Clayton County District Attorney Jewel Scott entered office in 2004 with almost no criminal law experience.

Nearly four years later, she has delivered opening statements in two high-profile child murder trials, but generally stuck to her belief that being district attorney means desk work and community outreach.

"I see my job as stabilizing the office and being out in the community as much as I can be," she said. "I have to be accessible. ... I have competent, efficient people to handle the courtroom."

Two lawyers are hoping to replace Scott, 47, in the race for Clayton district attorney: Attorney Herbert Adams Jr., 48, of Riverdale, and Clayton Juvenile Court Judge Tracy Graham Lawson, 50, of Jonesboro.

Lawson says she does not see the office as being administrative. "District attorneys have to lead by example. I love to try cases and I'm good at it," she said.

Lawson says her conviction rate as a Clayton assistant district attorney for more than 10 years was nearly 90 percent and, as a judge overseeing more than 1,800 trials in a dozen years, she has never been reversed on appeal. Lawson started out in public service as a police officer and firefighter in Durham, N.C., before earning her law degree.

Scott's previous experience includes working as a staff attorney for the Office of Legal Affairs in New York City and in private practice in Jamaica. She touts a 100 percent murder conviction rate in Clayton and says her strengths are new programs such as mentoring for at-risk minority youths and deferred prosecution, reducing child deaths and closing massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution.

Lawson, however, says Scott is "simply not doing her job and the citizens are suffering."

"There have been sloppy errors and the case backlog is high," Lawson said.

Scott does not dispute a backlog but she blames Clayton commissioners for failing to increase her office's budget to cover staff to handle the cases.

In two recently publicized cases, Scott, in a misunderstanding over the time of death, dropped murder charges against a man who confessed to beating his girlfriend's baby. Scott also missed a deadline to have a teenage murder suspect's case indicted in Superior Court, throwing it back to Juvenile Court, where he faces a more lenient sentence.

After the mothers of both victims took their stories to the media, Scott re-indicted the first case and has appealed the decision in the second.

Opponent Adams sees Scott and her husband, Headley "Lee" Scott Jr., 59, who is running for county commission chairman, as double threats, though Jewel Scott has rejected suggestions that her husband takes an active role in her daily decisions.

Adams served two years as an assistant district attorney in DeKalb County, unsuccessfully tried to get appointed district attorney there, and has served as a part-time municipal judge in DeKalb and Forest Park.

He garnered some negative publicity in 2004 when he served as public defender to the accused killer of a mother and child. Gwinnett District Attorney Danny Porter wanted Adams indicted for taking $80,000 for representing Wesley Harris. Ruling that Adams was unprepared for trial, a judge ordered a mistrial and Harris got a replacement attorney. After a second trial, Harris, who faced the death penalty, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"People know that's in the past," Adams said. "... What happened is not representative of a total body of work."