A Conversation With... Anne Colt Leitess: Anne Arundel State’s Attorney and Laurel High Graduate
- Kevin Leonard
- 21 hours ago
- 17 min read
Anne Colt Leitess is currently serving her second term as Anne Arundel County’s State’s Attorney. Over her 25-year plus career as a prosecutor, the Laurel High School graduate has handled numerous high-profile cases.
Kevin Leonard: Where did you grow up in Laurel?
Anne Colt Leitess: I lived in Briarwood on 197. Moved there by fifth grade and I went to Oaklands Elementary School and then Eisenhower Junior High and then Laurel High School.
KL: What year did you graduate from Laurel?
ACL: ‘81. Dwayne Jones, who I think may be the recently retired principal, was a good friend of mine. We went to junior high together and I was friends with his little brother Ivan. We used to walk to school. And he came when I was sworn in and won the 2018 election.
KL: You lived in Briarwood the whole time? All the way through high school?
ACL: All the way through high school. And then my mother bought a house in Maryland City the year I graduated from high school. So, I only lived there a couple months before I went to college. It was never really my home in Maryland City. It was always in Prince George’s County and Laurel.
KL: Let’s talk about some memories you may have from Laurel High School. Were there any teachers that inspired you that you look back on as being exemplary?
ACL: I had a great Spanish teacher named Marvelle McIntire. Everybody had to have a Spanish name and she was great. We had a drama teacher who was pretty great. I think her name was Miss Bosh. I had some really good teachers. It was a good school. I had a great high school experience.
KL: Did you have any inkling about law while you were still in high school?
ACL: I went on a field trip—I think I was about 15 years old—and somehow we were in a federal courthouse and we popped in there, and I’m watching the people. I’m like, this is really cool. I could be a lawyer. And I remember I dated a boy—a Laurel guy—and he was really smart. Anyway, I told my boyfriend’s brother, who was a couple of years older than him, “I’m going to be a lawyer.” And he kind of laughed at me. So, if anybody knows me, that’s the best thing to do to inspire me. If you just say I can’t do it or kind of giggle; you’ll never be able to do it. And so, I’m a lawyer and he’s not. I think he wanted to be a lawyer, too.
KL: Do you think the seed was planted then?
ACL: The seed was planted on that field trip. What’s so amazing is when you take young people to see things. I didn’t know any lawyers. I didn’t know any doctors. I didn’t know anybody with higher education. I was the first in my family to go to college. So, if you do that for people, you know that you can do this. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t do it.
KL: Where’d you go to college?
ACL: West Chester University, right outside of Philadelphia. It was a big political science school. And here I am a politician. So, it’s kind of crazy. Never thought that in a million years. But just a really good undergraduate liberal arts school.
KL: So, you enjoyed your years at Laurel High then?
ACL: Absolutely. I was a pom-pom girl my last year. Had a lot of friends. Very active. Had a couple advanced classes, at least in English. I always excelled in English. I was just an okay student in math. There was a lady there who told me this saying. She was very, very formal. And she told us about this paper she wrote in college and that her professor said that her paper was “a great ponderous machine grinding out the obvious.” So here I am, how many years later, 45 years? And I can still quote that teacher, but I can’t remember her name.
KL: Talk about the jobs you had growing up.
ACL: I had so many jobs in Laurel. I remember when I wanted to go to college, and my mother was basically saying I don’t know what you think you’re doing. You don’t have any money saved. You’re not going to college unless you make “X.” I need $1000 or $2000. So, I had two jobs and no car, of course, because my mother had a car. I would ride my bike from Maryland City to the mall to work. And then I had my day job. And then I came back and I worked at Everybody’s Pizza, which was in Maryland City, and those folks were not very nice to me. I had to do the dishes. It was hot and sweaty, but there was no way I wasn’t going to college.
KL: Where did you work in the mall?
