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Detroit dustup: where's the folo?

By Mark Obbie

It's been nearly a week since Detroit's top municipal lawyer was forced out of her job in a dispute with a judge. The city's corporation counsel, Kathleen Leavey, denies she was making a racist comment when she called one of the city's courts a "ghetto court." Leavey says she was accusing the court, which serves a mostly African-American population, of being poorly managed and providing substandard service -- of treating the public like ghetto residents. The court's chief judge reacted strongly, decrying the comment as racist and passionately defending her court's record. Both Detroit dailies covered the controversy last Friday and Saturday with he-said/she-said details of the immediate storm. But neither paper has followed up with a reported assessment of who's right -- whether the court is, in fact, well run. The closest either paper has come is this first-day story by the Detroit News' Christine MacDonald and Doug Guthrie, which explained in a couple of grafs why "the court is not without its warts." The examined warts did not include Leavey's allegations of long lines and dysfunction, nor has the paper or its competitor, the Free Press, provided context for its readers on a $400,000 judgment against the court that was the cause of Leavey's clash with the court in the first place. Perhaps this has all been reported in great detail in the past (though I found nothing in my searches of the papers' sites), but a reader who just started paying attention because of the racially charged controversy would be left completely clueless about what is really going on.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 22, 2009 (boomark / email).