Maricopa County, Arizona County Attorney Bill Montgomery has sought the death penalty so frequently that the county has run up millions of dollars in defense costs and run out of defense lawyers qualified to handle new capitally-charged cases. The Arizona Republic reports that, with 65 active death-penalty cases and more new capital cases charged than the 35 that have been resolved since July 1, 2014, the county ran out of the specialized lawyers needed to defend the cases in January of this year. Yet despite the county’s high rate of seeking the death penalty, the number of death sentences imposed in the county is falling. With 81 people on death row as of January 1, 2013, Maricopa County ranked fourth among all U.S. counties in the number of death-row prisoners. According to a 2016 Fair Punishment Project report, Maricopa County imposed 28 death sentences between 2010 and 2015, making it one of only 16 counties to have imposed as many as 10 death sentences over that period. However, only six of the cases resolved since July 1, 2014, have resulted in death sentences. In addition to burdening the county’s defense services, the County Attorney’s broad pursuit of the death penalty has placed a significant financial strain on the county. An audit commissioned by the Office of Public Defense Services, one of the agencies that provides representation for capital defendants, found that capital murder cases cost eight to 40 times more than first-degree murder cases in which the death penalty is not sought. The audit found that non-capital murder trials cost about $27,000 to defend, whereas capital cases—which require two defense attorneys, an investigator, and a mitigation specialist—cost from $213,000 to $1 million, depending on the outcome. Capital cases ending in a plea to a lesser offense or sentence cost about $213,000, the audit said; more than the cost of a non-capital case taken to trial. Death penalty trials resulting in life sentences cost $580,000, and those that ended with a death sentence cost $1 million, not including federal appeals. John Canby, an attorney for the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office, summarized the situation: “For a variety of reasons it appears that juries in Maricopa County are less willing to return death verdicts in trials for first-degree murder than they once were. Nevertheless, it seems that the County Attorney’s Office is still willing to seek death sentences in cases with only a remote possibility of a death verdict. That practice costs the taxpayers of Maricopa County a lot of money because the court is required to appoint capital-qualified attorneys to those cases, even if the possibility of a death sentence is in fact very remote.”
(M. Kiefer, “Maricopa County runs out of death-penalty defense attorneys,” Arizona Republic, March 26, 2017.) See Costs and Representation.
