County Prosecutor Won’t Charge Detroit Mayor

The county prosecutor who refuses to charge Detroit’s corrupt mayor with perjury—despite overwhelming evidence—is notorious for being soft on crime and bargaining with armed felons.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy claims her office is still investigating whether Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his city employee mistress committed perjury to hide their extramarital affair even though undisputable concrete evidence proves it.

Furthermore, Kilpatrick has admitted and apologized for lying under oath to hide the extramarital affair with his former chief-of-staff, Christine Beatty. His confession came during a public apology after a Detroit newspaper published a series of sexually explicit text messages exchanged between the secret lovers on their city-owned pagers during their year-long heated romance.

Both Kilpatrick and Beatty lied about the affair during a scandalous police whistleblower trial that cost taxpayers millions, partly to conceal their romance. The city eventually settled the case against the cops who were fired for raising questions about the mayor’s security team which could have led them to discover the extramarital affair. The city paid them $8.4 million.

At the beginning of March Worthy said she would determine whether to charge Kilpatrick with perjury on March 14. Now she says she won’t make a decision for another two weeks because her office needs more time to investigate the matter. If Worthy, who made headlines for becoming the county’s first black female prosecutor, continues exceeding her own deadlines her credibility will be further diminished considering the evidence is quite clear. A perjury conviction could send Kilpatrick to jail for 15 years.

In the meantime, Detroit’s self-described “Hip Hop” mayor is playing the race card, claiming that the media and his opponents have subjected him and his family to racial slurs and that he has received death threats. He warned that “this unethical, illegal, lynch mob mentality has to stop."

Surely he’d love to blame racism and the media for his past scandals as well. Kilpatrick has already been in trouble for charging more than $210,000 in personal travel, meals and entertainment on his city-issued credit card and for using $25,000 in city funds to lease a fancy sports utility vehicle for his wife at a time when Detroit’s $230 million budget deficit forced him to eliminate 3,000 city jobs and cut bus service.

Kilpatrick also used a secret tax-exempt, nonprofit that supposedly conducts voter education and community improvements to pay for a $9,000 stay at a lavish California resort. The nonprofit (Kilpatrick Civic Fund) gets about half a million dollars annually from donors that are seldom made public and some of the money comes from organized labor as “political contributions.”

No wonder many leaders, including fellow City Council members and Michigan’s attorney general, have called for Kilpatrick’s resignation. In fact, the Detroit City Council passed a resolution last month accusing Kilpatrick of using his office for personal gain and calling on him to resign or risk being forced from office.