Attorney Norman Yatooma made what could be his final argument in the Tamara Greene case.
Mike Wilkinson of The Detroit News reports that the $150 million civil case brought by the family of a slain stripper against the city of Detroit and former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was heard by a three-judge appellate panel in Cincinnati Tuesday. Arguments lasted less than an hour in the seven-year-old case.
Yatooma, the attorney for the family of Greene, a stripper whose stag name was Strawberry, is attempting to get the appeals court to overturn a Detroit federal judge's 2011 ruling that tossed the case, in part because of a lack of evidence.
Wilkinson reports the appellate judges seemed receptive to some of Yatooma's arguments, with one saying he was "puzzled" by Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen's decision to rule that the city destroyed evidence sought in the case yet then dismiss it for a lack of evidence.
Greene was the center of the rumored party at the Manoogian Mansion in 2002. The party almost certainly did not take place, but stories about it circulated through Detroit and led to a police investigation, which, in turn, triggered the events that led to the text-message scandal that ended the political career of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Greene was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003 while sitting in a car with her drug-dealer boyfriend on Detroit's West Side.
