Douglas L. Micko
How Judge Micko decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
Procedural preferences
In Section 1983 cases, Micko resolves qualified immunity at summary judgment by first asking whether the record establishes any constitutional violation at all: where documentary evidence shows no genuine dispute and the plaintiff fails to establish a violation, he recommends granting the officers' MSJ without reaching the clearly-established prong (the qualified-immunity analysis becomes 'unnecessary').
“Judge Micko found that documentary evidence shows there are no genuine issues of material fact, and that Mr. Aery failed to establish any constitutional violations. Furthermore, because Mr. Aery failed to establish any constitutional violation, he cannot overcome a qualified immunity defense on summary judgment.”
Micko's R&Rs draw a high adoption rate across different district judges: across the three orders read this pass (authored by Davis, Menendez, and Doty), every Micko R&R was adopted in full -- on de novo review, on clear-error review, or where the losing party declined to object. N is small.
“The R&R [ECF No. 20] is adopted in its entirety”
Motion outcomes
Counted from classified signed orders only. Percentages are shown only where the sample is large enough to be meaningful; smaller samples are reported as raw counts.
| Summary judgment N = 3 |
Granted: 2Denied: 1 | counts only |
| Motions to dismiss N = 1 |
Denied: 1 | counts only |
A "1 of 1" is one ruling, not a tendency. Treat small samples as illustrative, not predictive.
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“Defendant's Motion to Dismiss Indictment [Doc. 27] is DENIED.”
“Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment [ECF No. 67] is GRANTED; and 3. This action is DISMISSED with prejudice.”
“Plaintiff's Motion for Summary Judgment [ECF No. 12] is granted”
“Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment [ECF No. 18] is denied”
Caseload & timing
From public federal docket records for this judge.
Micko-assigned dockets via search_dockets are his -mj criminal-duty matters (US v. Hassan, US v. Wells), the duty-magistrate role. His R&R workload runs on cases captioned -DLM that stay with a district judge: criminal (US v. Evans 0:24-cr-00266, MTD), Section 1983 civil rights (Aery v. Bender 0:21-cv-02375, MSJ), and Social-Security appeals (Joshua A. J. v. Kijakazi 0:22-cv-03012) -- all surfaced in the GovInfo reasoning layer. Sampled 2026-06-03; not exhaustive; durations not tabulated this thin pass.