ACL: I worked at the Gap. When John Lennon died, I remember that it was a huge thing. It was right around Christmas time and then I worked at the Gap every time I came home from college for summer breaks or Christmas breaks.
KL: Where else did you work?
ACL: I worked everywhere. I worked at Roy Rogers on 197 across from Montpelier. The best job I ever had was at the movie theater, the Laurel Twin Theater in the shopping center. I remember when they made it into two, and I was slated to work the summer that Star Wars came out, and I had to tell my employer that my mother had planned a trip to Croatia to go see family, and I was going to be gone for like three weeks, and they were really upset at me. They were expecting long lines and maybe they liked me as a ticket-taker girl, I don’t know. I worked in the cashier booth. I used to go to the Tastee Freez on my lunch break when I was at Laurel Cinema to get the fried chicken. And what was that little alley?
KL: Georgetown?
ACL: Georgetown Alley. And they had the general store that had the world’s best frozen yogurt. This is before frozen yogurt was a thing. They had Dannon frozen yogurt, which was to die for. They used to have some kind of crazy store there with all these stones and beads and incense, too. Do you remember that?
KL: Yeah. Georgetown Alley was specifically created for the hip scene for the teenagers.
ACL: Was that what it was?
KL: They had the Jean Jack. They had cheese shops, a candle shop, and anything that they thought would appeal to the kids.
ACL: They had a store there—as you’re walking towards Hecht Company, walk to the left, Georgetown Alley was on the left. There was a shoe store, and I bought my first pair of Chuck Taylors there, white ones. And I’m laughing because my youngest son—he’s 24—but he and my other sons love Chuck Taylors. It’s like they’re the same shoe, right? No support. Cool looking, but yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love Laurel so much. I worked other places. I have to remember where else, but I always had a job. I did deliver the Laurel Leader, though. I did it in Montpelier. That was like my route. My mother would take me out trying to collect from people. That was the whole voluntary system. “Will you please give me some money for the Laurel Leader?” It’s not really a great business model, right?
KL: Let’s turn to your career. Before you came to Anne Arundel, you were in Baltimore, right?
ACL: Yes. I went to the University of Baltimore Law School, and they had a career center there. And they’d have these folders with jobs and all. You never really were supposed to work your first year of law school, but I worked at a law firm and then I got a job as a law clerk in the Homicide Division in Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s office. I pestered the Deputy State’s Attorney to death before he gave me a job. It was very hard to get a job in a State’s Attorney’s office back then. They’d have 20 people applying for the position. And so, to get in as a law clerk and then get in as a lawyer was a pretty big deal.
KL: I’m wondering, how did you juggle three sons with your career?
ACL: When I had my second son, I went part time. I worked part time for seven years. And then I figured if I don’t come back to work full time, nobody will remember that I did a good job because I was in Violent Crimes. I had done a death penalty case. I was kind of on the rise here in this office. And then I went part time for seven years. I was thinking, I’m a decent lawyer. I better come back and work full time while the boss is still here. And the boss knows my work. I tried a homicide within five or six weeks of coming back, and then a month later I was the boss.
KL: Obviously, they remembered you.
ACL: They remembered me and they knew I did a good job. I’d work hard. So that was pretty cool.
KL: Still, it must have been tough at that point to try to juggle—
ACL: Yeah, I had my mom. My mom was retired, so my mom would pick up the kids from school. She was a huge help, and my husband was a huge help. So, seven years of your children’s lives, working part time is pretty good benefit.
KL: It sounds like you had a lot of support here.
ACL: Yeah, absolutely. And all male bosses. But, there was one Deputy State’s Attorney, and he had this idea that if you’re going to work part time, you have to go down to District Court. And meanwhile, I had just done a death penalty case. I had murders, you know? It’s kind of a waste of my skill set to send me down to District Court. But I still did some big cases. I prosecuted Marion Barry while I was part time in the District Court. He shoved a lady in the bathroom at BWI. So, I prosecuted him for that.
KL: Oh, I remember that.
