Rebecca Kelley grew up in Mount Clemens and worked in the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office in her native town for 30 years. Now she wants to prosecute criminals in the county where she has been residing for over 30 years.
Kelley, the drug unit chief the past few years, served her last day Friday at the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office in Mount Clemens and started Monday in the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office in Pontiac.
Kelley, 56, who has two daughters in college, said she entered the Deferred Retirement Option Plan last April with intent to leave as her youngest of two daughters is “comfortably in college.”
She wanted to make the change before she opts for an easier life in retirement down the road.
“I feel comfortable to make a career change while I still have piss and vinegar left in me,” she said with a laugh, adding she made the move “while I’m still young enough” to “make a difference.”
Kelley since 2022 also has been part of the five-member Major Crime Unit, which makes charging decisions on the most serious cases in the county.
She spent five years, 2015 to 2020, in the Drug Unit and moved to homicides in 2020 to help eliminate a backlog of such cases that occurred due to delays over the COVID-19 pandemic.
Assistant Macomb County Prosecutor Rebecca Kelly in a county-courthosue courtroom recently.
JAMESON COOK — THE MACOMB DAILY
She also served for 12 years prosecuting criminal sexual conduct cases, which she said was the most rewarding assignment but also the most emotionally draining as she worked closely with victims.
“That was the most gratifying,” she said. “I felt like I was doing a great job protecting the public and trying to help individuals who were in situations they didn’t choose to be in.”
Those cases also were the most “emotionally tiring,” as vulnerable victims often were required to go through difficult testimony to achieve a conviction, she said.
“I didn’t want to make a victim go through that unless (there’s a conviction),” she said. “To go through that and lose is devastating.”
Kelley said she never considered a career change by switching to the defense side of the criminal justice system, as some former prosecutors do.
“I feel like it is in my blood,” she said. “Prosecution is intuitive to me.”
She believes she was influenced by the profession of her grandfather, Edward Morisette, who was a lieutenant in the old Mount Clemens police department, she said.
She graduated from Cardinal Mooney Catholic High School when it was located in Mount Clemens and then Michigan State University.
During her time in college and the year after she graduated, Kelley was a child-care worker and volunteered for Turning Point in Mount Clemens.
She got married in 1994 and moved to Royal Oak. She was hired as a victim advocate in the Prosecutor’s Office in 1995 and was on the Turning Point board of directors when the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner’s program started, the second in the state at the time.
While working with victims of crime, she attended the University of Detroit Mercy Law School and became an assistant prosecutor in 2002 under former prosecutor Carl Marlinga. The next year, she was assigned to the criminal sexual conduct unit, which later became the Child Protection Unit.
She commended her co-workers, including assistant prosecutors and support staff in the office and in the courts, calling them “phenomenal.” She called “the defense Bar wonderful” and got along with defense attorneys.
In Oakland, her assignment had not been finalized as of last week but her only requirement was that she not return to prosecuting sexual assault cases.