District Attorney

LOS ANGELES -- The task facing Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti in the O. J. Simpson case is daunting and unparalleled: He must try to win murder convictions against an American sports legend well known to the public for his charm and grace.Within hours of Friday's bizarre nationally televised spectacle of crowds cheering the beloved football superstar as he led police across Southern California freeways, Mr. Garcetti took to the airwaves, launching a publicity offensive on national TV news programs.

SAMSON, Ala. -First, he killed his mother. That, according to Alabama officials, was the first chilling act in Michael Kenneth McLendon's trail of carnage across south Alabama on Tuesday, which left 10 dead, six injured and a string of small communities wondering what motivated a quiet young man to obliterate the peaceful rhythms of rural southern life in March. "He was just friendly with everyone, and kind of stayed to himself," said Jessica Wise, 27, who graduated from high school with McLendon in 1999.

LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti and Public Defender Michael Judge have vastly increased their estimates of the number of convictions that need to be reviewed as a result of the city police scandal, and both now say they will need more resources to handle what could be more than 3,000 questionable cases."

Amid the outrageous rancor and hyper-partisanship of contemporary Washington, the Eastern Shore's Wayne T. Gilchrest is a throwback to the founders' concept of citizen legislators. For 18 years, the former schoolteacher has thought for himself and boldly followed a course of his own choosing, right of center on some issues, veering left on others. Few in the GOP have been as strong on environmental causes, a fitting approach for a congressional district geographically centered on the Chesapeake Bay. At a time when such statesmanship is needed more than ever, it would be a disservice not only to the residents of Maryland's sprawling 1st Congressional District but also to the nation to replace him with a rigid doctrinaire or someone who is not well-qualified for the post.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina's attorney general said yesterday that his office would immediately assume full control of the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case referred to him Friday by Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney. "I wish I could tell you this case would be resolved quickly," Attorney General Roy Cooper, said at a news conference yesterday afternoon. "Since we have not been involved in the investigation and prosecution, all of the information will be new to our office.

ATLANTA - The task of picking the jurors who will decide the guilt or innocence of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis and his co-defendants got under way yesterday with Fulton County's top prosecutor taking the lead. District Attorney Paul L. Howard surprised many observers by leading the jury selection effort for the state. He said he intends to participate in the case every day, possibly even delivering the opening remarks to jurors. Until now, an assistant district attorney has led the prosecution team.

The killers came and went. Dozens of them, guys who killed out of jealousy, greed, desperation, rage. James F. Shalleck, a Bronx, N.Y., assistant district attorney, could usually talk to them and find some emotion he could understand. None of them quite prepared him for David Berkowitz, also known as the "Son of Sam."They met in the middle of the night on Aug. 11, 1977, in a conference room in police headquarters in lower Manhattan, hours after Berkowitz was arrested. He sat across from Shalleck at a conference table surrounded by detectives and prosecutors.

ATLANTA - Jurors acquitted two men yesterday who had been on trial in a double homicide alongside Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, whose misdemeanor plea last week ended up as the only conviction in the nationally televised case. Baltimore barber Reginald Oakley, 31, and a 34-year-old Miami man, Joseph Sweeting, hugged their attorneys after the not-guilty verdicts were announced about 3:15 p.m. It took the jury five hours to reject the two counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault against each of them.

PHOENIX -- O. J. Simpson has already had a trial -- of sorts -- in Phoenix. The verdict was "not guilty."Mock jurors selected by a consulting firm -- apparently at the behest of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office -- heard key details of the case against Mr. Simpson last month at a Phoenix hotel.With prosecutor Marcia Clark reportedly monitoring the proceedings from the next room, the majority of the 17 men and women concluded that the circumstantial evidence against Mr. Simpson wasn't enough to convict him of killing his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.

David Brian, handsome, suave actor perhaps best remembered for his early television series, "Mr. District Attorney," and as the leading man in several Joan Crawford films, died Thursday at his suburban Los Angeles home of cancer and heart failure. He was 82.

Do NASCAR collectibles qualify as legal tender? Or, in this case, illegal tender? A Pennsylvania man jailed on a charge of selling painkillers allegedly wanted a witness against him rubbed out. After finding his "hit man," however, he was planning to pay him off in bobbleheads. Allen Bridges of Everett was asking around the Bedford County Jail, searching for someone to kill for him, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. "I want him fed to the pigs," said Bridges, apparently a Hannibal Lecter fan. But Bridges seems to have blabbed too much, and another inmate tipped law enforcement officials, who then set up a state policeman to pretend he was interested in murder for hire.

