Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System

by Nancy Grace

  M O N E Y T A L K S . . .

  J U S T I C E W A L K S

  The defense frequently and easily outspends the state—especially in high-profile cases. I have no problem with a high-priced defense, as long as a jury is not tricked into an acquittal. The defense likely outspent the state in the Jayson Williams trial as well as in the O. J. Simpson “trial of the century.” Here’s a little-known fact: Often when defendants don’t have the money to outspend the state, the defense can get public funds by petitioning the court for money to compensate experts. We the taxpayers pay for that. Our system guarantees a free lawyer if a defendant cannot pay for one, and at trial that is extended to include defense investigators and experts as well. Keep in mind that when the trial is over, if it ends in a conviction, the taxpayer also pays for the lawyers on appeal; and in some cases appeals go on for ten to fifteen years and wind their way all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  We have recently passed the fortieth anniversary of the landmark O B J E C T I O N !

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  case that made it possible for the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, the Menendez brothers, the D.C. snipers, and countless others to rack up exorbitant costs at trial and hand the taxpayers the bill. Before the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, indigent defendants who were accused of crimes could be convicted and sent to jail without the benefit of a lawyer. The Supreme Court reformed that practice in 1963, ruling that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to counsel and to equal protection under the law apply to poor and rich alike.

  The kicker is that we, the taxpayers, foot the bill for both the local public defenders appointed to criminal cases and private, high-priced defense lawyers, as well as their posse of consultants, experts, and investigators. In California, David Westerfield and killer brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez hired private lawyers initially. But when the well runs dry, as it did in those cases, the public pays. The rationale is that defendants who have built up a relationship with a specific attorney can likely keep the attorney even if they cannot afford to because there’s always us—people like my parents, who worked all their lives—to foot the bill.

  The costs incurred with these cases are immense. Lawyers’ fees in capital cases range from $500,000 to $1 million. In the Menendez case, Leslie Abramson represented the defendants in their first trial, which ended with a hung jury. At retrial, when the two had run through all their dead parents’ money, the judge appointed the high-paid lawyer to the case because she knew the case thoroughly. The same thing happened with Westerfield’s defense. Renowned lawyers Steven Feldman and Robert Boyce represented him at trial for huge fees. They later advised the court that they had used up all their client’s money, including nearly $500,000 realized from the sale of his house. The judge booted them from the case in favor of cheaper counsel. An appellate court later reversed that decision, and the much more expensive team was reinstated. Check your tax bill for the damage.

  The defense of the Washington, D.C., sniper John Allen Muhammad and teenage gunman Lee Boyd Malvo cost Virginia taxpayers more than $1 million. The defense bill for Muhammad was up to $900,000 as 1 5 0

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  of spring 2004. The cost of their appeals will drive the tab even higher.

  Virginia doesn’t put a cap on lawyers’ fees in capital cases, where their hourly rate hovers around $150 per hour. Taxpayers paid nearly $60,000 on expert witnesses for Malvo alone. The total for his defense as of May 2004: $1,021,337. And before you choke on the $4 million defense we provided for Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, compare it to the outrageous $13.8 million bill we paid for the defense of his confederate, convicted mass murderer Timothy McVeigh.

  Consider this tidbit from our legal system’s strange but frighteningly true files: North Carolina residents picked up part of the tab for the defense of Rae Carruth during his trial on the murder-for-hire case of his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams. The cost of paying defense attorneys David Rudolph and Christopher Fialko proved too much for the wide receiver who was paid a reported $40,000 a game. The state picked up the slack. Rudolph justified the state-funded end run around justice at the time by saying, “The only important thing is that Rae Carruth is receiving a competent, caring defense.”

  Under North Carolina law, defendants in capital (death-penalty) cases have the right to two publicly funded attorneys who are supposed to be paid $85 an hour, but the final compensation is up to the trial judge. In high-profile cases like Carruth’s, where the attorneys are savvy and aggressive, judges will grant extra money for experts and even jury consultants. Residents wound up paying more than $100,000

  for Carruth, who was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder but walked on the first-degree murder charge. I wonder who will pay for the care and feeding of his son, who was born with cerebral palsy because of the hit he ordered on his baby’s mother?

  Now consider this: How did a California fertilizer salesman pay for attorney-to-the-stars Mark Geragos’s services? It’s a mystery. At the time of his arrest, Scott Peterson stated he could not afford a lawyer, and the court appointed a public defender. In an interview with People magazine, the Petersons refused to comment on what they were paying Geragos to defend their son, but did say he wasn’t doing it pro bono.

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  Estimates put his fee at $1 million. Forensic expert Henry Lee and medical expert Cyril Wecht, who are also part of Team Peterson, don’t come cheap either. Reports indicated that many members of the Peterson family (including Scott’s siblings) have taken out second mortgages on their homes and run through a good chunk of their savings—and that was before the trial even started!

