On the heels of the latest landmark case in her career, Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess shifts around papers in her “war room.”

Tables in the office alcove are covered with documents, sticky notes and compact discs — remnants of evidence she used to prove the man who murdered five Capital Gazette employees was sane, as well as the makings of a separate case to convict the leader of a violent prison gang.

Written on a whiteboard are themes she saw as critical in trying the Annapolis mass shooting case, in which the killer is slated for sentencing Tuesday, like revenge and narcissism, and examples of the shooter’s sanity, like bills that he paid regularly.

Next to the board is a collage of photos of Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and

Gerald Fischman, with their first names printed underneath. Leitess pauses.

“That’s who we’re working for,” Leitess says.

Convicting Jarrod Ramos, 41, required becoming an expert on mental health and Maryland’s rarely used insanity law, then wielding it with authority throughout a 12-day trial. It entailed researching case law for two years to rebut legal arguments from a diligent team of public defenders while leading an agency with 140 attorneys and support staff working on hundreds of other cases. It meant telling a widow the gunman taunted her husband before executing him point-blank, so she wouldn’t be blindsided by that testimony.

“She’s ferociously committed and ferociously compassionate,” said Andrea Chamblee, the widow of one of the gunman’s other victims, John McNamara.

Nobody who knows Leitess, 58, is surprised at the outcome.

From her time as a younger prosecutor, she’s taken pride in speaking up for victims of heinous crimes. It’s why she kept prosecuting cases after a surprise election loss, what drives her to keep trying cases despite being state’s attorney, why she started prepping for her next trial days after the Capital Gazette case verdict in July.

“I work for the people who passed away,” Leitess said. “Those are my clients.”

In 1998, that meant Jose E. Trias and Julie N. Gilbert, prominent Washington, D.C., lawyers who were handcuffed, robbed and murdered in their weekend home along the Severn River.

Then-State’s Attorney Frank Weathersbee selected Leitess to retry Scotland Williams in that case after a conviction and death penalty were overturned on appeal. The new trial was the first time prosecutors in Maryland used mitochondrial DNA testing to link a defendant to a crime scene.

Leitess gave the last word. She dismissed the defense’s arguments, which claimed others were culpable, reminding jurors that Williams was caught with the lawyers’ possessions.

“So, some killer out there was so nice they gave Scotland Williams the fruits of this crime and kept nothing for themselves?” she asked the jurors. They found Williams guilty, solidifying Leitess’ reputation as a trial attorney.

“If there was a case with a confession or a video of what’s going on, we wouldn’t bother giving that to Anne. We’d give it to someone else. She liked the challenge,” said William Roessler, a former deputy state’s attorney.

When she started in Anne Arundel in 1990, working misdemeanors in district court, she brought three years of experience as a law clerk and prosecutor in the office of the Baltimore state’s attorney. Within seven years, she was the first woman on the Anne Arundel office’s Violent Crimes Trial Team, which she’d go on to lead around 2007.

After securing in 2012 two convictions in cases stemming from the murder-for-hire of Glen Burnie dentist Dr. Albert Ro, a six-year-old cold case, she got an unexpected promotion. Weathersbee, who served six terms as state’s attorney, retired in 2013. The county’s circuit court judges appointed Leitess to his post. She was the first woman to hold the office in Annapolis.

One of her first tasks was to try Michael Stahlnecker, who gunned down John Patrick Ryan behind a warehouse. The case relied mostly on circumstantial evidence, including the then emerging field of cell tower data.

Circuit Judge Pamela North, who has retired from the bench in Anne Arundel County, presided over that case and the Scotland Williams trial. She said she was impressed by Leitess’ knowledge of the cell records.

“This is the kind of thing you can’t delegate, in my mind,” North continued. The prosecutor has to extract the most important evidence, she said, “so as not to bore the jury out of their mind.”

Unlike some of the other elected prosecutors in Maryland’s largest jurisdictions, Leitess continues to try cases.

“Usually, the state’s attorney is more of a manager or a figurehead. They have so much on their plate running the office,” said veteran defense attorney John Robinson, who was a prosecutor in district court with Leitess. “It’s a testament to her.”

It’s also about leading by example, said retired Circuit Judge Paul Hackner.

