Greene, Detroit Lawyers To Meet- Judge: City Lawyers Slow To Turn Over Evidence
DETROIT — A federal judge has ordered slain exotic dancer Tamara Greene’s lawyers and Detroit lawyers to meet privately to settle a dispute over evidence in a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Greene’s family, which has filed a $105 million wrongful death lawsuit against Detroit, claims the city has been slow to turn over records in advance of a trial tentatively scheduled for April.
Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen said that if the two parties cannot settle the dispute in private before Feb. 8, they will have to return to court for another hearing on the matter Feb. 11.
Rosen previously cautioned city lawyers that sanctions would be imposed if the evidence was not turned over.
Rosen called the city’s consistent failure to provide timely responses to discovery requests a disturbing trend.
“The strategy has simply been delay, delay delay. The longer it takes, the more, hopefully people will forget. The more exhausted council will be become, the more folks will run out of money. Enough is enough,” said Norman Yatooma, the Birmingham lawyer representing Greene’s family.
The lawsuit claims that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and high-ranking police officials obstructed an investigation into Greene’s still unsolved 2003 slaying.
In the fall, Yatooma filed a court request for the city and Kilpatrick to hand over e-mails, police personnel files, city communication contracts and 911 tapes in connection with the lawsuit.
Kilpatrick and Detroit had until the end of December, but Yatooma said he’s still waiting for the records.
“We got a number of depositions still to take but we can’t take those depositions until we have answers to our written discovery requests, so I certainly appreciate the judge’s orders here,” said Yatooma.
Greene, a dancer known as Strawberry, was rumored to have been at a never-proven party thrown at a Manoogian mansion by Kilpatrick in 2002. It was also rumored that Greene was assaulted by the mayor’s wife, Carlita, when she walked into the party and saw Greene with Kilpatrick.
On April 30, 2003, Greene was in a car with her boyfriend on Detroit’s west side when a gunman opened fire on their vehicle, killing Greene and wounding her boyfriend.
Kilpatrick’s former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, is also named in the lawsuit. She filed her response on Dec. 18., after the deadline.
Kilpatrick and Beatty were charged in March 2008 with perjury, misconduct and obstruction of justice after sexually explicit text messages revealed both lied during an earlier whistleblowers’ trial about being romantically involved and their roles in the firing of a police official. The charges led to plea deals and eventual resignation for the two.
