Kym Worthy

Kym Loren Worthy (born December 5, 1956) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the prosecutor of Wayne County, Michigan since 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the first African-American woman to serve as a county prosecutor in Michigan. She is most noted for prosecuting then-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at the beginning of March 2008.

Kym Loren Worthy
Wayne County Prosecutor
Assumed office
16 July 2004
Preceded byMike Duggan
Personal details
Born (1956-12-05) December 5, 1956
Political partyDemocratic
Alma materUniversity of Michigan (AB)
Notre Dame Law School (JD)

Worthy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her J.D. degree from the university of Notre Dame Law School. She attended high school in Alexandria, Virginia and is a 1974 graduate of T.C. Williams High School.

Worthy started as an assistant prosecutor in the Wayne County Prosecutor's in 1984. She served in this position for ten years, becoming the first African-American special assignment prosecutor under Prosecutor John O'Hair. Her most notable prosecution was the trial of Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers in the beating death of Malice Green. Worthy had an over 90% conviction rate.[1] In 1994, Worthy was elected to the Detroit Recorder's Court (now the Wayne County Circuit Court).[2] From 1994 until January 2004, Worthy was a judge on the Wayne County Circuit Court.

In 2004, Worthy was appointed Wayne County Prosecutor by the judges of the Wayne County Circuit Court bench to replace now Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who resigned to become the head of the Detroit Medical Center.

The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office is by far the busiest in Michigan. There are 83 counties in Michigan yet Worthy's office handles 52% of all felony cases in Michigan and 64% of all serious felony cases that go to jury trial.[3] In 2013 Worthy sued Wayne County alleging that Wayne County Executive Robert A. Ficano had provided her with an insufficient budget to fulfill her duties as outlined in the Michigan State Constitution.[4] In June 2014 Worthy backed Warren Evans in his successful race to oust then Wayne Robert A. Ficano in the Democratic Primary.[5]

Established programs

In 2009, Worthy began working on resolving a massive backlog of unprocessed rape test kits in Detroit, despite previous years of refusal to even allow assistant prosecutors to look for them for over a decade.[6][7] On August 17, 2009, assistant prosecutor Robert Spada discovered a massive number of kits sitting in a warehouse that the Detroit Police Department had used as an overflow storage facility for evidence. The 11,431 sexual assault kits languished in the DPD property warehouse from 1984 to 2009 without being submitted for testing. In one case, a 2002 rape was linked to a man who was incarcerated for three murders he committed in the seven years after the rape. Because the City of Detroit was in bankruptcy and the then Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano would not provide funding for the project Worthy turned to the Detroit Crime Commission, Michigan Women's First Foundation and the African-American 490 Coalition to form a public-private partnership to raise funds to test the kits.;[8][9] Donations also were given by citizens from all over the United States. The project received grants and funding from the National Institute for Justice, the State of Michigan and the New York District Attorneys Office. An important academic study of the project was authored by Michigan State University Professor Rebecca Campbell.;[10][11]

In September 2016 Worthy hosted the first Detroit Sexual Assault Kit Summit that was attended by prosecutors, police, sexual assault victim service workers, academics, and journalists to share information learned from the Detroit Project. prosecutor-worthy-to-host-3-day-sexual-assault-kit-summit.[12]

In 2018 Worthy was featured in the documentary I Am Evidence.[13] The documentary won a number of awards including the Emmy in 2019 for the Best Documentary in the News and Documentary category.[14]

The 10th Anniversary of the Detroit Rape Kit Project was marked by a commemorative ceremony celebrating the completion of the testing of all of the rape kits, state legislation that sets out time line for the submission of kits for testing and a statewide tracking system that allows victims to follow the progression of their kit for DNA testing.[15]

Worthy also established a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in 2017 and became active in January 2018. As of 2017 it received over 700 requests for investigation.[16][17]

The CIU's function is to make recommendations to determine whether new evidence shows that an innocent person has been wrongfully convicted of a crime and to recommend steps to rectify such situations. As of June 2020, there have been 19 prisoners who have filed claims and been released from prison.[18][19][20]

In December 2019. Worthy announced a partnership between the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and the Wayne County Dispute Resolution Center to establish alternatives for charging adolescents and teens with low level crimes. The program, Talk It Out, gives crime victims an opportunity to voice their concerns within the process while potentially positively impacting the lives of the youth who victimized them.[21][22][23][24]

