Kym Worthy facts for kids

Kym Loren Worthy (born December 5, 1956) is an American lawyer and politician. Since 2004, she has served as the head prosecutor for Wayne County, Michigan. A prosecutor is a lawyer who represents the government in court and tries to prove that someone has broken the law.

As a member of the Democratic Party, Worthy made history as the first African-American woman to become a county prosecutor in Michigan. She is well-known for handling a major case involving Kwame Kilpatrick, who was the mayor of Detroit at the time.

Education and Early Career

Kym Worthy earned her first degree from the University of Michigan. She then went on to get her law degree, called a J.D., from the Notre Dame Law School. She grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from T.C. Williams High School in 1974.

In 1984, Worthy began her career as an assistant prosecutor in the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office. She worked there for ten years. During that time, she became the first African-American special assignment prosecutor. One of her most famous cases involved two Detroit police officers, Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers, in a case about the death of a driver named Malice Green. Worthy was very successful, winning over 90% of her cases.

In 1994, she was elected as a judge for the Wayne County Circuit Court, where she served for ten years.

Wayne County Prosecutor

In 2004, Kym Worthy was appointed as the Wayne County Prosecutor. She took over from Mike Duggan, who left to lead the Detroit Medical Center.

The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office is the busiest in Michigan. Even though Michigan has 83 counties, Worthy's office handles more than half of all serious crime cases in the state.

In 2013, Worthy took legal action against Wayne County. She stated that the county leader, Robert A. Ficano, had not given her office enough money to do its job properly. The next year, she supported Warren Evans to become the new county leader, and he won the election.

Important Programs and Projects

Solving a Major Evidence Backlog

In 2009, Worthy started a huge project to test thousands of evidence kits from serious crimes that had been left in storage for many years. On August 17, 2009, an assistant prosecutor found 11,431 of these kits in a Detroit Police Department warehouse. Some of them had been there since 1984.

Testing this old evidence was very important. In one instance, testing a kit from 2002 helped identify a person who had committed other serious crimes years later. Because the city and county did not have enough money for the project, Worthy worked with community groups to raise the funds needed to test all the kits. People from all over the country donated money to help.

This important work was featured in a 2018 documentary called I Am Evidence. The film won an Emmy award in 2019 for Best Documentary. By 2019, all the old kits had been tested. This led to new state laws to make sure evidence kits are tested quickly in the future.

Conviction Integrity Unit

In 2017, Worthy created a special team called the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). The CIU's job is to review old cases where new evidence might prove that a person was wrongly found guilty of a crime. If the CIU finds that someone is innocent, it recommends steps to correct the mistake. Since it began, the unit has reviewed hundreds of cases and helped free several people who were proven to be innocent.

Youth Justice Program

In December 2019, Worthy's office partnered with another group to create a program called "Talk It Out." This program offers an alternative to charging teenagers with minor offenses. It helps young people resolve issues without getting a criminal record.

Awards and Recognition

In 2018, Kym Worthy was added to the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. She was honored for her many years of service as a prosecutor and especially for her amazing work in getting the old evidence kits tested. Other women honored that year included Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Agatha Biddle, and Clara Stanton Jones.