ALBANY, Ga. — When J. Tom Morgan leveled his finger at Sidney Dorsey's chest in court on Monday, it was the closest the two men had come to a face-to-face confrontation.
Dorsey, a man once celebrated for being the first black sheriff of suburban De Kalb County, stood accused of assassinating his rival. Morgan, the district attorney, had been pursuing him for the last year and a half.
"This man," Morgan said, his voice beginning to crack, "this man was the only person in the whole wide universe who had the motive to gun down Sheriff-Elect Derwin Brown. Why? Because he was so obsessed with power."
The stare-down was an intense finale to the prosecution's closing arguments. Just before that, Dorsey's attorney, Brian Steel, called the case "a witch hunt."
"Sidney Dorsey is not a killer. He's been manipulated. This is like going back to the Salem witch trials and throwing people into a lake and seeing if they drown."
Facing Life in Prison
For the last month, many people in De Kalb County and the surrounding Atlanta metro area have been closely following Dorsey's case. The once-popular sheriff faces life in prison if he is found guilty of arranging to kill Brown.
Brown, also black, had defeated Dorsey in an acrimonious election after vowing to clean up the De Kalb Sheriff's Department. Dorsey, like several of his predecessors, was under investigation on corruption charges.
Immediately after Brown was shot to death in his driveway on Dec. 15, 2000, Morgan began circling Dorsey. He checked his alibis, put his house under surveillance and pushed a grand jury to connect the corruption investigation with the killing. But Morgan, in his third term as De Kalb's district attorney, didn't find much evidence and was criticized for an investigation that didn't lead to any arrests for almost a year.
The break came in November when Morgan persuaded a former protege of Dorsey to testify against him. Patrick Cuffy, a thickly built sheriff's deputy, said he was among four men Dorsey assigned to kill Brown. In exchange for testifying against Dorsey, Cuffy was granted total immunity and even asked for reward money (which nobody has given him yet).
On top of murder charges, Dorsey faces 14 counts of racketeering, bribery, theft and abuse of power allegations. Dorsey, 62, has said he had nothing to do with the killing. He did not testify.
