After a lengthy and frustrating search ended with an arrest, Norm Maleng, district attorney of King County (Seattle), Washington state and an NDAA board member, will prosecute the man who authorities say is the notorious Green River Killer. This man, who is being prosecuted for the murders of three women, terrorized the Northwest for 20 years. Maleng announced that he would seek the death penalty in the case of Gary Leon Ridgway, 53, a married man who worked in a Seattle truck-manufacturing plant. Police believe that the Green River Killer brutally murdered and mutilated at least 49 women since August 15, 1982, when the first victim was found. Some investigators think he killed as many as 90, which, if true, would make him the Number One serial killer in U.S. history. The arrest of Ridgway brought special satisfaction to David Reichert, who, as a Seattle detective, discovered the first victim in 1982 and continued the investigation, even when he later became county sheriff. DA Maleng has indicated that he’s not interested in any plea bargaining. Sheriff Reichert is, as Time magazine put it, “torn between wanting to know the whole story and wanting to inflict the ultimate punishment. The sheriff told Time magazine: “I would love to have the opportunity to visit with him and learn the what, where, why, when, who and how in each case…but if anyone deserves to get the death penalty, it would be the person responsible for this series of murders.”

J. Tom Morgan, DA of DeKalb County, Georgia, and an NDAA vice president, won the big one when a jury convicted Sidney Dorsey, former county sheriff, of ordering the ambush killing of Derwin Brown, Dorsey’s political nemesis. Brown defeated Dorsey in a fiercely contested 2000 election and announced that he would clean up corruption in the sheriff’s office. The reporter covering the trial for The Washington Post wrote that after the verdict was announced, DA Morgan “sobbed and hugged (the victim’s widow) Phyllis Brown over the courtroom railing.” In addition to the murder conviction, Dorsey—a controversial figure known for his swaggering and pugnacious attitude—was also convicted of 11 racketeering and theft charges related to his practice of ordering his deputies to work for his private security firm and run errands for his family on county time.

It was the toughest kind of case for a prosecutor. The murder occurred 27 years ago when the defendant and the victim were 15 years old. There was no physical evidence. There were no eye witnesses. Most of the witnesses who testified were either openly hostile, openly sympathetic to the defendant or claimed to have forgotten details of what they once knew. But Jonathan Benedict, state’s attorney for Connecticut’s Fairfield Judicial District, obtained the conviction of Michael Skakel, a nephew of Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy, with what a number of legal reporters, analysts and commentators called one of the greatest summations they had ever heard. Skakel, 41, was accused of beating neighbor Martha Moxley to death in a jealous rage on Halloween 1975 by bashing her head with a golf club, striking her so hard that the shaft snapped into pieces, and then stabbing her in the neck with a splintered section. The murder weapon was part of a set of clubs owned by Skakel’s mother. Benedict won his case by convicting Skakel with his own words, pointing out obvious contradictions and implicit admissions that he had been at the murder scene. Time magazine reported, “Orchestrating a barrage of tapes, photographs and flashing manuscripts, Benedict wove dozens of disparate facts into a simple scenario as chilling as any thriller.” As part of his closing argument, prosecutor Benedict played a recording of a key 1997 interview between Skakel and writer Richard Hoffman while displaying Skakel’s words on a projection screen in large, red letters: “I remember that Andrea (Andrea Renna, his sister’s friend) had gone home.” Famed crime novelist Dominick Dunne, who attended the trial and called Benedict’s summation “brilliant,” told Connecticut Post reporter MariAn Gail Brown, “The only way (Skakel) would know that was if he had never left the house in the first place,” thus placing Skakel at the murder scene during the time frame in which the murder occurred.

The indictment of Dennis Kozlowski, former chairman and CEO of Tyco International and one of the nation’s highest-paid corporate executives, marks the latest battle in Manhattan DA Robert M. Morgenthau’s three-decade war on public and corporate corruption. Kozlowski, whose income was over $300 million for the last three years, is accused of evading more than $1 million in sales taxes on six paintings he bought last fall. Morgenthau, now 83, said that the indictment is part of a broader investigation of Kozlowski’s finances. The veteran Manhattan DA has earned a reputation during his eight terms as an indefatigable opponent of organized crime, tax fraud, corruption and white-collar crime, regardless of the high offices and reputed power and influence of the suspects. His targets have ranged from mob-connected garbage collection firms to public officials, IRS lawyers, accountants, organized crime mobsters and some of the biggest corporate names in the nation.

Mobile County (Alabama) DA John Tyson, Jr. is developing a unique juvenile crime prevention program by working with teachers and school officials to identify potential juvenile offenders and intervening to prevent further misbehavior. Working from a list of some 3,000 students who were suspended during the previous school year, one of Tyson’s investigators compiled a list of 206 “primary” candidates for intervention. Students who were suspended three or more times or had two or more violations for drug or weapons violations were placed on the primary list. Students suspended twice for less serious violations were placed on a secondary list. A third list included students who had been suspended once. DA Tyson says that teachers are usually the first to identify problem students, frequently as early as in elementary school. “Now,” he declares, “we will know who they are, too, and try to find a way to help them.”

The New Jersey State Senate has confirmed Vincent P. Sarubbi as Camden County’s new prosecutor. Sarubbi is a partner in a suburban Camden law firm specializing in civil litigation and is a former municipal prosecutor in two suburban townships, as well as a former county freeholder (legislator). He succeeds Lee A. Solomon, an NDAA state director, who resigned to accept an appointment as a deputy U.S. attorney overseeing federal law enforcement in southern New Jersey—a new position. In New Jersey, county prosecutors are appointed by the governor and are subject to confirmation by the state senate.

Scott Teter, prosecuting attorney for Cass County, Michigan, has been appointed chair of the state Child Support Leadership Council, a joint creation of the governor and the state’s chief justice. The mission of the nine-member council is to establish statewide goals and objectives for the child support program, review and recommend policy, share information with appropriate groups, and analyze and recommend state positions on pending and proposed changes in court rules and federal and state legislation.