Kym Worthy throws the book at the slimy mayor!
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080325/METRO01/803250347/&imw=Y
'Classic' Worthy delivers
Strong comments impress some, anger others
Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News
After Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced the filing of charges against Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on Monday, a reporter asked if she had a message for His Honor.
"I think I just delivered it," she said.
It was classic Worthy: blunt, focused, confident, according to people who have known her a long time.
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Despite a quarter-century in public service, the televised press conference was Worthy's first lengthy introduction to much of Metro Detroit. Taking on a popular mayor with her own re-election looming later this year, the stakes were high.
Several residents said she handled the pressure well.
"She's a strong woman," said Bernice Walters, 43, while waiting for a bus outside City Hall. "No one is telling her what to do."
That's also the way other prosecutors and defense attorneys view her.
When it comes to the law, she sees things in black and white, they said. What's right is right and wrong is wrong.
"She's an intellectually honest person," said Detroit lawyer Ben Gonek. "In the end, she's going to fulfill the obligations to her office. She wasn't going to treat the mayor any differently."
It comes from a childhood steeped in the military and an adulthood filled with the law. Her father was a career military officer who was just the second black Michiganian to graduate from West Point.
Worthy, 51, became an assistant county prosecutor in 1984, a Wayne circuit judge in 1994 and the top prosecutor in 2004.
With such big leaps every 10 years, one wonders what awaits in 2014. But Worthy has said she wants to remain prosecutor a long time.
A trailblazer like her dad, she was the first woman and minority to lead a prosecutor's office in Metro Detroit.
She has viewed the law from three sides, as a prosecutor, judge and victim. During her first year of law school at Notre Dame, she was raped.
During the press conference Monday, Worthy also showed something that only her friends know about -- her sense of humor.
When a reporter asked whether she had spoken to the mayor, she quipped:
"We don't have discussions with defendants. That happens on television but not in real life."
Despite the enormity of the mayor's criminal charges, Worthy has said it wasn't the most pressure she's felt.
Worthy made her biggest mark as an assistant prosecutor in the nationally watched trial of white Detroit police officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers in the November 1992 death of black motorist Malice Green.
She persuaded jurors to convict both officers, though an appeals court later granted each a new trial.
Because of the prominence from the case she was elected a judge in 1994.
As for the press conference Monday, residents responded to Worthy's televised appearance in different ways.
As they listened in homes and businesses, bars and barber shops, the message they received was colored by their feelings about the mayor.
Kilpatrick's supporters said Worthy was pressing charges to help her get re-elected later this year. The mayor's foes said justice was finally being served.
"This was not a legal decision. It was a re-election campaign announcement," said an angry Malik Shabazz, a Detroit civic activist and outspoken supporter of Kilpatrick.
Inside City Hall, workers declined to talk about Worthy.
Outside the building, residents lauded her for doing what they believed was the right thing.
For some residents, it was a relief to watch a high-ranking elected official on television who wasn't apologizing or rebutting criminal behavior.
From the outset of the press conference at Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, Worthy immediately cut a different figure from Kilpatrick's recent TV appearances.
"In this office, doing things right trumps doing things fast and easy every time," she said. "The only body that has told us what to do is the body of the law."
Some residents said they were not only impressed with Worthy but that her statements made them wonder about Kilpatrick's innocence. Retiree James Fields, 58, who had watched the press conference from a TV in a downtown restaurant, said he was ambivalent about the mayor until listening to the prosecutor.
"As a kid you know lying is wrong," he said, paraphrasing from Worthy's words earlier in the day. "You gotta pay the consequences."
Detroit News Staff Writer Mark Hicks contributed to this report.
