acknowledge the family will never be able to collect any part of it because dorsey is in prison and the other two can never afford to pay it. during dorsey s murder trial, the governor signed a special exception allowing phyllis brown to collect $75,000 in law enforcement widows benefits. that is all the family has ever received. all that public service after a case like this, it s time to try something else. former d.a., j. tom morgan is now in private practice. the case aged all of us because from the moment derwin was assassinated until dorsey was convicted, that was two long years, we lived and breathed that case every day. and morgan got a chilling wake-up call, himself, when he later learned that dorsey planned to kill him next. dorsey wanted me assassinated because of the investigation
dosy dorsey s purported sexual misconduct, cash for conduct, bribery scheme and the personal use of his inmates and deputies. dorsey continued to defend himself. the only thing i can say to you and the world is that sidney dorsey is innocent of all of these accusations. there is no corruption in the dekalb county sheriff s office. those accusations are completely and totally false. and brown continued to plan for change. his main concern was cleaning up the jail, making sure that the programs that were in place were actually going to benefit the people that they were designed to serve. brown s best friend and former partner, robert crowder, agreed to be h c duty. he began to make change by sending out dismissal letters of people he were not going to offer jobs to beginning the first of the year. brown wanted to demote or fire 38 people.
it. and it was just holy smokes, how did that happen? and the jury could not wrap themselves around understanding why these people would do such a horrible act. nor could the jury believe patrick cuffy, an admitted liar, or find a clear motive for the murder. cuffy s story deserved skepticism anyway because he conveniently flipped on sid dorsey when he got into trouble. how could anyone kill a sheriff-elect for nothing more than a promotion in a sheriff s department? now the four men accused of carrying out the assassination were free to walk the streets. only cuffy would serve less than a year on a reduced charge stemming from the shootout at his home. losing that first trial was very difficult. we knew they were guilty. but once that was over with, we knew we still had a job to do and that was to convict mr. dorsey. the murder trial of sidney dorsey began in june in a small
and he was an appealing candidate against dorsey, who by then had off-put a lot of people. and had sort of an imperialistic approach to being sheriff. as a cop, dorsey was known for working the wayne williams atlanta missing and murdered children s cases in the 1980s. but the sheriff s office was a different kind of place. the sheriff s office was what dorsey made of it. he turned it into a little fife dom fifedom for himself. there were things going on in that sheriff s department that those of us in law enforcement in the district attorney s office had no idea about. as the campaign for sheriff heated up in the summer of 2000, pictures were leaked to the press that seemed to show that dorsey was lawless, himself. the photos showed he d bus criminals from his dekalb county jail to do work on his home. they worked for dorsey s wife, sherry, an elected member of the atlanta city council.
now, the irony of all of this is that there s a shootout at cuffy s house and cuffy is being prosecuted for something totally unrelated to the murder and that s when he wants to come talk to us. j. tom morgan went in the back room. cuffy went into the back room. cuffy s attorney went into the back room. and the hearing was delayed. and several hours later, cuffy flipped. prosecutors agreed not to charge cuffy and another former deputy sheriff, paul skyers, in return for their testimony against dorsey and two others. mr. dorsey, did you have anything to do with this? the day after cuffy flipped, former sheriff sidney dorsey was handcuffed and taken by officers armed with machine guns to this same jail he once ran. did you do it? did you do it? sidney dorsey was now charged with masterminding and directing four of his deputies to murder sheriff-elect, derwin brown. i m innocent. what to you say to the charges? coming up