Now, however, the career prosecutor finds himself in the middle of a political and legal dispute.
Ever since a black teenager died after a melee at a Pasadena party in July, Weathersbee, 61, has been harshly criticized by some for not prosecuting the case aggressively enough – and by others for bringing charges at all.
The dead youth’s family was incensed when Weathersbee’s office dropped murder charges against four white men allegedly involved in the melee. Weathersbee said preliminary autopsy results suggested the injuries that caused Noah Jamahl Jones’ death were consistent with a fall. Then he brought witnesses before a grand jury, which indicted six white men on manslaughter charges. But this month, an all-white jury acquitted the first defendant, Jacob Tyler Fortney, of all charges.
Amid speculation that charges against the remaining defendants will be dropped – Weathersbee said a decision is likely this week – a group of black ministers called on Weathersbee last week to resign.
“Everyone’s mad at him. Sometimes, you just can’t win,” said lawyer T. Joseph Touhey, who has known Weathersbee more than three decades.
Weathersbee said he believes that his prosecutors have done the best they could with what they had. He is sorry, he said, that some people see the case as they do.
Weathersbee, a Democrat, said he is not resigning. He said he expects to seek a fifth term in the increasingly conservative county, though Republicans sense that Weathersbee, who narrowly won re-election in 2002, might be vulnerable.
“There’s nothing I can do about that,” said Weathersbee, who was battling bronchitis during an interview Friday in his Annapolis office. “You’ve just got to make the right decision. If the public wants to kick me out of office, they can.”
Then he quickly added: “I would hope the people would not kick me out of office for this.”
A Washington, D.C., native who is married and has grown children, Weathersbee was raised in Montgomery County and received his bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Maryland.
He joined the state’s attorney’s office in 1969, and with the exception of one year, he has been in the office ever since. He rose to deputy prosecutor under then-State’s Attorney Warren B. Duckett Jr., known for his love of politics. When Duckett became a judge in 1988, Weathersbee was appointed chief prosecutor and uncomfortably became the office’s public and political face.
He ran for the post in 1990 and won – then won three more times, making him Anne Arundel’s longest-serving state’s attorney in recent memory. His office has a $7 million budget.
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‘No flash or dash’
Touhey, a one-time prosecutor now in private practice, remembers Weathersbee as an organized, though hardly dramatic, young prosecutor.
“There is no flash or dash with Frank. No histrionics. He would just lay it out there methodically – and then he goes home and eats his milk and cookies,” Touhey said.
The biggest known transgression in Weathersbee’s past: getting caught in 1973 with a beer in hand in Ocean City. The case was dropped, he recalled, after police failed to appear. But Weathersbee didn’t try to have the record expunged because, he said, he didn’t think that was right.
Lawyer Jonas D. Legum said that when he was a young prosecutor, then-deputy Weathersbee made himself available to help less-experienced attorneys.
“If I had a question on the law, I could approach him – and he knew the law,” Legum said.
Over the years, he has played key roles in the county’s drug and teen courts, and in starting a program to give first-time drug offenders a chance to mend their ways without getting a criminal record. He has also increased mediation as a better way to resolve disputes than going to court, and he instituted a bad-check unit.
Some of Weathersbee’s policies and programs – such as sending all handgun violation charges to Circuit Court for prosecution, and having a large team of staffers to help victims and witnesses – grate on defense lawyers even if they play well with voters.
In recent years, he has publicly chastised Democratic judges who have given criminals lighter sentences than his office sought – and has been faulted by other Democrats for possibly helping two Republicans oust two Democratic judges in an election last year.
Race problem?
In segments of the African-American community, Weathersbee’s office is seen as having a race problem. Although he is credited with organizing a hate-crimes unit within his office, he employs only one black attorney out of dozens of lawyers in his office. Some say he has failed to take the pulse of the minority community.
“When it comes to handling issues that have a racial dimension to [them], I think his office has had difficulty managing that both from the prosecution issue and the public relations issue,” said Carl O. Snowden, a black community leader and aide to County Executive Janet S. Owens.
When Weathersbee decided to drop murder charges against four defendants in the Jones case, his efforts to explain it to black leaders backfired: The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for a federal probe into Jones’ death.
Some defense lawyers said privately that his decision to turn to a grand jury was a way to distance himself from an increasingly muddled case, and that the manslaughter indictments against the six were a way to placate black critics.
Weathersbee shot back: “That’s not why [we pursued it]. There was a dead body.”
And still, some in the black community are angry that the Jones case was not prosecuted as a hate crime. Investigators concluded that Jones’ death was not motivated by racial hatred, and Weathersbee said that he believes that black people who disagree will not change their minds.
The split in the way many whites and blacks see the case is exemplified by the acquittal by the all-white jury and remarks by two black alternates that justice was not done.
Now Weathersbee faces another tough choice: whether to go forward with the other cases in light of Fortney’s acquittal.
Pending are the manslaughter cases against four young white men – charges against one are being dropped after he testified in the first trial – as well as weapons charges against Jones’ two black friends. Defense lawyers for the four whites argued that the black youths picked a fight that was not racially motivated, but Jones’ family and many black leaders say his death was fueled by race.
Weathersbee said a decision will be made the way other ones are.
“The ability to prove the case is certainly high among the concerns that we are looking at,” he said. Another key concern, he said, is “something that exists in many cases: fairness to the defendants and fairness to the victims.”
Daryl D. Jones, a black attorney who worked for Weathersbee from 1992 to 1996, said that if Weathersbee drops charges against the white youths but successfully prosecutes either of Jones’ friends, “that has a horrible appearance.”
Local Republicans theorize that two of Weathersbee’s constituencies may have reason not to vote for him next time: some white Democrats who don’t think the white young men should have been prosecuted, and some black Democrats who think his office botched the case. Along with the perception that the county is becoming more conservative, Republicans say, this might help the party to recruit a candidate early on.
“Our main concern as residents … is that we are not sure of the quality of the work his office is putting out,” said Chuck Gast, chairman of the county’s Republican Central Committee.
Weathersbee has said he knows that whatever he decides will irritate somebody.
But, he added, his role is to get a job done – “not to make people happy.”
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ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTFrank R. Weathersbee is ex pected to seek a fifth term as Anne Arundel County's top prosecutor.
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