Controversies

In 2017, a documentary, White Boy, detailed evidence that high-ranking Detroit officials engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to unjustly imprison Richard Wershe Jr., a former FBI informant arrested for possession of 8 kg of cocaine in 1987, when Wershe was only 17 years old. Despite being a non-violent offender and a juvenile at the time of his sentencing, Wershe was held in a Michigan prison for 29 years. In September 2015, Wayne County Circuit Judge Dana Hathaway ruled that Wershe's life sentence was unconstitutional and that he should be re-sentenced. Worthy objected to Hathaway's ruling and Wershe lost his appeal for re-sentencing. Worthy claimed she objected because Wershe was charged and convicted of operating a car theft ring in Florida when he was in prison there. One subject interviewed suggested that she was motivated by her "personal and professional" ties to former Detroit City Council President Gil Hill, subject of an FBI investigation for which Wershe was an informant. On August 26, 2016, Worthy changed her position after public pressure and news reporting about this conflict of interest.[25] She did not help to release Wershe but merely did not object to his parole from the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Michigan Women's Hall of Fame

In 2018 after a distinguished career with many awards Worthy was inducted for her years of tireless work as the Wayne county Prosecutor and specifically for her outstanding work on resolving the Detroit Sexual Assault Kit Backlog. The other inductees were Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Agatha Biddle and Clara Stanton Jones. [26]

References
  1. "Detroit's dramatic prosecutor. (Kym Worthy, lawyer in Malice Green police brutality case) - Ebony | Encyclopedia.com". Archived from the original on 2008-09-03. Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  2. "About Kym Worthy, Current Wayne County Presecutor". Re-Elect Kym Worthy for Wayne County Prosecutor. Retrieved 2020-07-24.
  3. "Wayne County, MI - Prosecutor of Wayne County". Archived from the original on 2008-05-10. Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  4. "Detroit Free Press article on Worthy's suit". Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2014-07-24.
  5. "NPR', March 6, 2010". NPR. Archived from the original on March 2, 2019. Retrieved July 30, 2019.
  6. "Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney's Office (Michigan) | Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI)". www.sakitta.org.
  7. "In Hot Pursuit of Cold Cases". Time.
  8. "Enough Said. Sexual Assault in Detroit". enoughsaiddetroit.org.
  9. Steinberg, Stephanie. "Kim Trent, woman behind African American 490 Challenge". Detroit News.
  10. University, Michigan State. "Detroit solves problem of untested rape kits, MSU report finds". MSUToday.
  11. "SAK Final Report" (PDF). www.ncjrs.gov. November 9, 2015. Retrieved 2020-07-25.
  13. "I Am Evidence". HBO.
  14. "Video showing Best Documentary Nominees and Winner". YouTube. August 10, 2019.
  15. "Event to Commemorate 10th Anniversary of Rape Kit Initiative". www.usnews.com. August 10, 2019. Retrieved 2020-07-25.
  16. Baldas, Tresa. "Battler for the wrongly convicted will join Wayne County Prosecutor's Office". Detroit Free Press.
  17. "Conviction Integrity Unit | Prosecutor".
  18. "A Michigan Man Spent Decades in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit — But Who Was the Real Killer?". PEOPLE.com.
  19. Cwiek, Sarah (29 March 2018). "After 45 years behind bars for murder, Richard Phillips is finally, officially exonerated". www.michiganradio.org.
  20. Cwiek, Sarah (21 February 2020). "Wayne County overturns man's wrongful conviction after 25 years". www.michiganradio.org.
  21. Twitter, Dave Herndon dherndon@medianewsgroup com @NHDaveH on (16 December 2019). "New program allows mediation option for Wayne County juveniles charged with certain crimes". Press and Guide. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  22. Clarke, Evrod Cassimy, Kayla (December 16, 2019). "'Talk It Out' program in Wayne County could give juvenile offenders a second chance". WDIV.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  23. Brand-Williams, Oralandar. "Wayne County prosecutor announces diversionary program for youth offenders". Detroit News.
  24. "Press Release - Prosecutor Worthy Announces Juvenile Mediation Program Talk It Out".
  25. "Video: Prosecutor Worthy Denies She Fought Rick Wershe's Parole for Gil Hill".
  26. "Dr. Mona, prosecutor Kym Worthy among 2018 Michigan Women's Hall of Fame inductees". Crain's Detroit Business. July 20, 2018.
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