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I know that’s what people just convicted of felonies do: They appeal their conviction and try to drum up any reason to challenge the judge's rulings. They also blame the media for creating a biased environment.
You can’t blame them.
In this case, Kwame Kilpatrick, who is stewing in prison while awaiting sentencing, has filed an appeal. He’s written it himself. He wants U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds to overturn his conviction and grant a new trial.
So he’s resorted to blaming everybody and everything . . . except himself.
What about his attorney, Jim Thomas?
Oh yes, Kilpatrick rips into him. He says Thomas was involved in multiple conflicts of interest -- an issue that came up before trial. Kilpatrick tried to get Thomas booted from the case as a court-appointed attorney. Judge Edmunds had ruled Thomas could represent Kilpatrick.
Now, in his court motion, Kilpatrick is raising the issue again. He writes that Thomas represented a client in connection to campaign finance issues related to the Kilpatrick campaign fund.
“This represented a blatant conflict of interest,” Kilpatrick wrote in his brief.
He wrote that Thomas also had a conflict of interest because his law firm represented Macomb County in a lawsuit against Kilpatrick involving the Detroit Water Department contract that was “one of the subject matter contracts and counts in the present criminal case.”
Kilpatrick notes that he had filed a formal complaint against Thomas with the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission
Kilpatrick has many other complaints.
He insists:
- The trial judge let in “broad swaths of hearsay concerning state of mind of victims and the defendants."
- The court refused to give him materials to help him determine if the jury pool for grand jury reflected the community.
- Biased media coverage made it hard to get a fair trial.
I won’t judge all the issues on its legal merits.
And I certainly can’t blame him for trying to wiggle loose even though he was convicted by one of the most racially balanced federal juries in Detroit in a long time -- five blacks, one Hispanic and six whites --convicted him of 24 of 30 counts.
But I also can’t help but thinking of mountains of evidence that piled up against him in trial, how witness after witness portrayed him as a crook who shook down business people of this community and helped make a poor city poorer.
It’s particularly hard to read about his cries of justice on a day when Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr is painting a very very bleak picture of the city's finances.
Kilpatrick can’t blame Orr for anything. He just arrived in town.
But it wouldn’t be far fetched for Orr to blame Kilpatrick -- at least a little.