  As discussed in an earlier chapter, I strongly suspect the state footed at least part of the bill. The alternative would have been to appoint a new, court-appointed legal team midway through trial, like the local public defenders who had the case to begin with. This is tantamount to starting over from square one. You can almost guarantee that it would be argued that such a move would slow down the trial and put Peterson at a disadvantage, having a new lawyer unfamiliar with the case now trying to play catch-up. Both are true. Although a public-defender-based team would not incur legal fees, as PDs are already paid a salary by the state, it is highly likely the court would have left Geragos on the case at a reduced fee. On appeal, the Peterson tab continues to mount.

  Y O U R T A X D O L L A R S A T W O R K

  Another misconception about “the power of the state” is the myth that the government—the evil empire—is taking in billions and billions of dollars in taxes that somehow go to help in convicting innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit. That’s simply ridiculous! I’ve often wondered what happens to all the money I’ve been paying in taxes all these years. What I see is Congress spending millions and millions of dollars on an outrageous list of projects that are nothing more than political boondoggles.

  As I write this, I have just learned that Oregon prisoners now have flat-screen TVs to enjoy in the privacy of their own jail cells! Although the Oregon State Correctional Institution’s administrator, Randy Geer, 1 5 2

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  contends that the televisions are “not a luxury item,” the fact is, the Salem prisoners now get to kick back on their bunks and enjoy brand-new flat-screen TVs that most of us on the outside don’t have. The seven-inch sets are copies of flat-screen models in cars and airplanes.

  The inmates contribute to the cost of the sets from money they’ve earned while working in prison, but related costs are all paid for by the taxpayer. Oregon is not alone in making prisoners feel at home behind bars. Fifteen other states allow in-cell televisions.

  Still a skeptic? When I think of all the rehabilitation programs, probation officers, and investigators currently needed around the country, the following is even more disturbing. Take a look at this short list of the government’s pork project initiated after 2001. These are your tax dollars at work:
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br />   $50 million to build an indoor rain forest in Iowa $1.5 million for a statue of the Roman god Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama

  $489,000 for swine-waste management in North Carolina $273,000 to help Missouri combat “Goth culture”

  $50,000 for a tattoo-removal program in California $26,000 to study how thoroughly Americans rinse their dishes

  $4,572 given to Las Vegas Helicopters, a company that performs airborne weddings officiated by Elvis Presley impersonators as part of a post–September 11, 2001, aid-to-airlines package

  Those are just a few examples of the government’s penchant to spend money on just about everything—except the justice system.

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  These are funds that could be used to staff hotlines, hire victims’ counselors, and add desperately needed child-welfare workers, prosecutors, investigators, public defenders, or additional state court judges. The search for justice is shortchanged once again.

  S L A V E W A G E S

  Cops and prosecutors are underpaid and overworked. I know that many people in many walks of life can make the same claim, but it strikes me that nobody is calling most of them out onto the street at 3:00

  A.M. to stop a gunfight, a drug deal, or a domestic dispute. I can’t even count the number of times police officers came in on their free time to go out with me to take crime-scene photos and help me work cases.

  When the bank alarm goes off down the block, everybody in the diner doesn’t look at each other to hop in their cars and run over and shoot the robbers—we all look to the cops. When our kids go missing or the house is burgled or the car is stolen, they answer the call. And the fact that they live on such low pay for such dangerous and important work is shocking.

  It’s much the same for prosecutors. In my case, coming off Law Review, I started out at $31,000 and after ten years of hard litigation, never got past $50,000. After prosecuting all day, I held down two different night jobs to make ends meet. I taught law classes at a downtown university in Atlanta, one in the law school and one in the undergradu-ate school. Many prosecutors have second jobs because state and federal salaries are so low. Lawyers in private practice make double or even triple what prosecutors do. I’m not complaining—I continued to prosecute because it was what I wanted to do and why I had gone to law school in the first place.

  I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, though. I can still remember coming home after class at nearly 10:00 P.M. and cutting my grass because I couldn’t afford a lawn service to do it. The neighbors were so good; they 1 5 4

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  never complained. I wondered—and still wonder—how cops do it.

  They have families to feed and second jobs to work through the night after they finish their shifts.

  Low pay is a problem on the federal level also, to the extent that it’s actually causing a defection within the FBI. It also raises the risk of corruption and espionage. FBI officials have been quoted as saying high debt resulting from low pay could make agents more vulnerable to offers of spying on the United States for cash. Taking the oath of public service is more like taking a vow of poverty.

  According to an April 2004 report in USA Today, the base salary for new FBI agents is about $39,000. Houston cops start at $28,000.

  Chicago weighs in at $37,000, and in the capital of the world, New York City, rookies start at $44,000. Okay, Officers, rush out of the police station and stop a bullet for that!

  Aside from rudimentary cost-of-living raises, salaries have not changed appreciably for the last decade. Think about it: Within that short time span, two U.S. counterintelligence agents were convicted of selling secrets to the Russians. Earl Pitts and Robert Hanssen both went down in history as traitors, making money off the sale of U.S. security secrets. Those are the two we know of.

  Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. Prosecutors, unlike their silk-stocking opponents on the other side of the courtroom, very often do not have an army of flunkies and assistants. To prepare for a morning calendar call of, say, a hundred cases, I would sit in my office and dig through five or six boxes sent from the district attorney’s office trying to find the eighty files I needed for the next day’s arraignment.

