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Just-retired U.S. District Judge Nancy G. Edmunds, who sentenced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to 28 years in prison in 2013 for public corruption, tells the Detroit News that she's disappointed President Donald Trump commuted Kilpatrick's sentence to time served in January 2021. He ended up serving nearly eight years.
Kwame Kilpatrick (Facebook photo)
"He deserved to be in prison for a long time," Edmunds tells the Detroit News in a wide-sweeping interview. "He has never shown an ounce of remorse for anything he did. He has never acknowledged the criminality of anything he did.
"I think he should have paid his restitution like most criminal defendants make some attempt to do."
"A commutation suggests that what he did wasn't so bad," Edmunds said. "It was terrible—terrible in terms of the squandering of what could have been real leadership, and just the greed and sense of entitlement that suggested he was outside the law—that the law doesn't apply to him the same way it does to everybody else."
Kilpatrick, 55, declined to comment to Deadline Deadline on Monday.
After battling the government over restitution, Kilpatrick earlier this year agreed to a payment plan for $823,649.09 in restitution.
President George H.W. Bush appointed Edmunds, 78, to the bench in 1992. She retired on March 31.
She was well respected on the bench by both prosecutors and attorneys.
Reporters who covered Kilpatrick's criminal trial in 2013 got the impression, from both her demeanor and the harsh 28-year sentence she handed down, that she was not a fan of Kilpatrick.
