Retired Detroit-Area Drug Prosecutor Takes Plea in Trial-Testimony Case, Will Get 6 Months
A retired chief drug prosecutor in the Detroit area has taken a plea in a controversial perjury case, along with two police officers, leaving only a former Wayne County judge awaiting trial.
Karen Plants pleaded guilty yesterday to misconduct in office, for which she will get a six-month jail sentence and avoid conviction on more serious charges that could have put her in jail for much longer, the Detroit News reported.
She will lose her law license as a result of the conviction, but may be able to regain it in five years, with good behavior, when she is eligible to get her conviction expunged, the newspaper says.
Jeff Martlew, a retired judge who sat on the bench in other Michigan counties and now is a professor at Cooley Law School, tells the Detroit Free Press that Plants’ sentence “sounds about right. You need to send a message,” he says, “and any jail time has to be shocking for anyone involved in criminal prosecutions.”
Retired County Circuit Judge Mary Waterstone is scheduled to be tried in May on one count of misconduct in office. Earlier, her lawyer argued that the judge lacked requisite criminal intent, and the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission apparently agreed when it reprimanded her for the admitted conduct, as a previous ABAJournal.com post details.
Plants and two Inkster police officers were accused of encouraging a paid witness to lie in a major 2005 cocaine case in order to keep the individual’s identity confidential, and Waterstone is accused of permitting a perjury-tainted trial to proceed. However, that also meant that defense lawyers and the jury allegedly were kept in the dark about who the witness really was.
Three other charges against Waterstone were dismissed last month, reports an earlier Free Press article.
The case has been controversial because of a perception of unfairness by some observers, who point out that Plants, until she was charged after a special prosecutor investigation, continued to work for Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy for several years even as Worthy pursued another, unrelated high-profile perjury case against a then-mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick.
Hat tip: Legal Profession Blog.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “More Bad News for Ex-Mayor & Ex-Lawyer Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit: He’s Now a RICO Defendant”
Jonathan Turley (2009): “An Un-Worthy Moment: Judge, Prosecutor, and Two Police Officers Indicted Over False Testimony in Drug Case”
