Prosecutor Kym Worthy's Budget Mess

Good morning County Commissioners:

I write you this morning in anticipation of today's 11:30 a.m. budget meeting with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who is expected to present her case before the Committee on Public Safety about how the budget cuts have impacted her staff.  I ask that you deny Ms. Worthy's request for any additional money for this budget year for the following reasons.  First, as Ms. Bell very well knows from past meetings between her and our group, the People's Task Force to Free the Wrongfully Convicted, Ms. Worthy received more than $3 million from the City of Detroit for her purported review of adjudicated cases involving the Detroit Crime Lab.  Aside from the fact that funding violated state law which prohibits a prosecutor from receiving funding from a municipality, as her office salary is set annually by the County Commission, for Ms. Worthy to now complain she is in dire need of additional money to fund operations is a fault of her own making.  She wasted both, human and financial resources by pulling her staff to conduct post-conviction reviews of thousands of adjudicated cases that were in addition to her regular duties as prosecutor, to say nothing of the fact that both conflict of law and ethical issues demanded that she not conduct those reviews.  But she did, and against our strong urging against allowing her to do so.  So, there is where a lot of her staff's hours went to in cases where the prosecutor was reviewing cases she prosecuted.  On that note, Ms. Worthy should be tasked with explaining what she did with the $3 million she unlawfully received from the City of Detoit.  Perhaps it's time to ask her.

Finally, one case in particular strikes at the heart of her conduct of wasting money to fight appeals in which she refuses to heed her ethical obligation to confess error.  That of Davontae Sanford, a 14 year old mentally challenged kid who was induced to plead guilty to four murders in 2007 for which post-conviction evidence of his innocence has emerged in which a professed hitman for Detroit Police, Vincent Smothers, has unequivocally confessed to those crimes.  Despite evidence of his innocence, Ms. Worthy has spent untold THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS prosecuting that case and fighting the appeals, although she has the power to save the county money by simply confessing error in that case and set Davontae free.  Remind her, if you will, of her own crimes in continuing to deny justice for that little boy whose freedom she stole with no regard for due process of law and continue to deny to this day.  I have no sympathy for her; she is corrupt; she is no guardian of justice.  

 Roberto Guzman