If only lawyers didn’t have kids who expect to eat every day, we could serve the greater good for free.  Alas, we have to pay the dinner bill just like everybody else.  It sucks, but that’s the deal, which is why lawyers who defend the indigent submit bills.

From the Buffalo News :

It may cost Niagara County taxpayers an estimated $64,000 to provide legal defense for the convicted killer of youth counselor Renee C. Greco.

Robert M. Pusateri, administrator of Niagara County’s conflict defender and assigned counsel office, disclosed the figure to a County Legislature committee Tuesday.

He said that E. Earl Key, the court-appointed defense attorney for Anthony J. Allen, had told him he would submit a bill for more than $40,000 for himself and cocounsel Samuel P. Davis.

Expert witnesses called by Key and Davis in the trial cost $17,241, and Key spent $4,368 on court transcripts and statements, Pusateri said.

Does $64 grand seem like a lot of money for a murder defense?  Not from where I sit, but then, it’s not like I’m inclined to believe that money spent on the legal fees for the defense of an accused is money wasted.  I could be biased in this regard.

The bill will be sent to our favorite upstate jurist, Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, the one who approves of cops getting folks to be compliant at the end of a Taser and that the solution to the marijuana problem is to banish defendants from Buffalo, for her approval.  She could cut the bill without explanation because, you know, she just could.

It’s not easy getting to the $40k mark on 18B rates of $75 an hour.  That’s a lot of hours, and those hours spent on the defense of Anthony Allen were hours that couldn’t be spent elsewhere, whether on the defense of a paying client or in the backyard playing ball with the kids.  Either way, they come from somewhere and were used up on defending a client.

Of course, defendant an accused murderer, especially now that he’s convicted, isn’t the sort of expense that taxpayers tend to appreciate.  Allen was convicted, for crying out loud.  A complete waste of money defending a murderer, right?

The problem was that they had to use Earl Key to defend because of conflicts with the local public defender.  There was a co-defendant, and he needed a lawyer too, and then the conflict-defender ended up with a conflict of his own.  What’s a county to do to save money?

Legislator Dennis F. Virtuoso, D-Niagara Falls, said the county should try to borrow public defenders from other counties in such cases.

That’s because all those other counties have gaggles of public defenders sitting around with nothing much to do, just in case a neighboring county wants to save money on its murder cases.

What’s striking is that at least one lawmaker, a person duly elected to make sound decisions on behalf of his constituents, has absolutely no clue that public defenders are not merely sitting in the courthouse eating bon bons, but overwhelmed (and underpaid) with the work on hand.  Imagine the speech he would give in the state legislature about how the counties could save a bundle if they only used their spare PDs to cover the gap when some murderer absolutely had to be defended (darn that law thingy).

But then, it’s certainly a lot easier to just borrow some spare public defenders from a neighboring county than either covering the responsibility of defending those accused by your own PDs, or paying the freight of 18B when the law mandates. 

H/T Our hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen Casey