Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy
A Michigan State Police inquiry raises serious questions about potential ethical violations by Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy's office.
Worthy's office waited eight months before telling Davontae Sanford’s attorneys about evidence that would exonerate him, the State Police found, according to George Hunter of The Detroit News. Sanford spent eight years in prison for murders he didn’t commit, the report stated.
Sanford confessed and pleaded guilty in the 2007 slaying of four people in a drug house on Runyon Street in Detroit. He was 14 at the time, was learning disabled and was known for spinning stories. But two weeks after heading to prison hit man Vincent Smothers confessed to the killings and said Sanford had no role in the murders.
Hunter reports:
Legal experts question the delay that forced Sanford to sit in prison an extra eight months before prosecutors decided to drop the charges. He was released June 8.
Prosecutors had an ethical duty to quickly disclose to Sanford’s attorneys alleged perjury by former Detroit police deputy chief James Tolbert, experts said. The state police report, released Friday, shows prosecutors were told of the alleged perjury in October 2015, but waited until May to inform Sanford’s defense and drop the case against him.
Tolbert, who became Flint’s police chief after leaving Detroit, testified in a July 2010 court hearing the 14-year-old Sanford had drawn a sketch of a Sept. 17, 2007, quadruple homicide scene. In October 2015 Tolbert contradicted his earlier testimony when he told state investigators he had sketched the diagram. State police are seeking perjury charges against Tolbert.
Prosecutor Kym Worthy said the crime scene sketch had been “a major building block” in the case against Sanford, who was convicted in 2008 of second-degree murder. She told reporters at a June 9 press conference she had learned only three weeks earlier of Tolbert’s alleged perjury, when state police turned over their investigative report.
Davontae Sanford“We received information on the 20th of May of this year that called into question the murder conviction of Davontae Sanford,” Worthy said at her press briefing, a day after Sanford was released from prison. “The new information from the Michigan State Police led us to the conclusion that the interest of justice required that Mr. Sanford’s conviction be set aside.”
But the state police report, released to Michigan Public Radio through the Freedom of Information Act, shows prosecutors were informed of the alleged perjury Oct. 6, 2015, when state police detectives met with assistant prosecutors Rob Moran, Jason Williams and Tom Chambers and investigator Cory Williams “to discuss our interview results with Chief Tolbert,” the report said.
“They were specifically briefed on Chief Tolbert’s statements regarding the diagram that Sanford had allegedly drawn for DPD,” the report said.
The News asked Worthy's spokesperson, Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Maria Miller, whether waiting eight months to disclose Tolbert’s alleged perjury to Sanford’s attorneys was an ethical violation, to which she responded:
“We received the completed investigation from MSP in May and immediately disclosed information to Sanford’s attorneys.”
