SEARCY -- The walls in Prosecuting Attorney Chris Raff's small office are lined with certificates, pictures and newspaper front pages headlining some of his biggest -- and most sobering -- court cases.
He reaches into a notebook and pulls out a picture of a little girl with blood streaming down her head.
"Please don't hurt my momma," someone typed beneath the picture of Lacey Phillips, 11.
"I am going to hurt you," the assailant replied, according to Lacey's testimony during the 1996 trial of Jack Jones Jr., who was convicted of raping and murdering Lacey's mother, Mary Phillips, 35, of Bradford at her office in 1995.
Even as Raff, Arkansas' longest-serving prosecuting attorney, plans to leave the job after more than three decades at year's end, he still carries the memories of the early June morning when police found Lacey, beaten so severely that they thought she was dead -- until an officer began taking pictures and she moved.
Lacey has since recovered from a fractured skull and is doing well, Raff said.
Today, the man convicted in the Phillips case, Jones, sits on death row at the Varner Supermax Unit.
He is one of four defendants for whom Raff sought the death penalty. Each time, jurors concurred with that sentencing request. Jones is the only one of the four yet to be executed.
"I don't think you take the death penalty lightly," Raff said.
In addition to meeting legal requirements, he said he always "tried to make a decision as to whether [a defendant] would kill again if given the chance." He also considered the nature of the crime: Some were just "so horrible," he recalled.
Raff, 63, began working as White County's chief deputy prosecutor in 1979 and became the elected prosecutor for the district, which then covered White, Lonoke and Prairie counties, in 1983. The 17th Judicial Circuit, since redrawn, now covers White and Prairie counties.
Looking around his office, Raff noted he has much to pack up before January, when one of his longtime deputies, Becky Reed, will take over the job.
"In 36 years of accumulating, there's a lot of memories [to pack] in boxes," he said.
Among the items to be packed up is a newspaper picture of him with his late brother, Gene, who was an elected prosecutor in eastern Arkansas -- "the only time two brothers served as elected prosecutors" in the state, Chris Raff said.
Other photos show him with former Gov. Orval Faubus, former Pulaski County Sheriff Tommy Robinson and a young Bill Clinton.
A police radio scanner plays in the background as he works. Raff explained that he keeps it on because he tries to go to the scenes of homicides and some other major crimes when police learn about them.
"It makes it a lot easier to try the case. If you can picture it in your mind, it makes it easier to describe it to the jury," he said.
One of the highest-profile cases he handled was that of Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed in 1995 for the 1983 kidnapping, rape and murder of Marjorie "Greta" Mason, 22, a nurse at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville.
In a videotaped confession, Fairchild said he helped kidnap Mason in North Little Rock, drove her to an abandoned house near Scott and raped her. But he said he was in Mason's car when he heard the two shots that killed her. He never identified his accomplice.
"When they caught him [on a California-bound bus], he was dressed as a woman" in an attempted disguise, Raff recalled.
Raff said the hardest part of his job is "seeing the impact on victims [and their families], particularly in murder cases where they have lost children, but anytime they have lost a loved one."
"They always wonder why," he said. "There really is no good reason."
But there are good parts, too.
"It's rewarding when victims come to you and say you've given them some closure," Raff said.
He also appreciates it when people he has prosecuted come to him in the years after a case "and say that was the best thing for me.' Or their parents say, 'You've changed his life.'"
Raff, who grew up in Helena, doesn't have many specific plans for his post-prosecutorial days. He and his wife, Vickie, may take a hiking and backpacking trip, but he isn't retiring.
"I'm still going to be a lawyer, do some teaching for district attorneys," he said. "I may even run for judge sometime. I'm not going to rush into anything.
"I'm certainly going to have more free time," he said. "I'm going to go out and do what I want to do."
If he were going to give any advice to those aspiring to be prosecutors, it would be to "play tough but play fair."
As for the best defense attorney he's faced in court, Raff named Little Rock lawyer Jeff Rosenzweig.
"I've never met an attorney who knows as much law as him," Raff said.
"Even though we're on opposite sides ... he's certainly a worthy" opponent -- so good that Raff had Rosenzweig represent him in a case more than a decade ago involving whether prosecutors should be lawyers, as they believed.
Rosenzweig said Raff has done a good job as prosecutor.
"I think he's been generally prudent in the way" he conducts the office, Rosenzweig said. "I don't do that many cases ... in Searcy, but I'm up there on occasion, and his office tries the cases properly.
"I think the fact that he's stayed in office for 30-something years shows that."
State Desk on 12/27/2014