The trial of Brian Nichols for his 26 hours courthouse murder spree has started, and according to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, there is one additional death caused here for which there will be no trial:  The death of Georgia’s newly formulated indigent defense system.

The destruction caused by the Brian Nichols case has gone beyond the four people he killed and beyond the five he carjacked.

It’s also gone beyond the people he assaulted in the hours between his unprecedented escape from the Fulton County Courthouse on a windy Friday morning and his surrender 26 hours later at a Duluth apartment complex.

Those 26 hours three-and-a-half years ago may have been the death-knell of Georgia’s then-newly created system to eliminate inequities in a hodgepodge of indigent defense systems.

The financial —- and political —- drain of the case has crippled and maybe destroyed the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, said Bright and Michael Mears, who previously headed the Public Defender Standards Council, the state agency charged with representing capital defendants like Nichols.

According to the ACJ, the cost of trying Brian Nichols, including compensation for two of the victims of his courthouse killings, has reached $13 million.  There are many hidden costs in a case like this, from the juror expense to the court personnel.  But the cost of paying for lawyers to represent Nichols is the one that has drawn the greatest political attention and ire.  

The political passion surrounding this case cost the original judge dearly, though it was his own fault.  According to the New York Times,

The original judge in the Nichols trial, Hilton M. Fuller Jr., resigned in January after telling a reporter for The New Yorker of Mr. Nichols that “everyone in the world knows he did it.”

Awfully foolish thing to say, but even judges get caught up in the passion of the moment.  Not good judges, mind you, but judges.

The Nichols case is clearly an extreme example, but it’s the extremes that test the system.  If the state wants to try him, to put him to death, then the state has to pay for his defense.  It’s a cause/effect calculus.  The problem is that the public sees the cause as a positive, or at least as a necessary evil.  The effect, on the other hand, is just a total waste of money, the public’s money, because as Judge Fuller said, “everyone in the world knows he did it.” 

Why bankrupt a system to help the guilty?  It strikes most people as a foolish waste of money.  In the current economic environment, it raises the question of whether it’s worth it.  Or more precisely, if it’s anywhere close to worth it, since there are few footing the bill in Georgia who think it’s even a close call.

There is a disconnect in our legal system between cost and benefit, where we have certain obligations that transcend their relative value to society.  It’s really not productive to spend this much on a single defendant, particularly when it risks bankrupting the indigent defense system and thereby impairing the system’s ability to provide an effective defense to all the others who need it and are due it.  If one looks at this from the perspective of allocating scarce resources, it’s foolish indeed.

But the prosecution of Brian Nichols leaves no other option.  The deal has two sides, and the harder and bigger the prosecution, the more expensive and involved the defense.  And so there’s a bill that comes due.

Money is always an object.  There are plenty of people clamoring for it. There are plenty of people who don’t want to spend it.  There are plenty of people who think this is just a total waste of time and their money.  And yet this is the deal if we want to maintain a criminal justice system.  You can’t have a prosecution without a defense.

Perhaps the better solution that complaining about the ridiculous cost of defending Brian Nichols, who “everyone in the world knows [] did it” is to consider the ramifications, social, political and financial, before the State of Georgia decided that it had to go for broke on this case.  And indeed, broke may well be what they get.

No doubt many will see the answer as doing away with this pretense called trials, thereby eliminating any need for a defense.  The more enlightened will urge a variation, doing away with trials for those who “we know” are guilty.  How they know this before the trial isn’t hard to fathom, since the police and the media tell them.

This might be a facetious reaction, except it reflects an attitude where the cost of defense just isn’t worth it anymore.  When a defense costs as much as Nichols has, the result may be that the public has had enough and are ready to junk the system.  Of course, that doesn’t apply when it’s their turn, but rarely does this point influence the discussion.  It just costs too much to defend the guilty. 

It will be interesting to see whether the people of Georgia, and elsewhere, support indigent defense once this trial is over and all the numbers are added up.  And then see what is proposed in its place.