Orange-Chatham district attorney to retire. This person wants to replace him in 2022.
Orange-Chatham District Attorney Jim Woodall plans to retire when his term expires in 2022, he announced this week.
A potential successor launched his election campaign Wednesday.
Woodall was appointed interim district attorney for N.C. District 18 in 2005 and was first elected to the office in 2006. He was a private attorney handling civil and criminal cases until he started at the Orange-Chatham District Attorney’s Office in 1990.
He announced Monday he will not seek a fifth term. Although he may return to a professional life in the future, he’s never had the ambition to be a judge or a prosecutor anywhere but in Orange and Chatham counties, he said in an interview Wednesday with The News & Observer.
His high-profile cases: Woodall’s best known cases include the 2008 murder of UNC student body president Eve Carson, and the 2014 murder of UNC professor Feng Liu.
Josh Bailey’s murder in 2008 at the hands of multiple teenage and young defendants, and Chapel Hill teen Adam Sapikowski’s double slaying of his parents in 2005 at their home are two others that stick with him, Woodall said.
Another is the 2002 trial of Dawayne Edwards, who was charged with multiple rapes, sexual offenses, armed robberies and burglaries over several months, he said. Edwards’ sentence of 334 years in prison may have been the longest ever handed down in the district, Woodall said.
“You try to develop a strategy and an ability to work through all those things and not take it home with you and not let it kind of weigh you down, but it does,” Woodall said. “That’s why those kinds of trials and those kinds of cases, they’re stressful, they take just so much effort not just from me — it’s law enforcement, it’s our entire office.”
What he says he’s proud of: Woodall also has led and worked with law enforcement, court officials and community members to implement a number of criminal justice reforms, including policies that help immigrant drivers caught without a driver’s license, bail reform and pre-arrest diversion programs.
That day-to-day work is where the district attorney’s office makes its “most true impact,” Woodall said. He praised his “excellent staff,” noting his office has “several of the best trial lawyers in our district.”
“We’ve given a lot of second chances, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to do that, and we’ve done it with some fair success,” Woodall said. “You don’t always have success, but I really think that’s more impactful than the big cases that I’ve handled, because those things, District Court affects dozens and dozens of people every single day, sometimes hundreds of people every day.”
What he wants to do next: His immediate plan is to move onto a 42-foot Catamaran with his wife, Linda, and sail around for a couple of years. They’ve been planning their getaway for a while, he said.
“We’ll probably start in the Bahamas, time in the Caribbean, and then if things go well, and we feel this ambitious, we might attempt to take the boat to Australia,” Woodall said.
Who wants to succeed him: On Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Jeff Nieman announced that he will run for Woodall’s seat in the 2022 election. The Orange County native lives in Chapel Hill and has been assistant district attorney for 15 years.
Woodall is “a great mentor and quite simply one of the best trial lawyers NC has ever known,” Nieman said in a post to Twitter this week. He is running to replace his mentor, Neiman said in a news release, “to create positive change in the criminal justice system” and build “a model of community-oriented justice.”
Woodall said he’s not backing any particular candidate, but he looks forward to seeing if others in his office enter the race.
This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 1:44 PM.