ACL: And then there was a conflict-of-interest murder case where somebody who was murdered was a relative of somebody—maybe in our office—I don’t even know. I still don’t know the connection. I prosecuted that case. And then I had an attempted murder case where this nurse from Laurel—she lived in Russett. She stabbed her ex-husband in the butt with a needle filled with succinylcholine chloride, which is one of the drugs in the triple cocktail for the death penalty. They use it in ERs and operating rooms to make your diaphragm stop moving. It kind of paralyzes your diaphragm so they can intubate you. And so, she tried to stab him with that. I think she thought he was going to have a heart attack. He had high blood pressure and a heart issue and all, and she failed. When they tested the needle, they found what the drug was. So suddenly, that little District Court assault case became an attempted murder case. So even though I was part time for seven years, I had some pretty good cases here and there—kept my foot in the door.
KL: And didn’t you prosecute Ramos, the guy from—
ACL: Yeah, the Capital Gazette shooter. I prosecuted him. He’s from Laurel, too.
KL: He lived behind the shopping center.
ACL: Yeah, the—what’s the name of those apartments? He had the world’s cheapest rent. I don’t think it was even $1,000. Maybe $700 or $800. He lived there for, I don’t know, 15, 20 years.
KL: He had a grudge, right? Against the paper?
ACL: Grievance. That’s what we call it. A wound that doesn’t heal. It’s usually in your personal business, economic, romantic life that you can never get over and—
KL: But you have to have a certain mental thing to hold that grudge and to let it escalate to that point.
ACL: Well, it’s interesting because the FBI has written papers about it, about mass shooters. It’s called “The Pathway to Violence.” And it starts with a grievance, and it can go all the way up to the explosive mass shooting or whatever. And people go up and down that ladder. Violent ideation, planning, preparation, going to the scene, I forget what that’s called. It’s called breach. When you go to the scene and you check it out and try the doors and then attack. So, people can go up and down, and most people don’t go through with the attack. You still have these angry feelings. Maybe you do some research and then you and people try to fix that grievance and then maybe they write nasty posts on the Internet, or they send nasty letters or lawsuits to try to feel better about whatever is making them so angry, and sometimes that resolves it, or they get over it. And then they found in these studies of mass shooters, workplace violence, that kind of thing, they all fit this pattern of the pathway to violence.
KL: Is that a tough thing to prove in court? That they’re on that path and that it has something to do with what they did?
ACL: Well, it’s funny. I wasn’t allowed to talk about that in the Capital Gazette case because it didn’t pass muster for one of the legal parameters, the court ruled. But they let me talk about it because I called it the defendant’s journey. So, I couldn’t call it a pathway to violence, but I still talked about it. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it as a research concept, but it holds true because we all can understand somebody with a grudge, right? And we can all understand preparation and planning and breach and attack and all that. So, I could talk about it. I just couldn’t say, “This is based on a study of all kinds of psychiatrists and psychologists and the FBI.”
KL: And the jury has no problem understanding the concept?
ACL: The thing about it was very interesting and a “not criminally responsible” plea. He pled guilty, but he said, “I’m not criminally responsible, meaning I did it. But at the time that I committed the crime, I could not understand that what I was doing was either a crime or I couldn’t control my behavior.” So, if you can prove either of those due to mental illness, it has to be due to mental illness, right? Then a person would be committed to the state psychiatric hospital until they’re cured or no longer suffering from the mental illness. They have to prove it by a preponderance more likely than not standard. And so, they put on their case first, and we were just cross-examining and batting it away. It’s a complete reversal of how trials usually are. That was very interesting.
KL: Why did they do it that way? Why did they go first?
ACL: Because it’s their burden on NCR. He pled guilty. He could have had a trial on guilt or innocence and then a trial on criminal responsibility. Just two days before the trial, he pled guilty. So we didn’t have to prove that he did it. He admitted he did it. He just said, “I did it because I couldn’t appreciate the criminality.” That’s the standard. It’s two things. Either appreciate the criminality of my actions, that what I’m doing is a crime or could not control my actions because of the mental illness.
