Detroit 2017 Primary Election: Half Of Mayoral Candidates Are Felons

DETROIT, MI — Recent polling shows it’s not likely to happen, but voters in Detroit’s Aug. 8 mayoral primary election could advance to the fall ballot a candidate who once got into a shootout over a car repair bill. Political newcomer Donna Marie Pitts, 58, is one of four candidates in the eight-person primary field with felony records, according to a report by The Detroit News.

A poll released this week gives Pitts 1 percent support among 410 likely voters in next Tuesday’s election. Incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan has a wide lead in the Target Insyght poll, which showed 60 percent of likely voters plan to cast ballots for him. The next closest challenger, state Sen. Coleman A. Young Jr., polled at 30 percent, and Edward Dean also polled at 1 percent.

Duggan, Young and Dean all have spotless criminal records, as does candidate Angelo Brown. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, click here to find your local Michigan Patch. Also, like us on Facebook, and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Besides Pitts, other mayoral candidates with felony convictions are Danetta L. Simpson, who was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder in 1996; Articia Bomer, who was convicted of a concealed weapon charge in 2008; and Curtis Christopher Greene, who was 19 in 2004 when he was charged with delivering and manufacturing marijuana and fleeing and eluding police during a chase.

Of the four, Pitts has the most detailed rap sheet with crimes in both Oakland and Wayne counties, The Detroit News said. In the 1987 shootout over the car repair bill, a jury convicted Pitts of a lesser offense of assault with intent to do great bodily harm, less than murder, and a firearms offense. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and paroled in June 992, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. Her most recent conviction was in 2003, when she pleaded guilty in Wayne County Circuit Court to carrying a concealed weapon.

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» For more on this story, go to The Detroit News.

» For more on the poll, go here.

Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images News/Getty Images