The Michigan Court of Appeals recently reversed the trial court’s judgment in a felony murder case, agreeing with the defense on two issues that Criminal Appellate Practice (CAP) Clinic student-attorneys had briefed. Now the defendant will get a new trial.
Meg Beyer, ’24, and Alexandra (“Al”) Hargrave, ’25, pinpointed these issues when they were a 3L and 2L, respectively, in the 2024 winter semester. As student-attorneys in the CAP Clinic, they functioned as members of a litigation team alongside Professor Michael Mittlestat.
“The students were the driving force behind this. I let them take the lead, and they did a great job,” said Mittlestat, who is an adjunct clinical professor of law and an appellate attorney at the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office.
Beyer and Hargrave met with the client, reviewed the record, spotted issues in the trial transcripts and discovery, and then split up the issues to tackle.
“They were amazing students who took a lot of initiative in identifying the issues, developing the issues in terms of framing the argument, and doing the legal research,” Mittlestat said.
Both Beyer and Hargrave are now public defenders—Beyer at the Hamilton County Public Defender in Ohio, and Hargrave at Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, New York.
A case gone awry
Marquis Thomas was convicted of felony murder, for killing a friend during an alleged armed robbery. Thomas maintained that he shot and killed his friend by accident when he tried to move a loaded gun from the front to the back seat of the car the two men occupied at the time.
But the trial court improperly instructed the jury that accident is not a defense to felony murder, the Michigan Court of Appeals found.
At Thomas’s trial, “The judge, at the last minute, said, ‘No, that’s not how accident works with a felony murder instruction,’” said Beyer, who briefed this issue in the clinic. “The judge applied a very old-school definition of felony murder that has not been used in Michigan or pretty much anywhere else since 1980—and was incorrect in that assessment.”
Mittlestat filed the brief in 2024, and it was scheduled for oral argument in early 2026, after Beyer and Hargrave had graduated. But Beyer, who was practicing in Ohio, returned to Michigan to argue the case.
“I care about this client, and I was excited to have the opportunity to make his life incredibly different. Getting to return to a case that can change the course of a client’s life was really special,” Beyer said.
The second issue the appeals court agreed with is one that Hargrave had briefed regarding Thomas’s sentencing: The trial court had failed to score the sentencing guidelines properly for the weapon-possession crime Thomas admitted committing.
When the trial court sentenced Thomas on his felon-in-possession charge, “they didn’t follow Michigan’s sentencing guidelines—they basically bypassed all of that and had a very disproportionate sentence set for him,” Hargrave said. The sentence was a minimum of 45 years for that charge, far exceeding the guidelines of 24 to 76 months.
Insight gained from this appellate case
In their day-to-day work as public defenders, Beyer and Hargrave handle cases at the trial level, but their experience with Thomas’s appeal informs their current work.
“For me now, as a line attorney, it’s helpful to review the things that can go wrong at trial. Returning to the case was a good reminder of just how different a trial is in practice than when you are sitting in your office preparing for it,” Beyer said.
The clinic was Hargrave’s first step into criminal law. “This was the very first time that I looked through discovery and saw surveillance footage and body-worn camera footage and talked to a client who was incarcerated,” she said.
“I learned the humanity that comes with speaking with a client who’s been incarcerated for the amount of time Mr. Thomas has,” Hargrave said. “As soon as you put a human behind all of the transcripts and evidence, the motivation becomes different and more visceral. I learned how to take those emotions and put them in my writing.”
Building skills in appellate advocacy
Mittlestat taught Hargrave to be a better writer, she said. “I still pull from that experience and the writing skills that I learned in that clinic.”
Most law students don’t get an opportunity to write a brief, unless they’re clerking, and most “certainly won’t be first- or second-chairing an appellate argument,” Beyer said. The clinic “lets you, with very helpful training wheels, do something as a student-attorney that you won’t be able to touch for a little while.”
Although Beyer and Hargrave were already on the path toward becoming public defenders when they participated in the clinic, the experience reinforced their interest.
“For me, being a slightly older student, the clinics were opportunities to determine whether I had the energy to do this work,” Beyer said. “You obviously have far fewer clients as a clinic student, but you get to do the social work aspects of public defense and the ‘fighting against the machine’ aspects of public defense.”
Hargrave said she appreciated being able to spend more time with Thomas than she does representing clients at the trial level. “I got to have several conversations with Mr. Thomas, and you really get to know somebody more than you do at the trial level,” she said.
Beyer agreed. “Until you interact with a client in that sort of way, there’s nothing really like it.”
Banner image: Meg Beyer, ’24, argues Criminal Appellate Practice Clinic client Marquis Thomas’s case at the Michigan Court of Appeals. Beyer, now a public defender in Ohio, worked on Thomas’s case as a student-attorney in the clinic.