  Without fail they’d be in the wrong offices or lost in the filing room.

  Hours would be spent just gathering cases for a calendar call—much less preparing for trial. There were no secretaries, no assistants, no paralegals. I wish I had a nickel for every time I had to go to the crime lab to drop something off or pick something up. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for all the days I had to drive to the police station, where I’d be O B J E C T I O N !

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  hassled about where I parked when I was there to pick up fingerprint cards or a police report or simply to drop off a subpoena.

  I can’t even guess how many times I would go to the local 7-Eleven to get two or three packs of film for my Polaroid camera. It would kill me, because at the time they were $8 a pack. I needed the film to take additional crime-scene photos to show to the jury the next day. If something came up during the trial that I wanted the jury to see, I would drive over to take pictures and tromp around in my high heels getting whatever I could. I kept my camera in the backseat of my car until it was stolen (twice) during a trial. Thieves busted out the back window of my Honda to get the cameras or the car phone (they were installed then), and the office threatened not to give me another one. I started locking it in the trunk when I went to scenes.

  I often bought my own supplies to use for visual aids at trial and never turned in my receipts because I was convinced that the district attorney would think I’d been extravagant in buying markers and artist’s poster board—the big, thick kind a jury could see from a distance. Before closing arguments in a case, I would go to a local crafts store to pick up what I needed, then stay up half the night, crouched on the floor, listing summation points in blue marker on the boards from my trial notes. I can still hear them squeaking across the matte white surface. I’ll never forget the sharp smell of the ink that always seemed to wind up all over the sides of my palms. That was the extent of the high-tech razzle-dazzle I used to wow juries.

  My state-of-the-art visuals threatened to break the bank in State v.

  David Lindsey Cook, in which the defendant was accused of murdering his wife. For months before trial, I had to ambush his friends and colleagues in parking lots all over town to personally hand them a subpoena duces tecum—a demand for documents. Those documents were the defendant’s handwritten letters, composed behind bars, detailing how he planned to trick the system by acting crazy to get an insanity verdict. Cook first claimed that his wife’s death was suicide and then 1 5 6

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  argued that if he had committed murder, he’d been insane at the time.

  His friends and relatives begrudgingly handed over the letters that outlined his plan. I had the letters blown up at a local Kinko’s to show them in enlarged detail to the jury. That cost money I didn’t have at the time and I knew the D.A.’s office didn’t have it in the budget, so I had no choice—I charged it!

  F O R T H E L O V E O F M O N E Y

  In 1987, in the first major drug case I tried, I was up against Bob Fierer, ironically pronounced “fear.” He was by far the slickest defense attorney in Atlanta. This wasn’t a case where the accused was a street-corner hustler or a drifter nailed at a traffic stop with a joint in his ashtray. This case involved a huge chunk of pure, uncut cocaine worth millions on the street.

  I remember reading the file and driving by the luxury high-rise where the drugs had been discovered. I wanted to see what I could before the first calendar call on the case. The building was in Buckhead—one of the swankiest parts of Atlanta, home of multimillionaires, an area where old money is mixed with that of rich up-and-comers. The next morning, I got to court early. The defendant had managed to get out of jail on a huge bond before I was assigned the case. I naturally woul
d have opposed bond, with such a large amount of uncut cocaine involved. What that indicated to me was that the defendant, Charles Ehrlich, also known as

  “Charlie Tuna,” was no amateur but a major drug distributor in the city.

  That morning in court, though, it was the lawyer himself who bowled me over.

  For the first time in my practice of law, I was acutely aware that I was the underdog. Robert Fierer was wearing a suit that had to have cost $4,000. His shoes were polished Italian leather, his cuff links had diamonds in them. Even his hair was perfect—I found out later he got it highlighted every three weeks like clockwork (while I was still using bleach from the drugstore). I even noticed his nails, which were, of O B J E C T I O N !

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  course, perfectly buffed. His briefcase had that dull glow of expensive leather. My files were organized in a plastic mail carrier’s box with handles on either side that I’d found in the hall of the courthouse. That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks—I was outgunned.

  I was a novice prosecutor, and at the time I didn’t know a thing about organized crime. Ehrlich was clearly a player of some sort in a drug cartel, serving as the distribution hub in that part of Atlanta.

  Amazingly, his bust came about by accident. Ehrlich had received a FedExed brick of pure, uncut, white cocaine in the lobby of his apartment building. When it was delivered, the doorman signed for the package on behalf of the tenant. As I worked with that doorman (who, I quickly learned, was not, let me say, afraid of a cocktail) during one of our many interviews, he explained how he discovered the contents of the package. He told me that ordinarily he never looked in people’s packages, because he could lose his job over such a violation. On the night Ehrlich’s box was dropped off, the edge of the package was already torn open, and the doorman could clearly see inside. The brick was obvious, so he called the cops. When the police searched “Charlie Tuna’s” apartment, things got even worse. They discovered that the place was wired, so he’d know if someone got in. Cops found a silencer in the closet. Who needs a silencer? That did it. This was a bad guy, and he had to be stopped from poisoning the streets of the city.