JUDGE TO CITY: HAND IN GREENE RECORDS- Federal Judge Said Detroit, Kilpatrick Have 7 Days To Turn Over All Greene Records
DETROIT – A federal judge issued an order Friday demanding that Detroit turn over all of its records in connection with lawsuit brought by the family of slain exotic dancer Tamara Greene.
The order, issued by Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, said that all city lawyers have one week to turn over the records in question to lawyers for Greene’s family.
“The court cautions the parties and their counsel that any further failures to provide timely and appropriate responses to discovery requests will be met with escalating rounds of sanctions …” Rosen wrote in his order.
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 in a $150 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Detroit.
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 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 in court documents filed last week, 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.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in April, but many people expected that it would be delayed. However, Rosen’s order may have restored the original timeline.
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.
