Legal Issues

She prosecuted killers for decades. Then she took on the Capital Gazette mass shooter.

By Katie Mettler
Yesterday at 12:00 p.m. EDT

Anne Colt Leitess did not react.

She stood and gathered her papers before cutting through the courtroom where she had spent every day of the last three weeks, until she reached the hallway where she found the people who had kept her going.

Only then did the state’s attorney for Anne Arundel County finally smile.

Moments earlier, a jury had found 41-year-old Jarrod Ramos criminally responsible for the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper that killed five people on June 28, 2018. He had already pleaded guilty to the attack, but his lawyers had argued he wasn’t mentally stable enough to understand his actions — and should be sentenced to a hospital instead of prison.

It was Leitess’s job to convince the jury otherwise. And she’d won.

For three years, through financial hardships at the newspaper and a pandemic that shut down the courts, the Capital Gazette mass shooting case had loomed over her office and reshaped her Annapolis community. The attack — amid her campaign for state’s attorney — had come to define her first elected term in office and crystallized her reputation as both a mercilessly tough litigator and a deep-feeling advocate for victims.

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Emily Davies contributed to this report.

By Katie Mettler
Katie Mettler is a reporter covering policing, courts and justice. Twitter https://twitter.com/kemettler