Melissa Mourges

Melissa Mourges is a career prosecutor who has spent almost 40 years at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office investigating and bringing rape, homicide and other serious felony cases to trial. Currently, she is chief of the forensic sciences/cold case unit. She acts as a liaison between the 500 prosecutors in her office and their forensic labs, including the forensic pathology and biology labs of New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner and the NYPD crime scene unit, ballistics, controlled substances, latent fingerprint, and criminalistics labs. When Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance devoted over $38 million to test the nationwide backlog of untested rape kits, Mourges helped design and administer that project. She also prosecuted hundreds of cold cases from the nation’s first rape kit backlog, funded by the NYPD in 2000, where over 17,000 kits from evidence storage were tested. Mourges is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and a graduate of Albany Law School and Binghamton University.