Legal News

Depleted Michigan Prosecutors Turn to Student Investigators

By Amir Efrati

These are hard times for law enforcement — and just about everyone else working for local governments. Examples here and here .

In Detroit, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy (pictured) recently told a local newspaper that her office “is on life support” financially. Some of the 142 prosecutors in Worthy’s office voluntarily took the equivalent of a 10 percent pay cut, according to a spokeswoman.

Today we got word that Worthy’s office is outsourcing a small piece of her operation — cold cases — to eager beavers from a small liberal-arts college in Ohio.

Worthy said in a statement that she wasn’t aware of another major prosecutor’s office in the U.S. that was “taking advantage of the skills of college students and faculty to re-examine cases which have lain dormant due to lack of staff.” She added: “In an era of limited resources, we are striving to be innovative in our approach to doing our job and serving justice.”

The students hail from Defiance College, located in Defiance, Ohio. Initially, six students – two each from the school's criminal justice, forensic science, and digital-forensic science areas of study — will take part in the cold case reviews. Additional students and cases will be added in future semesters, Defiance College said.

The students, who have already begun discussing an old homicide case with the prosecutor’s office’s chief investigator, must sign confidentiality agreements, the school said.

For longtime Law Blog readers, it might interest you to learn that the president of Defiance is a member of the Law Blog Moustache Society, Mark Gordon. Gordon, a Harvard Law grad who was dean of Detroit Mercy School of Law until last year, accomplished the rather improbable feat of landing his law students at top-tier law firms in New York and elsewhere.

Gordon told the Law Blog that he met Worthy when he was a dean in Detroit and they discussed a way to involve his law students in the work of the prosecutor’s office, but nothing ever materialized.

When Gordon moved to Defiance to take over the 1,000-student school, he told Worthy about its criminal justice program and the two began collaborating. “It’s a win-win situation,” he said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 06, 2010 (boomark / email).