Eight is the magic number for the Toombs Judicial Circuit.
District Attorney William “Bill” Doupe´ recently hired two more assistant district attorneys to bring his assistants, who along with a chief assistant attorney and a circuit investigator, make eight people in his office to dispense justice in Glascock, Lincoln, McDuffie, Taliaferro, Warren and Wilkes counties.
Benjamin Gephardt and Graham Hall are the most recent additions to the circuit, and McDuffie County Probate Judge Valerie Burley swore both in on Feb. 15 and March 1, respectively. They join Deshala Dixon and Seterria Brodnex who started in the circuit in January.
Gephardt was most recently special assistant with the district attorney’s office in the Cobb County Judicial Circuit.
“I was with the trial division with a team assigned to a specific court and a specific judge,” Gephardt said.
He received a law degree from Mercer University and said early on that he knew criminal practice was his forte. He was impressed by the way the prosecutor handled the case in which he was a victim of a crime in Washington, D.C. “A family friend also let me shadow him, and I saw what criminal practice was like before law school. It cemented my interest in that practice area,” Gephardt said.
Hall most recently worked with regulatory compliance for CarMax Auto Finance in Kennesaw.
He received a law degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law. He said it is his desire to enter politics one day.
Hall said the assistant district attorney position gave him the opportunity to switch to criminal law.
“I will be rotating around for a while,” he said. “Since I am new to criminal law, I am trying to learn as much as possible and get better everyday,” he said.
Hall said he became an attorney because of his interest in politics. “I have always been passionate about government and history. The law is a melting pot of those areas,” he said, adding that he is enthusiastic, loves to learn and is never bored. He spent his high school years in Beaufort, South Carolina, as his father served in the Air Force.
To read the entire article in The McDuffie Progress, click HERE.