Detroit Mayor Charged With Assaulting Officer DETROIT — Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick’s already debilitating legal troubles compounded here on Friday as Michigan’s attorney general charged him with two felony counts of assaulting police officers.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kilpatrick sat in a county jail serving time for violating a bond agreement on an unrelated charge. He had to be arraigned in the afternoon via video, although he had an earlier court appearance Friday in person.
Mike Cox, the attorney general and a frequent critic of the mayor, accused Mr. Kilpatrick of shoving and shouting expletives at two officers who were trying to serve a subpoena to one of Mr. Kilpatrick’s friends about two weeks ago while Mr. Kilpatrick was in the man’s home.
The friend, Bobby Ferguson, a businessman, is a witness in a pending criminal case against Mr. Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty. Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty are accused of perjury and misconduct in that large and complicated case, nearly seven months old now, involving text messages and an extramarital affair.
If convicted of the assault charges, Mr. Kilpatrick, 38, would face up to two years in prison for each count and fines. But it is the specter of an even larger legal repercussion that has Detroit abuzz: if convicted as a felon, Mr. Kilpatrick, who has refused to resign, would be forced under the city’s charter to vacate his office.
That outcome would not render the other, larger case moot, but it would hasten an outcome that many residents say they are ready for after months of unseemly drama. Mr. Kilpatrick, a second-term mayor who brimmed with promise early in his career, was charged with eight felonies earlier this year in the perjury case. During that case it was exposed through text messages that he and Ms. Beatty, who were both married, were having an affair and lied about it under oath in a civil trial about wrongful terminations in the police department.
Ms. Beatty resigned after the messages were revealed.
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