Football Boston College defensive end Brady Smith, a Loyola High graduate, is being held on $50,000 bail after his arraignment yesterday on charges that he gained access to a residence hall at Boston College and assaulted a female student early Saturday morning. According to a release from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, Smith pleaded not guilty to charges of breaking and entering at night with the intent to commit a felony rape. The junior was ordered to have no contact with the victim and to stay away from campus.

HOUSTON -- The district attorney in the racially charged Jena 6 case in Louisiana agreed to a plea bargain yesterday that sharply reduced the charges against the first of the six black teenagers who faced trial. Attorneys for other defendants said the prosecutor appeared eager to avoid taking their cases to court as well. LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, whose initial decision to charge the black teens with attempted murder for beating a white youth was widely condemned as excessive, dropped a conspiracy charge against Mychal Bell, 17, and agreed to let him plead guilty to a juvenile charge of second-degree battery, with a sentence of 18 months and credit for time he has served in jail.

For months, members of Duke's men's 2006 lacrosse team and their families quietly seethed at university administrators and faculty members who they believed abandoned them when three players were falsely accused of rape. Yesterday, the three men who were accused - they were declared innocent by the North Carolina attorney general in April - reached financial settlements that will eliminate the possibility of lawsuits by the former players against Duke. Neither Duke nor former teammates David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty would disclose details of the settlements, but a Duke official said there was "a financial component."

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Choking back tears at his ethics hearing, the prosecutor in the Duke University lacrosse team rape case stunned a packed courtroom yesterday, saying he was resigning as the district attorney of Durham County. Michael B. Nifong's emotional announcement came after a bruising interrogation by his own lawyer, whose questions forced the district attorney to admit that he had unwittingly lied to judges and made prejudicial statements against three Duke players. As two of the former defendants and their parents stared at him, Nifong apologized "to the extent that my actions have caused pain."

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Ravens quarterback Steve McNair's court appearance for a charge related to driving under the influence has been delayed until July 10 after it seemed the case would be dismissed. "We thought we had a conclusion," McNair's lawyer, Roger May, said outside the courtroom. "Apparently, someone in the [district attorney's] office wants to review the file. Obviously, I'm disappointed." A clerk for the criminal court in Nashville told a reporter after yesterday's pretrial hearing that McNair's DUI by consent charge had been dismissed and that the DUI charge against his brother-in-law, Jamie Cartwright, had been reduced to reckless driving.

PHILADELPHIA -- Jason Michael Smith told police that he had decided to kill Upper Perkiomen High School classmate Michael Swann "because he punches me and kicks me and makes me" look bad.But Michael Swann wasn't the only one the 10th grader wanted to "take out.""It was not just him," young Smith said in a statement he gave to police just hours after he shot the Swann youth, 16, during biology class May 24. "I was thinking of other people too. . . . Just random people who give me trouble."I figured I could walk into the lunch room and basically kill everybody -- or blow up the school.

SAN DIEGO -- Frederick Martin Davidson, shackled and downcast, pleaded innocent yesterday to three counts of murder in the fatal shootings Thursday of three engineering professors at the California State University campus here.Deputy District Attorney James Pippin announced that the district attorney's office will ask the jury to find that "special circumstances" -- lying in wait and committing multiple homicides -- exist that merit the death penalty.Pippin said Davidson admitted to police that he shot and killed professors Chen Liang, D. Preston Lowery III and Constantinos Lyrintzis just as a session devoted to his rebuttal of their earlier criticisms of his master's thesis was beginning.

After a year of salacious stories and unfettered speculation, the legal case against the Duke University lacrosse players is over - but the news media might not be off the hook. Ever since it emerged in March last year that a stripper had accused three Duke students of raping her at a party, some reporters and columnists have come under attack for making points that seemed at odds with the few facts that were known. The Duke story had all the elements of a dramatic tale - a black woman alleging that she had been attacked by a handful of supposedly drunk, privileged white athletes at a top private college in a North Carolina town with a long history of racial tensions.

Washington -- For Duke University men's lacrosse parents, this season's games are a little less meaningful, the tailgates a little more somber. With three former players still accused of sexual assault, there are more solemn concerns than winning games. "Let's have those three boys get exonerated. That's the only win that really matters," said Patricia Dowd of Northport, N.Y., whose son, Kyle, played for Duke last year but is not among the players charged. A year after charges were filed, Duke parents are cautiously allowing themselves to believe they will soon get their wish.