Yesterday, the Michigan Court of Appeals shut down former Shelby Township priest Neil Kalina’s latest bid for freedom, affirming a resentencing that keeps him behind bars for years to come. The panel left intact the seven-to-fifteen-year prison term that had been imposed after an earlier appellate ruling forced the trial court to redo his sentence.
Kalina was convicted in 2022 on two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old in 1984. A 2024 appeals opinion later vacated his original sentence after finding that the trial judge relied on conduct tied to charges for which Kalina had been acquitted when calculating his punishment. As detailed by Justia, the appellate panel said the sentencing court improperly assessed offense-variable points based on that acquitted conduct.
On Jan. 9, 2025, Kalina was resentenced to seven to 15 years in prison and ordered to register for life on Michigan’s sex-offender registry, according to the Michigan Attorney General’s office. Prosecutors have said his case was part of the statewide clergy-abuse investigation, as outlined in a 2019 press release from the Michigan Attorney General's Office, which also noted that he was first charged in May 2019 and arrested in Littlerock, California.
After another appeal, the Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed the 2025 sentence, keeping Kalina in custody, according to ClickOnDetroit. The outlet reports that Kalina remains housed at the Cooper Street Correctional Facility in Jackson while his conviction and punishment have been fought over in court for years.
Why the sentence was remanded
The 2024 Court of Appeals opinion took issue with how the trial court originally calculated Kalina’s guidelines, finding that the judge had improperly relied on alleged sexual penetration, conduct for which Kalina had been acquitted. Assigning points under Michigan’s sentencing system based on that allegation, the panel said, violated due process.
Relying on the Michigan Supreme Court’s People v. Beck precedent, the appeals court held that a defendant cannot be punished based on conduct a jury has expressly rejected. As laid out by Justia, the remedy was a full resentencing, this time without factoring in the acquitted conduct.
What this means locally
Kalina’s case is one of several prosecutions that grew out of Michigan’s broader clergy-abuse investigation, and it shows how decades-old allegations can still lead to long, complicated legal fights over both evidence and sentencing. As reported by CBS Detroit, prosecutors and victims’ advocates say these cases are intended to hold both individual abusers and institutions accountable, even when the underlying crimes are many years in the past.
