Michael D. Bradbury has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance of California Law Enforcement. Bradbury, a former NDAA board member, retired as district attorney of Ventura County in November 2002 after serving for 24 years, and his office was recognized as one of the best and most innovative in the nation. He is now a partner in the law firm of Weston Benshoof Rochefort Rubalcava & MacCuish LLP.

Jaime E. Esparza, DA in El Paso, Texas, and an NDAA director-at-large, is the new president of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. He is the third El Paso DA to head the association.

Although Lewis R. (Lew) Slaton, Jr., former DA for the Atlanta (GA) Judicial Circuit, died several months ago, those who knew him and worked with him will be talking about this legendary prosecutor for a long time. During his 31 years in office, Slaton, a former NDAA board member, built a reputation as a skillful manager, dauntless prosecutor and a consummate politician who never forgot a fact, face or name. At a testimonial dinner for him last year, he said, “If I’ve ever learned anything over the years, it is to follow my instincts of what is right and what is wrong and to consider what justice requires…This has been more than a job for me; it has been my life’s passion.”

Joe L. Price, DA of Trinity County, Texas, was killed in a single-car accident recently. A colleague said he would be remembered as “tenacious in his pursuit of justice and in what he believed was right.”

An item in a recent issue of The Texas Prosecutor, the official journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, serves as a reminder that DAs and members of their staffs were among those law enforcement personnel who were called to active military duty from the reserves to serve in the recent war in Iraq. In Texas these included Bill Sowder, DA in Lubbock; James Angelino, assistant criminal DA in Denton; Gary Cook, investigator for the county and district attorney’s office in Brownfield; and J. D. Luckie, DA’s investigator in Midland. Also called up were Michael Dobbins, assistant county attorney in San Angelo; and C. Wade Overstreet, assistant county attorney in Potter County.

After more than 20 years as a prosecutor at the county and state level in Oklahoma, Richard Wintory, senior assistant DA in the Oklahoma County DA’s office, has moved to Tucson, Arizona, to become chief of the Criminal Division of the Pima County DA’s office. For varying periods, he served as a special assistant U.S. attorney and as chief criminal deputy in the Oklahoma State Attorney General’s Office. Wintory is well known to NDAA members and prosecutors throughout the U.S. Currently an associate vice president of NDAA, he served at one time as director of APRI’s National Drug Prosecution Center, and has worked on several NDAA committees and task forces, including successful efforts to reform habeas corpus laws to shorten death penalty appeals. He has won national recognition for his dynamic training and trial advocacy skills, having lectured at hundreds of prosecutors’ conferences.

James C. Backstrom, Dakota County (Minnesota) attorney, a past vice president of NDAA and one of the association’s “workhorses,” has been selected as one of Minnesota’s top lawyers of the year 2002 by Minnesota Lawyer, the magazine for the Minnesota legal profession.

Deaths

Roger Rook former DA of Clackamas County, Oregon, and a former president of NDAA died March 31 after a long battle with congestive heart failure. He was 75. Rook left private practice in Milwaukie, Oregon, to run for DA in 1965 and was elected. He subsequently served three four-year terms before retiring and returning to private practice in Milwaukie. During his career as DA, he also served a term as president of the Oregon DAs’ association. He served as president of NDAA from 1976 to 1977.