Three Cuyahoga County Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys were honored by their peers for exemplary work at the annual meeting of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association in Columbus.
Anna Faraglia received the OPAA's highest award to a non-elected prosecutor -- Outstanding Assistant Prosecutor for the State of Ohio.
Matthew Meyer and Brian Radigan were recognized as Meritorious Assistant Prosecutors.
Faraglia joined the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office in the fall of 1997, and has handled many of the office's most sensitive and important cases involving violence against woman and children.
She helped investigate sexual-abuse allegations against Catholic priests, led the successful murder prosecution of Dr. Yazeed Essa and was part of the team preparing the case against Ariel Castro last summer. In November, she led the prosecution team that won an aggravated murder conviction of Camilla Terry for killing her three-year-old son.
Meyer became an Assistant County Prosecutor in 2002. He was also involved in the Essa trial, travelling overseas to gather evidence and leading the nearly two-year extradition battle to bring him back to Cuyahoga County for trial.
Experienced in both trial and appellate work, Meyer now serves as Supervising Attorney of the office's Public Corruption Unit and most recently obtained bribery convictions against two local attorneys: G. Timothy Marshall and Marc Doumbas.
Radigan was hired as an assistant county prosecutor in 2006 and has been assigned to the Major Trial Unit since 2010.
In 2009, as a special prosecutor for Lorain County, he helped win a guilty plea to theft in office charges from the county's chief deputy recorder. Last month, he obtained a guilty verdict from a jury in the murder trial of Andrey Bridges, who killed a transgender woman in Olmsted Falls.
For more than a year in 2011 and 2012, Faraglia, Meyer and Radigan were special prosecutors for Summit County, prosecuting defendant Denny Ross for the 1999 murder of Hannah Hill. A jury convicted Ross on October 5, 2012, after a nine-week trial.
"Assistant prosecutors Anna Faraglia, Matthew Meyer and Brian Radigan are so deserving of this recognition," said Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh. "Retrying Denny Ross for the brutal murder of Hannah Hill was no small feat. Their work ethic and dedication to another county's case was truly impressive."
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said he was proud to see OPAA recognize Faraglia, Meyer and Radigan for their outsanding work. He added, "Not only is this a great individual honor for them, it is reflective of the dedicated, hardworking public servants in the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office."
