Ypsi Twp. Trustees “Outraged”: The County Prosecutor Is Soft on Gun Crime

By The Ann Arbor Independent Editorial Team Last updated Nov 13, 2024

by P.D. Lesko

It was dark at 6 a.m. Oct. 8, 2024, when an Ypsilanti Twp. employee arrived for work at the Township’s maintenance building. Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen, a felon on lifetime parole, ambushed that employee, pointed a loaded Black Ruger LCP 380 pistol at the employee’s head and threatened to murder a man he didn’t know and had never met. Yet another gun crime in Washtenaw County. County Prosecutor Eli Savit did not charge Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen with “Carrying or Possessing Firearm When Committing or Attempting to Commit Felony” (Weapons–Felony Firearm). A conviction on this charge would have required Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen to serve a mandatory two-year sentence before beginning to serve any other sentences imposed on him. Ypsilanti Twp. Trustees and their Township attorney Doug Winters sent Savit a letter in which they said the lesser charges brought against Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen are an “outrage.”

County Prosecutor Eli Savit, in a letter in response to Doug Winters, said he filed four felony charges, 4-5 year felonies which would be served concurrently, not consecutively:

Assault with the dangerous weapon
Weapons –carrying concealed
Weapons–Firearms possession by a prohibited person
Weapons –Ammunition possession by a prohibited person

Winters said: “Eli Savit should be using the charge of Felony Firearm on a regular basis when crimes are committed with guns to send the message that felony firearm crime is not tolerated in Washtenaw County, but he isn’t.”

Doug Winters’s office serves as the General Counsel to the Township of Ypsilanti. In a Nov. 4, 2024 letter to County Prosecutor Eli Savit and shared with the newspaper, Winters pointed out that Savit had failed to charge a habitual offender, a felon on lifetime parole in possession of a gun while committing a crime, with “Carrying or Possessing Firearm When Committing or Attempting to Commit Felony” (Weapons–Felony Firearm).

Winters explained why he and the Ypsilanti Twp. Trustees were outraged by Savit’s failure to charge Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen with the mandatory two year felony firearm crime:

“A charge of Carrying or Possessing Firearm When Committing or Attempting to Commit Felony” upon conviction would require this Defendant to serve two years prior to any sentence that he receives for the underlying felony charges contained in the Complaint. This glaring failure to charge this Defendant with this ‘Felony Firearm Charge’ is even more shocking given that Savit frequently participates in numerous panel discussions regarding ‘Firearm Violence’ and the need to remove guns from those who would commit crimes such as what occurred in Ypsilanti Township on October 8, 2024.”

Failing to Charge (and Sentence) Habitual Felons as a Habitual Felons

There is no question that Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen is a habitual criminal. There is no question that in 2022 Trial Court Judge Arianne Slay and Prosecutor Eli Savit handed Allen (a habitual felon) the opportunity to victimize an innocent man on Oct. 8, 2024.

Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen was a habitual felon in Aug. 2022 when the Prosecutor proposed a sentence of 11 months of probation after Allen was convicted of tampering with his electronic tether, a felony that can carry a two-year prison sentence and a fine of $4,000. The sentencing recommendation of the Prosecutor, and Judge Arianne Slay’s acceptance of the Prosecutor’s recommendation, handed Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen the opportunity in 2024 to get a gun, load it with bullets, hide in the early-morning hours in wait for a victim, and point a gun in the face of an Ypsilanti Twp. employee and threaten to murder him.

This is not the first time Prosecutor Eli Savit and our Trial Court judges have allowed a habitual felon the opportunity to victimize an unsuspecting county resident. In 2022, a habitual felon given a one-year sentence by Judge Carol Kuhnke for tampering with his tether, served his jail time. Then, on April 13, 2023, Ricky McCain, 55, allegedly broke into Jude Walton’s home on Chapin on the West Side of Ann Arbor; among other felonies, he stands accused of allegedly murdering the 54-year-old woman.

In his Nov. 6 letter in response to Doug Winters’s Nov. 4 letter, County Prosecutor Eli Savit wrote that, “Mr. Allen is facing four felony counts related to this incident, and has been designated a habitual offender.”

Court records show that on Nov. 8 the Prosecutor submitted a Habitual Offender Notice to Judge Slay. However, like in the case of Ricky McCaine, Savit is a day late and a dollar short: a father of three young children had a gun pointed to his face by a habitual felon and was told he was going to die.

Being sentenced as a habitual criminal increases the lengths of sentences:

Second felony: The maximum sentence increases by 25%
Third felony: The maximum sentence increases by 50%
Fourth felony: The maximum sentence doubles
Life sentence: A third or more felony convictions can increase the maximum sentence to life in prison

County Trial Court records show that in 2002 Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen was charged and prosecuted for Criminal Sexual Conduct (CSC) 4th Degree Force or Coercion. Judge Donald Shelden dismissed the charge on July 2, 2002, but ordered Allen to have no contact with the victim, a young female relative.

