Judge: City must turn over text messages in Tamara Greene case
The City of Detroit must turn over text messages exchanged by high-ranking city and police officials around the time of the death of Tamara Greene, a stripper who purportedly danced at the long-rumored, but never proven party at the Manoogian Mansion, a federal court has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, in a ruling dated Friday, ordered the attorney representing Greene’s family — which has sued the city claiming it stalled the investigation into Greene’s slaying — to resubmit his request for the text messages and for the City of Detroit to produce them.
Rosen held that the federal Stored Communications Act would allow Greene family attorney Norman Yatooma to obtain the text messages if he asked for them under court evidentiary rules requiring parties to disclose materials in their control instead of as a subpoena as Yatooma has done. The judge further ordered the city to obtain the text messages from its onetime provider, SkyTel, which he said would then forward them to the court.
The court would then review the messages to determine their relevance to the Greene family’s lawsuit.
Rosen has said he would allow the review and possible release of up to 18 months of messages from the paging devices of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; his bodyguards; his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty; Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, and more than two dozen others.
The city had contended the federal Stored Communications Act prohibited the disclosure of the messages.
“It is a necessary and routine incident of the rules of discovery that a court may order disclosures that a party would prefer not to make,” Rosen said. “This power of compulsion encompasses such measures as are necessary to secure a party’s compliance with its discovery obligations.”
Rosen also cited the city policy in effect at the time making all electronic communications city property and advising users they could be made public. Kilpatrick has insisted this policy does not apply to text messages — and in the spring revised the policy to make that explicitly so.
“It is problematic, to say the least, for someone in Defendant Kilpatrick’s position to attempt to deny or diminish the import of the City’s electronic communications policy as it applies to him, when an important purpose of this policy is to provide notice to rank-and-file employees that their communications are subject to access and disclosure as public records and as property of the City,” Rosen said.
