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A 25-Year Journey to State's Attorney
Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy, left, talks with a friend, David G. Mulquin, in Rockville. McCarthy has streamlined some midlevel jobs and appointed two more prosecutors to work solely on gang cases.
(Photos By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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Not only did McCarthy survive the transition, he remained one of the top three deputies. The county's public defender and private defense attorneys, who regularly clash with him in court, say he is widely respected.
When he announced his candidacy last spring, the stakes for McCarthy were high.
"If I lost, I lost my career," he said.
McCarthy was born in Jersey City and was the oldest of six children. He grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. His next-door neighbors were a roofer and a truck driver.
"That background has given me insight," he told his staff during the meeting last week. "We see in this job more people with those backgrounds than the backgrounds most of you come from."
McCarthy moved to Washington in 1970 to attend Catholic University on a baseball scholarship and later got a job teaching at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Wheaton. While teaching, he attended the University of Baltimore's law school at night. He graduated in 1979 and was briefly a defense attorney, a prosecutor in Prince George's and a public defender in Montgomery before arriving at the Montgomery office.
He rose through the ranks quickly, earning a reputation as a shrewd and vigorous lawyer who thrived in jury trials.
"Juries love him," said Paul F. Kemp, a partner at Venable LLP and a past president of the county bar association. "I think he takes the opportunity of a jury trial to teach the jury as opposed to argue with them."
In 1992, he prosecuted a landmark case in which a man was convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of his wife despite the fact that her body was never found. It was one of the first "no body" convictions in the country and the first murder conviction in Maryland in which DNA was used, McCarthy said.
Shortly afterward, brain cancer was diagnosed in McCarthy's wife. The youngest of their four children was a toddler, and Jeanette McCarthy's prognosis was bleak.
"I just remember him handling it so well," said his daughter, Meaghan, 23. "Under this horrible situation, he always held us together."
His wife recovered.