KL: Is that the kind of thing that juries get confused with?
ACL: They were not confused.
KL: Not in his particular case, but is that whole concept an easy thing to get across to a jury?
ACL: I think it was. It’s funny because you can actually use common everyday experiences. Like, we’ve all seen people who are crazy and can’t control themselves, right? I brought out all the mundane things that he had done, like he was a very good cat owner. He took his cat for cancer treatments. That cat lived, like, four years. It probably would have died within six months. He got insurance for the cat. He got his oil changed. He sold his car. He did all these regular, mundane things. Went to the bank. I had him on videotape talking to the bank teller. And so, you can present that to a jury as he’s doing all this. He just wants to go and kill these people that he’s angry at the Capital Gazette and hurt the newspaper and the parent company and all these people. So, the jury got it.
KL: Did he work in Laurel? What did he do for money?
ACL: No. He got fired from his job, I think because he was engaged in this online harassment of this woman that he had allegedly went to school with at Arundel High School, and he had a security clearance, and then he would work overnight doing some type of computer stuff, and he got fired. So, he lived off his savings and credit cards for the next three years—ran up, I can’t remember how, $70,000, $80,000 in debt. He would pay the minimum. He got a bunch of credit cards. He got cash advances or whatever. You pay the minimum amount, you can do that. And he did that for like three years. You know, he knew that he had a couple minutes to commit the mass shooting before the police. He had actually studied police response times. He knew he had under five minutes, and he set his watch. So, something as easy as setting his watch and locking the door. He actually brought a chain to lock the door. Those kinds of things. Because he knew at the most basic level: I shoot people. Police come, and I don’t want to die. He wanted to live and enjoy the fruits of his rampage. So, we used that against him. I mean, it was an exercise, and there was never any doubt, but we had to go through it. Those are the kinds of things that are very important.
State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess (left) is interviewed after the 2021 sentencing of Capital Gazette shooter Jarrod Ramos, (right) who was sentenced to five life terms plus 345 years in prison.
KL: When you first ran for State’s Attorney, did it give you pause that now you had to become a politician?
ACL: That aspect of it, I guess. I must have been so dense in 2011, 2012, something like that. Our Deputy State’s Attorney became a judge and I had also applied to be a judge. And another woman in our office had applied to be a judge. Somebody said to me, “Now the deputy position was going to be open.” So, me and this other woman are competing for it. And then this other guy said to me, “You need to make a decision. Do you want to be State’s Attorney or a judge?” And I’m like, “What do you mean? I have to make a decision? I want to be the Deputy State’s Attorney.” And I talked to Frank Weathersby. He’s like, “Do you want to be State’s Attorney?” And I was like, “I want to be your deputy. I want to do the best job, blah, blah, blah.” Apparently, that was the wrong answer. The answer should have been, “Yes. I want to be State’s Attorney. I want to take over the office.” I didn’t even think that way. The bottom line is that he wanted whoever he picked as a deputy to take his place. I never thought I’d be an elected official or a politician. So, the first go-round, I didn’t really have enough time. You get better at it.
KL: Is it like any other election where you have to go out and knock on doors?
ACL: And you have to raise a lot of money. A quarter of a million dollars at least just to be in the mix. It’s hard work to run.
KL: When you’re campaigning, what is it you’re trying to get across to people? Do you say you’re going to be tough on crime and all that, or do you just want them to get to know you? Is it more of a personality thing?
ACL: It’s both. You have to be an authentic self. Somebody told me to change parties in 2014 because the political winds were blowing a certain way, and I said my grandfather would roll over in his grave if I did that. Again, the political winds blow every couple of years this way or that way. And I wanted to be true to myself and who I am and who my roots are. I’m a Democrat, but I’m also a prosecutor, so I’m pretty tough on crime, but I also care about victims, and I care about the accused. You have to. But I am who I am. Most prosecutors are. Most of us are exactly the same. We’re just kind of middle of the road kind of people. We’re fair. Try to be tough but fair, and some go a little bit further on either end, but that’s just the way it is throughout. You have to be responsive. You have to be open. You have to be honest. You have to be accountable. And, that’s what I try to be.
