- Coming up on the next "American Black Journal," we're taking a look back at the Detroit case that became a national symbol of police brutality.

Malice Green was killed by two police officers 30 years ago and my special guest today is Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who prosecuted those officers.

We'll talk about what happened then and what's happening now.

Stay where you are, "American Black Journal" starts right now.

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(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host Stephen Henderson.

In November of 1992, 35 year old Detroiter Malice Green became the face of police brutality after he was beaten to death by two Detroit police officers.

Green was an unarmed Black man.

The two officers were white.

The case drew national attention and pushed then Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Kym Worthy into the spotlight.

Following the conviction of the officers in 1993, "Detroit Black Journal" spoke with Kym Worthy and Larry Simmons, who at the time was the executive assistant to Mayor Coleman Young.

Here's a portion of that episode which was hosted by the late Cliff Russell.

- You know what's interesting as the Malice Green trial has been perhaps more interesting to me is has been the response of some suburban brethren we have who want to have Buzdyn and Nevers pardoned, who also are trying to raise monies for their defense.

What is your read on that, Larry?

What does that say about where we are as a community and a region?

- Well, you know, there are always indications, Cliff that we are still cleaved in America in this region on the question of race.

And all you have to do is listen to one of our local radio talk stations and you will hear the sentiment that is now galvanized around exonerating these officers.

I tell you for me, the real story here is that 140 years after our parents were in slavery and the the American justice system said that we had no rights that a white man was bound to give credence to.

- [Cliff] That was the law.

- That was the law of the land from Supreme Court.

We had a trial in which the former slaves were adjudicating the offspring of former slave masters and did so fairly, there was not a wholesale conviction here.

One person was found innocent and all of the players in this, Blacks and whites together gave their best.

Now I tell you, I thought that they were guilty based on what I heard, but you know what, if that jury had found them innocent, that would've been the end of the story for me because what you had here, if we can't find fairness and justice in that situation then there's nothing to be found in America.

Unfortunately, when justice arrives and it doesn't go the way some people want it to who are accustomed to seeing us obedient and subservient, they think then that they have to overturn that.

I feel sorry for 'em.

- Let's talk about Buzdyn and Nevers right now.

Was that a, I won't say painful, but a difficult trial for you in the fact that these were police officers, that the case had received so much notoriety and attention in Detroit, that there was so much focus on you and this case?

- It wasn't the most difficult case I'd ever done.

It was the most challenging in the sense that Doug and I were constantly scrutinized and fly specked and questioned about everything that we did.

But we know that we had worked very hard and put together what we thought was a very solid case.

And so I never lost my confidence that we were going to prevail.

And I knew that it was tight.

I knew that we had done everything that we could possibly do and I knew that when I sat down at the end of my closing argument that there's nothing else that I could have done 'cause I did my best.

And so I felt really good about the work that both Doug and I did.

So it was hard at first being a microscope and fly spect, but you really forget about that.

And I don't have a problem with my focus.

I was extremely focused on what I was supposed to be doing and I really didn't think about what was going on around me.

- Doug Baker, of course is the other assistant Wayne County prosecutor, who as a team with Kym Worthy were the prosecutors prosecuting Larry Nevers and Walter Buzdyn.

A lot of things have been said about your style.

I've heard everything from very intense, some people said a legal pit bull.

(Kym laughing) - [Cliff] How would you describe your style?

- It's interesting, I think, I don't think I was any more or less aggressive than any of the male attorneys that were practicing in that same case.

And I think they're saying that about me.

And I think mainly because I'm a woman and I don't have any problem with that.

I can't imagine prosecuting a homicide case when someone has lost a loved one.

And when you have repercussions like we have for this trial and being anything but aggressive and competent.

I've always been very confident about my abilities and I know that I am competent, so I just act accordingly.

And I think that you have to be aggressive.

You have to be in, you know, insightful.

You have to be intense sometimes.

- In fact, we have a little bit of you in the courtroom.

Let's take a look now at Kym Worthy in action.

- You were more concerned with getting your cigarettes, your lighter and the ID card and the narcotics than you were, than someone possibly killing your client.

Weren't you?

Your partner, weren't you?

You want me to answer?

I'm telling you what I saw.

That isn't what I asked you.

Cause you've already clearly established you didn't see a thing, you didn't hear nothing, you didn't see nothing, you didn't do nothing.

