Kym Worthy

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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.

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.

She started as an assistant prosecutor in the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office 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 Detroit police officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers in the beating death of motorist 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 succeed now Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who had resigned to become the head of the Detroit Medical Center.^{[citation needed]}

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, she backed former Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans who defeated incumbent Robert A. Ficano in the Democratic primary for Wayne County Executive. Evans later won the general election.^[5]

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. As the City of Detroit was in bankruptcy and 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]

Financial donations were made 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 2018, Worthy was featured in the documentary I Am Evidence.^[12] The documentary won a number of awards, including the Emmy in 2019 for the Best Documentary in the News and Documentary category.^[13]

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 a 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.^[14]

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.^[15][16]

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, 19 prisoners had filed claims and been released from prison.^[17][18][19]

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 is called Talk It Out.^[20][21][22]

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. She did not assist in his release but did not object to his parole from the Michigan Department of Corrections after Hill's death in 2016.^[23]

In 2018, Worthy was inducted for her years of 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.^[24]

• Detroit News, August 16, 2004.