A Death in Georgia

The February 4th issue of the New Yorker has a great piece of writing by author and journalist Jeffrey Toobin entitled Death In Georgia. The article focuses on the Brian Nichols case which has effectively bankrupted the Georgia Public Defenders:

...The 2003 reform in Georgia established a comparatively generous, open-ended compensation system for defense lawyers in capital cases. By contrast, Florida caps legal fees in death-penalty cases at fifteen thousand dollars, and South Carolina and Oklahoma allocate twenty-five thousand. Expenses for experts, however, often push the total cost in those states to six figures; in Georgia the average death-penalty defense costs about three hundred thousand dollars, and so it is not surprising that a case as complicated as Nichols’s has cost a great deal more.

The Nichols case is an extraordinary example of the potential costs of capital punishment cases.

Indiana has an agency for reimbursement of public defenders similar to the Georgia Public Defenders: the Indiana Public Defender Commission. Without a thorough comparison of the Georgia and Indiana reimbursement agencies, it's difficult to speculate how a Nichols-like case would play out here in Indiana but it can safely be said that a bill of $1.2 million -the current Nichols case tab- would be an unprecedented stress on an agency that spent $844,700 on all 2006-2007 capital cases.