- Your honor, you arguing with the witness at this point and I would object to this line of questioning.

- Well, there we have it.

You seem to be giving it to Mr. Buzdyn pretty strongly there on the stand.

Is that your intent to, I won't say intimidate the person on the stand, but certainly cut it to the chase, put some pressure on them?

- Well, it's not, yeah it's not intimidation, it's cross examination.

And I thought his story was highly and I called a story deliberately, was highly incredible.

And I wanted the jurors to be able to decipher that information for themselves.

And there were questions that I think that everybody had and I just asked them.

I asked the questions that I thought they may have been wondering about as they listened to his testimony.

And to me it made absolutely no sense.

And so I wanted him to tell me how it was that this could have happened the way he said it could.

- So here we are 30 years later, what have we learned since Malice Green's death and what has changed if anything, in our city.

I pose these questions and much more to Kym Worthy who has now served as Wayne County prosecutor since 2004.

Here's where I wanna start.

Talk about what the context was for this killing, who Buzdyn and Nevers were, what department they were part of and what was going on between Detroit Police and Detroiters when they killed Malice Green.

- Well, it's interesting, the context is very interesting because as you would recall and most people would recall that at the, this was right on the heels of the Rodney King verdict in California.

And I always tell people that, in that case in our case anyway, there was no video.

It wasn't, we did it the old fashioned way with witnesses that were there who testified, but as you know, it was right kind of at the precepe of all the unrest that they were having in LA.

And there was not only the acquittal of the officers that beat Rodney King, but also the riots were going on in LA and everywhere else.

And there was Reginald Denny who was pulled out of a a truck when he was working and he was beaten.

And it was just a terrible thing that was going on.

And quite frankly I knew that the case was going on.

I knew that there had been an acquittal.

I knew that it had been moved to Simi Valley as opposed to staying in downtown LA, which I will never understand that decision but that's not for me to understand, I guess.

But, you know, I was, you know, not oblivious, but I was doing my cases and I was working on a case or I was already in trial in a case where a very elderly woman had been robbed and pushed down by two males and she died.

And so I was really ensconced in that case, trying it.

And I was summon to Mr. O'Hara's office, who was the prosecutor at the time, my boss, I was still an assistant back then, obviously.

And he asked me to be one of the prosecutors trying this case.

And, but I'm in another case.

And so kinda had to do it simultaneously.

So he put together a team of prosecutors to decide what the charges were gonna be.

I was a part of that team working on that by night, and by day trying my case.

And we made that charging decision.

And back then, you know that was not a popular decision for John O'Hare.

And as you know, he barely squeaked by a reelection his next election cycle, mainly because of this case, because he did just very, very quickly as he would want us to do, to do the right thing.

And it didn't matter what the fallout was gonna be, he didn't put any pressure on us.

He just told us to go and make the right decision.

The right decision was charging obviously in that case, charging homicide in that case.

There had never been at that time and even, well I guess there has been today, but there had never at that time been a successful prosecution of on-duty police officers for murders.

That had never happened and we were the first.

And so that was kind of the climate that was going on at the time.

And the, you know, I wouldn't say protests were sweeping the nation, like happened with George Floyd and others, but it was a very heightened alert type situation.

And I remember it was Coleman Young was the mayor then and he was kinda near the end of his tenure and was very interested in this case and said some things in his Colemanesque kinda way that we had to deal with (laughs) almost each and every time during the trial.

And we certainly had to deal with it during jury selection.

And so, you know, getting a jury was difficult.

It was a, we did it the way that we do in Wayne County that many people had not heard of.

We had a one jury for each defendant.

And then I always say, and I thought this was critical so we didn't have the unrest that we had that they had in LA, Don Barden who was the owner of Barden Cable Vision made the decision and I don't know how it happened, but made the decision that he was going to show this trial Gavel to Gavel on free tv, whether you had Barden cable vision or not.

And that to me was a stroke of genius because I firmly believe, even if there had not been a conviction in this case that Detroit wouldn't have gone up in flames, because people saw every single day us fighting really hard and honestly and earnestly not, this was not a sham prosecution.

People saw that we were really trying to convict these officers for murdering Malice Green.

And they saw our witnesses, they saw everything that we did was on camera and on full display.

Because remember at that time, Stephen, there was no Court TV in Detroit at that time.

- Right, that's right.

- And so that was the only way that the citizens can, you can, I wanna say streaming, but that wasn't called that, you could turn on their TV and see it every day.