“There are certain cases where it’s difficult to say to someone else, ‘You do it,’ ” Hackner said. “The buck stops with her. I think she recognizes that responsibility and she also has the talent to do it.”

Leitess chose to continue prosecuting cases even after a setback in the 2014 election. Leitess, a Democrat, sought to keep the job she’d won by appointment, but lost to Republican Wes Adams.

“I don’t think it was losing the election that was so bad, it was the fact that I would have to leave my job,” Leitess said.

To keep working in court, she moved back to the prosecutor’s office in Baltimore. She led the Special Victims Unit for four years, trying sexual assault and child abuse cases.

“Some defense attorneys tease me ... like, ‘When are you going to come to the other side?’ ” Leitess said. “I say, ‘Never, never.’ I’ll retire first, because I love representing the community and victims of crime.”

Veteran defense attorney Peter O’Neill has seen that commitment in court.

“I’m not going to back down when I’m defending my client and I don’t think she’s going to back down when she’s advocating for the victims and the people of this county,” O’Neill said. “If you have a case against Anne, then you better be prepared.”

Even after prosecuting a mass shooter in the Capital Gazette case, some of her cases involving children in Baltimore are the ones that weigh on Leitess, a mother of three.

“I’ve had baby deaths that have haunted me,” Leitess said.

In 2018, she challenged Adams and won. Among her first actions was entering her appearance in the State of Maryland v. Jarrod Ramos, making it one of the handful of cases she’s taken on, in addition to overseeing a variety of violent crime cases.

Her caseload included defendants who were members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang charged in the murder of John Albert O’Sullivan at the Jessup Correctional Institute.

A mistrial had been declared in the trial of the two members who stabbed and slashed O’Sullivan more than 50 times. After Leitess took over the case, she secured second-degree murder convictions.

At the trial, the state’s attorney told jurors that people who killed in Anne Arundel County needed to be held accountable, regardless of whether the victim was an inmate or a gang member, as O’Sullivan was alleged to be.

“They had a choice,” she told jurors. “To kill or not kill.”

A month after the verdict in the Capital Gazette case, Leitess began picking a jury for the trial of Joseph Leissler, the gang’s leader in Maryland, who allegedly ordered the hit on O’Sullivan. Leissler took the stand in his own defense; under Leitess’ questioning, he acknowledged ordering the deaths of other inmates. Leissler was convicted on all counts.

Though she has not filed yet to run, Leitess, who made about $197,700 in fiscal year 2021, is determined to be reelected in 2022, she said.

In the meantime, her office faces another challenging case, one that’s being closely observed by supporters of police reform. Gwynne Tavel, an Annapolis Police Department corporal, was charged in February with misconduct in office for allegedly failing to investigate sexual assault cases and hiding case files.

“She’s got a mixed record,” said Carl Snowden, convener of the county’s Caucus of African American Leaders. He said he wants Leitess’ office to do more to hold accountable officers who are accused of not doing their jobs, like Tavel, and those who lie or use excessive force.

Assistant State’s Attorney Katherine Smeltzer worked under Leitess in Baltimore, and moved to Anne Arundel County when Leitess returned to office in 2018. She credited Leitess’ leadership for convincing her to continue her career.

“She never forgot where she came from,” Smeltzer said. “She’s a prosecutor. She was in the trenches with us. She took cases, she took challenging cases. And she still does.”

In her closing argument for the Capital Gazette case, Leitess laid out examples of the shooter’s sanity, drawing from notes on her whiteboard, passionately discredited the defense’s key expert witness and broke down the insanity law to its simplest form. She explained what a staggering tragedy Ramos caused.

“She was driven by the story she thought deserved to be told, the story of these five hardworking people at their office one day whose lives were stolen from them,” Chamblee said. “In that sense, I could see that she was speaking up for them.”

Leitess gave the jury an opportunity to end the gunman’s “narcissist’s journey,” as she put it, by finding him criminally responsible.

Within two hours, the jury heeded her advice. Relatives of Fischman, Hiaasen, McNamara, Smith and Winters filed out of the courtroom and formed a semicircle around Leitess. They clapped and thanked her.

Leitess’ eyes welled up.