Just kill me now. FGS, a close friend of Easley's?
Cozy bunch.
A rock in a hard place
Durham's district attorney draws strength from law.
The News & Observer
April 25, 1993
Author: Scott Huler; Staff writer
Estimated printed pages: 9
DURHAM -- Ron Stephens knows something about the rules.
(snip)
Assistant District Attorney Jim Hardin agrees. "I've never seen anyone that took greater pains to ensure that everyone we deal with is fed out of the same spoon," he says.
Mike Nifong, another assistant, says this is what makes a person of such seemingly rigid values excellent at plea bargaining. "Ron had this gift for making you an offer in a case that was a whole lot worse than you wanted but much better than you could get in court," he says. "The point of greatest stability, I guess you'd call it."
The point of greatest stability -- greatest consistency, greatest predictability -- is what Stephens is all about, according to his staff. Assistant District Attorney Mary Winstead, who's been in the office for six years, sums up the ADAs' opinion of Stephens': "The term we use for Ron around the office is that he's a rock."
Not that Stephens can't get angry.
Nifong describes the only time he can recall Stephens nearly losing his temper. "I had a case where a man was charged with an assault on his ex-wife," he says, sitting in his little office, about a third the size of Stephens', and beginning to smile. "I had a chance to take a plea, a plea to the maximum sentencing allowable." He couldn't reach the victim, he says, so he took the plea.
"That is the maddest I ever saw Ron," he says. "He was mad not because of the sentence but because I had not contacted the victim."
Stephens recalls the incident. What infuriated him, he says, was that the system let the victim down.
"That woman had lost her leg" as a result of the attack, he says. "She came in the office as an amputee, and she asked when was she going to have her day in court. And she did not get her day in court.
"I was more upset than the victim was."
(snip)
Never mind my last post---I'm catching up. Yikes--not good!