And I really think that that's what helped the city heal if we ever really healed, but heal at the time during that case.

- So I always think of kind of the irony of one part of this that you mentioned, which was that, you know Coleman Young was the mayor here and the first Black mayor of the city elected in 1973 on a platform of reforming police brutality, particularly against African Americans.

The stress units that were patrolling the city back in the seventies were the reason he said that we needed new leadership and a different approach to the department.

You know, 20 years later almost, we're, it felt like we hadn't made the progress that his election promised, that.

- Yeah, it was very ironic.

And I think it's not for lack of trying on his case.

'Cause remember at the time we had a Black police chief and remember Coleman Young had announced he wasn't running again.

Dennis Archer was running and so he was, you know he wasn't gonna be the mayor anymore, but he was, you know he was tuned into this case like no other.

And I remember Bob Berg who was, you know one of the ones that worked very closely with him.

Younger people won't remember, but he was, he kept me really posted on, you know what the mayor thought.

It didn't have anything to do with our case obviously.

Cause we were gonna do the right thing, you know no matter who the person was that wanted to inquire.

But it was just a different dynamic.

And Detroit has always been different than any place else in the country.

And we've always had our own mindset, our own ways, our own, you know kind of our own morays, our own traditions.

And because they saw what we were doing, people understood that we were trying to hold these officers accountable.

And I lost friends, quote unquote friends over this.

I mean, you know, for the most part the white police officers wouldn't talk to me.

And some of 'em haven't talked to me, you know, 30 years later, a lot of the Black officers were split.

Very, very few thought that they should be charged with murder.

There were a num, most of the, well a good number of Black officers felt they should have been charged with manslaughter.

They thought that murder was going too far.

Although it was when you pumble someone in the head with flashlights, I don't know what it is other than murder.

And so a lot of Black officers never spoke to me again.

I really think it's a testament to the jurors who were on that case.

Of course, when they were convicted, of course people say, well it's because it was a Black jury.

But then they forget the rest of the story that one jury was out eight days and the other jury was out nine days.

So this certainly wasn't a group of Black folk rushing to judgment, just wanted to pin a murder on two white cops.

They took eight and nine days because it's excruciating.

If you talk to a trial attorney, they will tell you one of the most excruciating, if not the most excruciating part of a trial was waiting for that verdict.

And we had to wait for over a week for both of them.

And so they took everything seriously.

They asked good questions.

We had Judge George Crockett, III, who was a, just a great juris who, you know and I don't wanna say he bent over backwards to make sure justice was done, cause that's what he did.

He always made sure that justice was done.

- Let's fast forward to Detroit of today and something really important of course happens between back then and now in terms of police reform in Detroit.

And that's that, you know, we have a consent agreement with the Justice Department to really clean up some of the routine constitutional violations that have been going on for years and years in Detroit.

And I always point to that as kind of the North star for understanding how the department functions now.

It's not perfect, we still have issues, but it is really different from the department back then.

But I wonder from your chair as prosecutor and as the person who prosecuted these police officers 30 years ago, how differently the department looks now?

- Well, it's different.

It's different in many ways.

First of all, it's a lot smaller than it was.

You know there was a lot more people, you know, I didn't live in Detroit in it's heyday when you had 2 million people and you had Black Bottom and you had, oh you know, it's, I wish I could have lived in Detroit back then.

And so the department, I believe at the time we did the Buzdyn and Nevers case I believe it was like either 4,000, 4,500 at one point, 5,000 officers.

But I don't think it was 5,000 officers when we did this case.

And, you know, pretty really large department.

It's not in LA or New York, but a very large department.

And, you know now I wanna say there's under 2,800, something like that.

- Yeah, I mean we're less than half I think of what we need.

- But of course we have, you know probably we have a lot less people too.

And so in Detroit and so, you know, just different you know, we've had, I believe it's nine different changes of leadership since then in terms of chiefs of police, maybe 10, maybe more, which each new chief has their own agenda, his or her, because we had one female, has their own agenda, their own, when I say own agenda, I don't mean that in a bad way, but different focuses that they wanna focus on, different things they wanna focus on.

And it's been kind of a different road every time we get a new chief.

My favorite is the chief we have now.

I think he's wonderful.

He's, we don't always agree, obviously, you don't always agree with anybody, but he is dedicated.

He doesn't have an agenda.