KL: How do you keep your sanity when you deal with the worst in humanity?
ACL: Well, I just had a meeting in my office earlier today, and someone started talking about some horrible case in a home for people who are mentally challenged. And someone committed a crime there, and I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t talk about that in front of me.” Certain things, I just, I don’t want to hear, hurting older people or abusing children.
KL: Everybody’s got their limits.
ACL: I never tried child murderers for a long, long time. And when I lost the 2014 election, I was made the head of Special Victims unit in Baltimore City. And I went back there and I tried five or six child murders. And then I prosecuted a whole bunch of others, so I never had to do it before. But I was like, okay, I’m here. This is a need. These are very important cases. I’m going to do my best on them. But it was not my cup of tea. It’s like you don’t want to try those kinds of cases. Like you said, how do you keep your sanity? Every one of those children, I cried at some point, whether it was when I first opened the file or when I closed the file. There were tears shed for every child because of the enormity of it. Children can be intentionally murdered or murdered through abuse or severe neglect and it’s shocking what people will do. Like some of the child murders where the child was accidentally hurt and then nobody did anything about it, right? This child needs to go to the hospital, and you chose not to take that, or the child overdosed and you knew the child picked up your drugs and you did nothing about it. Were scalded or your boyfriend beat up your baby and you look the other way and did nothing. So that’s still murder in your household, if your child is beaten up in front of you. And if you just do nothing about it, you are just as guilty as the abuser. So that was hard. I’m not trying those cases right now so that four years of my life—put that aside. But that’s the only stuff that really, really gets to me.
KL: But does it affect your viewpoint on humanity basically? Because like I said, you’ve seen the worst.
ACL: I am more disappointed in the everyday people and their petty shenanigans than criminals, you know what I mean?
KL: Do you learn to compartmentalize? You know, you’ve got to leave that at work.
ACL: What bothers me more than prosecuting a horrific case is doing nothing about it, or being unable to do something about it. That’s the stuff that would drive me crazy. Or someone getting away with it. So that’s the stuff that keeps me up at night. How do you prevent that injustice, right? That’s what motivates me. It doesn’t bother me—the horrible stuff. I don’t know why. It motivates me to work harder. Really, it does. But don’t show me any animals hurt in a video. Or don’t tell me about older people being abused because I can’t stand that.
KL: I guess we all have our pressure points or whatever it’s called.
ACL: Yeah, I hate cruelty. I can’t stand cruelty. That’s one thing that gets to me. And I’ve had some cases where someone was murdered. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and just in the cruelest of ways. And it’s just so unfair. That gets to me in a way of “I got to fix this.” I feel like I represent the deceased. The family’s there, and I’m doing the work for them, but I really feel like I’m the deceased person. The victim. That’s who I’m thinking about, right? Like, I was their spokesperson.
KL: So, it’s the victims that really motivate you?
ACL: Absolutely.
KL: I’m going to end with one more question. What is it you would like people to know about you that you don’t think they know?
ACL: That I am a down-to-earth person, not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Well, I’m from Laurel, too. And sometimes people maybe judge you as you get older and now, I have a nice house and a nice family and a nice car or whatever. I have some of the trappings of success now. But it’s all achievable. You know, my parents were divorced. My mom worked two jobs. I lived in an apartment my whole childhood. But if you have people who love you and care about you and motivate you and a good education and role model, you can go on and be what you want to be.
[This interview was edited for clarity and space.]
Kevin Leonard is a founding member of the Laurel History Boys and a two-time winner of the Maryland Delaware District of Columbia Press Association Journalism Award.
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