Prosecutor Promises a Full Investigation: Worthy Gives Few Details About Probe's Specifics

Jan 26, 08:25 AM

Jan. 26--Seven hours after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced she was wading into the text message scandal involving Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, the prosecutor confirmed Friday that the mayor called her this week to tell her he would remain neutral in her upcoming re-election bid.

Worthy's spokeswoman, Maria Miller, said the phone call came out of the blue Tuesday morning, several hours before the Free Press notified the mayor's office it wanted to interview him and Christine Beatty regarding what the newspaper published Thursday. The call was unusual because Worthy and Kilpatrick have had a distant political relationship.

Miller said Worthy doesn't know whether Kilpatrick was aware of the upcoming Free Press report when he made the call, or whether he was trying to head off an investigation. But Miller pointedly noted that Worthy has had no more than three conversations with the mayor in four years.

"She was very surprised by this because they know each other as public officials but she rarely speaks with him on the phone," Miller said.

Worthy, at her news conference Friday morning, said she would conduct a "fair, impartial and thorough" investigation in the wake of the Free Press report that Kilpatrick and Beatty lied under oath at a police whistle-blower's trial last summer when they denied having a sexual relationship.

The report, based on a series of text messages from Beatty's city-issued paging device, also indicated the mayor and Beatty misled jurors when they said they had not fired deputy police chief Gary Brown in 2003.

The outcome of the trial and related legal issues cost the city more than $9 million.

Worthy did not specify what, if any, possible criminal charges would be investigated and she declined to take questions from reporters.

Former Macomb County Prosecutor Carl Marlinga said Worthy could either conduct the investigation in-house or ask the State Police, the Wayne County Sheriff's Office or another law enforcement agency to conduct it. He said having an outside agency do the investigation would give it more credibility.

Marlinga also said the investigation would be tricky and potentially time-consuming. He said investigators would have to independently compare the text messages and trial transcripts to see whether Kilpatrick and Beatty lied under oath.

Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Colombo Jr., responding to a Free Press lawsuit, said Friday he would issue an injunction requiring SkyTel, the Mississippi telecommunications company that issued Beatty's paging device, to preserve the text messages.

Marlinga said that after comparing the messages, investigators would have to verify that the pair sent the messages to each other. Afterward, Worthy and her staff would make the final decision on whether there was enough evidence to prosecute.

Marlinga, referring to Kilpatrick's phone call to Worthy, said the call is suspicious, but probably not improper.

"Any inducements or threats to withhold support or grant support to someone else would have crossed the line," Marlinga said.

Miller said Kilpatrick's call "does not create a conflict because he never indicated that he was endorsing (Worthy). They don't have any kind of a relationship that would cause a conflict."

Kilpatrick spokesman James Canning acknowledged Friday that the mayor made the call but said it was before Kilpatrick knew about the Free Press' upcoming articles.

"It was well before we were aware you guys were doing a story," Canning said.

The mayor called Worthy sometime before noon Tuesday, Miller said. The Free Press first notified the mayor's office it wanted to speak with him and Beatty early Tuesday evening. That was followed by numerous attempts Wednesday.

The city's attorneys, however, have known since early January of a Free Press lawsuit against the city seeking documents relating to the whistle-blower settlement. As part of that suit, the paper had sent a subpoena to SkyTel seeking the text messages.

Lawyers for the city had blocked those records in court before this week.

Other legal experts also said the mayor's phone call probably would not cause Worthy to remove her office from the investigation.

"The conspiratists will say he was trying to create a conflict so she would have to disclose it and remove herself from an investigation," said Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning, a former Justice Department lawyer.

But Henning said he doesn't think a conflict exists because Kilpatrick didn't offer to throw his support to her or withdraw it from another candidate.

"To just out of the blue call ... that's just really unusual," said Lansing political observer Bill Ballenger, editor of the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics. "And it's certainly strange that he would do it at this particular time.... But the question really is, what did he know and when did he know it?"

Worthy ran unopposed in 2004. Defense lawyer and former Wayne County assistant prosecutor Portia Roberson has announced that she plans to run against Worthy this year.

Worthy did not endorse anyone in the 2005 mayoral race, when Kilpatrick won his second term.

Kim Eddie, the assistant executive secretary of the Michigan Prosecutors Coordinating Council, said the law "gives a great deal of discretion to the prosecutor in making the decision" to keep a case or to hand it off.

In the future, a judge might decide there is a conflict, but that could come "only when there is actually a case," said Eddie, who has been a prosecutor for 35 years. "There is no case now before a court."

But Detroit City Councilwoman Sheila Cockrel said she's concerned about the phone call.

"Personally, I would not be comfortable," she said. "I would be concerned that it would create the appearance of a conflict."

Contact BEN SCHMITT at 313-223-4296 or bcschmitt@freepress.com. Staff writers Kathleen Gray, M.L. Elrick and Zachary Gorchow contributed to this report.

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