He's not looking for a stepping stone to go someplace else.

He wants the department to run properly and is, will own up to mistakes, wants to correct things that are wrong.

And I just, I is a very good relationship in terms of seeing someone who has their eye on doing right and wanting the officers to do things right.

It hasn't always been like that.

All we want to do here at the Wayne County prosecutor's office is deliver justice.

It doesn't matter who you are, how much money you have, what your ethnicity is, what your occupation is, we wanna do right, at least that's what we strive for.

We're not afraid to bring charges against officers for varying reasons.

You know, people get mad at us when we don't bring charges, but we are not gonna put a case into the system to the best of our ability if we can't prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even though the public may think that that person's guilty as hell.

- And so you had a recent case where I think, you know, people were a little upset about you not filing charges in the Porter Burk's case shot many times by officers, a guy with mental health problems.

He did have a knife.

But talk about the, I guess the contrast between that decision and Malice Green.

- Well, we can't charge what we can't prove.

The standard for a criminal case is very, very high.

It's not, the standard is not we think he's guilty.

The standard is not the officer shouldn't have done what they did.

The standard is not, you know well they're guilty minimally, or the standard is not they're guilty, but we can't prove it.

And so the releases we send out, I don't know, sometimes people don't read that, I'm sure.

But we could not prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt.

There were witnesses, independent witnesses on the scene that said to us during our investigation more than one, that the police did everything that they could to deescalate that situation.

And when he charged at them and covered all that space in a matter of less than three seconds with that knife, knowing the history that this young man had, there was really no other option that we can come up with.

We can't prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's a very clear self-defense, defense of others cases.

And, you know, it's a lot that people don't understand.

But we are not gonna, we are gonna take the hit.

If we don't think we can prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt, then we're not gonna charge it.

We have other cases that we have charged, many other police officers that we have charged.

And there was certain segment, a different segment of people that were unhappy with us there.

You know, it's kind of like when I first became the prosecutor, trying to repair the relationships between myself and some of the out county departments outside the city of Detroit.

Detroiters loved me for the most part.

The suburbs hated me for the most part.

Kinda the opposite when I prosecuted the former mayor, Detroiters hated me.

The, you know, so it's just about, you can't, this is you know, you don't go by the court of public opinion.

You go by justice, you go by the evidence, you go by the facts.

And sometimes people are not gonna like your decisions but that's just the way it is.

And unfortunately, we always, always always try to do the right thing.

- Yeah so.

- Go ahead.

- So I wanna talk just a little about you and the difference between you then and now.

This is how you become a huge public figure here in Detroit.

You become a judge after that and then become the prosecutor.

Do you feel like this was the defining moment in the trajectory of your your career prosecuting Buzdyn and Nevers?

- I'm not sure it is the defining moment.

It's certainly a very important moment.

It's work that I'm proud of.

There's still people that are mad about it, you know 30 years later.

But it's something I'm very proud of.

I'm very proud of the fact that John O'Hare allowed us to, not allowed us to charge, but allowed us to make the decision and without any kind of influence over us that he was willing to took the political hit.

And boy did he take that political hit.

And that really shaped me into the prosecutor I am today because I wanted to be like that.

I wanted to be someone who made decisions based on the the law and the facts.

And it sounds so trite but that's what we're supposed to do.

We're not supposed to worry about, you know, people coming to my house and this has happened in many cases, a couple of cases and protesting and because they don't like a decision that I make or they don't think we're not moving fast enough.

If nothing else, I want people to think of me that we did the right thing, even if it was unpopular.

Cause you know what, nine times outta 10 when time goes by, they say, okay, that's what she was doing.

That's what exactly what happened with the former mayor.

People didn't understand what we did.

People said, you know it happened during election year for me, so it would've been very easy for me not to prosecute the mayor and not to suffer the political flack and get reelected, but when he was, when later on when things happened and more things came, oh, okay that's why she did what she did.

And so, but I just want people to know that I did the right thing based on the evidence and based on the facts.

That we weren't afraid to tackle the tough cases where we were gonna be endlessly criticized for or for years and years and years later.

But, and then I can look in the mirror and I can know that I represented the people of the county, all of the people, not just a certain segment but every single citizen in Wayne County.

- That is gonna do it for us this week.

Thanks for watching.

You can find out more about our guests at AmericanBlackjournal.org and as always you can connect with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you, thank you.

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