In 2011, Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen was charged with four counts of CSC 1st Degree with a person under the age of 13. Judge Archie Brown held Allen in the County Jail without bond. The victim in that case was a 9-year-old family member.

At sentencing, court transcripts show Judge Brown said, “There’s one thing society is supposed to do, it’s supposed to protect children, and when a child is abused, a loud message must be sent.”

Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen pled guilty to one charge: CSC 1st Degree (Multiple Variables). On Mar. 7, 2012, he was sentenced to 90 months to 30 years in prison.

Allen was released from prison on June 11, 2021, and placed on an electronic tether after release.

On June 7, 2022, Allen was charged with CSC – Tampering With Electronic Monitoring Device. He was bound over and appeared before Judge Archie C. Brown on June 28, 2022. Brown retired on Aug. 1, 2022 and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed Arianne Slay to fill Brown’s seat. On Aug. 24, 2022, Allen pled guilty before Judge Slay and in Oct. 2022, Judge Slay sentenced the habitual felon to 11 months of probation and Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT). MRT is a bogus therapeutic program provided by a County contractor named Tracey Woods. Woods has no psychological education or therapeutic credentials from any accredited college or university.

When reached by phone Woods said her “subcontractors” provide MRT therapy to probationers. On Tracey Woods’s website, she claims that MRT therapy can reduce recidivism by half in as little as six months.

The recidivism rate data in Washtenaw County doesn’t support these claims, and Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen is yet another example of the damage done to felons and their victims by a local criminal justice system that relies on MRT. Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen is a 2023 “graduate” of Tracy Woods’s MRT program to which Judge Slay sentenced him in June 2022.

In 2000, the Washtenaw County recidivism rate stood at 37 percent. According to county records, the recidivism rate is presently 63 percent. In 2023, statewide, Michigan reported a recidivism rate of 22.1 percent, down from 45.7 percent in 1998.

But the bogus MRT therapy is only one part of a system in which elected officials fail the public by not prosecuting or sentencing felons who commit gun crimes as habitual felons.

Prosecutor and Judges Soft on Gun Crime?

Doug Winters said in his Nov. 4, 2024 letter to the County Prosecutor: “This letter shall serve as confirmation of the Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees’ strong objections and, quite frankly, outrage as to the failure of your office to charge this Defendant [Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen] with the crime of “Carrying or Possessing Firearm When Committing or Attempting to Commit a Felony.”

Winters went on to say in his letter: “This failure to prosecute this Defendant for being in possession of a firearm while committing a felonious assault is not acceptable to the Township Board nor our office and is yet another example where the empathies lie more with the Defendant as opposed to the victim of this crime. This heinous criminal act has already caused a great deal of trauma to the victim and his family.”

A review of six months of County Circuit Court records of capital felonies committed while carrying a gun revealed that the Washtenaw County Prosecutor is only charging Weapons–Felony Firearm when the crime involves Assault with Intent to Murder, or Homicide Open Murder. Felons who are charged with domestic violence, rape or kidnapping crimes that include the use of a gun, are not charged with the two-year mandatory Weapons–Felony Firearm, but rather with lesser charges that don’t carry mandatory prison sentences, i.e. Weapons-Firearms-Possession by Prohibited Person.

The Weapons-Felony Firearm charge is a power tool at the disposal of a Prosecutor in Michigan. The first conviction is a 2-year mandatory prison sentence, the second conviction is a 5-year mandatory prison sentence and the third conviction is a mandatory 10-year prison sentence. These sentences are served before any other sentence(s) which may have been imposed.

“All these assault charges and dangerous felonies being committed in Washtenaw County and the Prosecutor is not charging felony firearm. Why the hell not?” asked Winters. “Without the felony firearm charge and the habitual offender charge, Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen is not going to get much time for this crime, at all.” Winters continued, “This County has suffered greatly at the hands of individuals who continue to gain access to firearms and if you are truly serious about sending a strong message
that the use of firearms during the commission of a felony in Washtenaw County is going to be taken seriously, then the time has come for you to start charging Defendants such as Spencer Allen with the felony firearm as opposed to the possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.”

Prosecutor Savit ended his letter: “He [Spencer Alexander-McCoy Allen] remains in jail at our request. We are committed to prosecuting this case, and will continue to do so.”

However, this promise doesn’t address the fact that Savit’s earlier actions in 2022 are directly responsible for the senseless victimization of a Ypsilanti Twp. employee who was threatened with a gun and told he would be murdered just for showing up for work on a dark Oct. morning.