim. She had accepted thousands of dollars from supporters and was treated by a hospice service for two years after claiming to have end-stage cervical cancer that had spread throughout her body. State police found no evidence confirming a cancer diagnosis. 

As we continue to emerge from the pandemic, what do we need to prioritize in the criminal legal system? 

Recently, I agreed to take an appointed interlocutory appeal that highlights a problem in Wayne County with pandemic-related trial backlog. My client has been sitting in the Wayne County Jail waiting to go to trial for four years. Four years! It’s simply unbelievable. He has been demanding a speedy trial for years, and I was appointed to handle an appeal of the denial of his motion to dismiss for denial of the interstate act on detainers – which requires that cases like his go to trial within 180 days. So, based on this case, I would say that at least in Wayne County, there is a need to get a handle on this trial backlog.
 
Has the pandemic had any positive effects on the way we practice law? 

It’s hard to say that the pandemic was anything but awful, but I think that the livestreaming of court proceedings via YouTube has been a good thing. I like being able to watch appellate court proceedings. Zoom Court can also be good for handling routine procedural matters, such as status conferences. 
  
Do you have any advice for other defense attorneys, particularly those that are just starting out?

I have so many opinions (about everything), thanks for asking for some of them!

I was told years ago that you build (or destroy) your reputation with the court every time you are there. Be over prepared. Read the court rules! Proofread your briefs! Look and be professional. And, if you can help it, don’t make arguments that make you sound ridiculous. It’s one thing to push a novel legal argument, it’s another thing to tell the court that the dog ate your homework.

Communicate with your client promptly and respectfully. You can work your a$$ off for your client, but if you don’t tell them what you are doing, they won’t know. That’s how problems start. Listen to them, but also show them that you respect them (and yourself) enough to push back when they tell you something that seems implausible. It’s hard to get people to take your advice if they think you are not smart enough to see through their obvious lies.
 
Have a life outside of your job and try to save some money so you can retire. It will make you better at your job and help you maintain some sanity.

Finally, try really hard not to be a jerk. It’s not always easy!

Kathy Swedlow
CDRC Manager and Editor