About Kym Worthy
Monday, April 15, 6 p.m.
Kym Loren Worthy is the current prosecutor of Wayne County in Detroit, Michigan. She is the first African American woman to serve as a county prosecutor in Michigan. She became internationally recognized for prosecuting then Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at the beginning of March 2008.
Worthy started as an assistant prosecutor in the Wayne County Prosecutor's in 1984. She served in this position for 10 years, becoming the first African American special assignment prosecutor, and had an over 90% conviction rate. In 1994, she was elected to the Detroit Recorder's Court (now the Wayne County Circuit Court). From 1994 until January 2004 she was a judge on the Wayne County Circuit Court.
In 2004, Worthy was appointed to the prosecutor’s office by the judges of the Wayne County Circuit Court bench. 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.
In 2009 Worthy began working on resolving a massive backlog of unprocessed rape test kits in Detroit. The 11,431 sexual assault kits languished in the Detroit Police Department property warehouse from 1984 to 2009 without being submitted for testing. From the inception of the project, she has been committed to ensuring that every kit is tested, every kit is investigated and that a victim-centered approach to the investigation of sexual assault is implemented.
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.
In 2018, Worthy was featured in the documentary produced by Mariska Hargitay, I Am Evidence. The documentary won several awards including a 2019 Emmy for the Best Documentary in the News and Documentary category.
In 2018, Worthy was inducted into the Michigan Woman’s Hall of Fame 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. In 2019, the tenth 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 timeline 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. The mission of the Detroit Sexual Assault Kit Project continues with investigations and prosecutions of rapists, and has been a leader in this field establishing best practices across the county.
After wanting to have a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) for many years, Worthy received the funding with the support of Wayne County Executive Warren C. Evans, from the Wayne County Commission in 2017. The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office CIU became operational in January 2018 and has received over 700 requests for investigation. It is headed by Director Valerie Newman. "We are committed to taking these new claims of innocence seriously and we need any and all additional resources we can muster,” Worthy said.
Worthy is also responsible for establishing the Conviction Integrity Unit, which investigates claims of actual innocence of convicted individuals, as well as the Wayne County Dispute Resolution Center, which handles thousands of juvenile delinquency cases.
Worthy has been an adjunct professor of criminal law at the University of Detroit/Mercy and has lectured at Harvard Law School, the University of Notre Dame Law School, Wayne State University Law School and the Universite des Sciences Sociales in Toulouse, France. She has lectured for the National College of District Attorneys, the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, the Detroit Police Department and other local schools and agencies.
Worthy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her law 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.