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3 years later, no one is in jail over Flint tainted water

Detroit • Michigan’s attorney general in 2016 promised to investigate “without fear or favor” the scandal over Flint’s lead-tainted drinking water and pledged that state regulators would be locked up for fudging data and misleading the public.

Yet three years later, no one is behind bars. Instead, seven of 15 defendants have pleaded no contest to misdemeanors, some as minor as disrupting a public meeting. Their records eventually will be scrubbed clean.

That has angered some people in Flint who believe key players who could have prevented the lead disaster are getting off easy. Four of five people at the state Department of Environmental Quality who were on the front line of the crisis have struck deals.