Let’s try Brian Nichols properly the first time

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The case of Brian Nichols, who is to be tried for escaping and killing four people, including a judge, may cost Georgia more than money.

The suggestion being made by legislators that the presiding judge should be impeached because of unpopular rulings is a serious threat to judicial independence and the rule of law.

The case is damaging the state’s new public defender system, which was given $4.5 million to provide lawyers to defend capital cases — a job that would cost over $12 million even without an extraordinary case like Nichols.

And with the case has come a return to old-time demagoguery in which legislators do not provide the public defender agency the money to do its job and then berate it for not being able to do it.

A committee of the Georgia House of Representatives is supposedly investigating spending for defending Nichols and considering recommending the impeachment of the presiding judge.

However, any responsible legislative investigation would not take place until after the trial and it would include the expenses of the prosecution as well as the defense. The district attorney is spending far more in prosecuting Nichols than his lawyers have spent defending him.

As Judge Hilton Fuller has observed in orders regarding funding for the defense, the cost of defending the case is influenced by what the prosecution spends on various experts, such as a doctor from Connecticut, the number of witnesses it plans to call (possibly as many as 400 in a case that could be proven with 10), and the scope of the investigation conducted by the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies.

It has been suggested by legislators and even one judge that the expenses for the defense of the case approved by Fuller are excessive. But their criticisms are uninformed. None of them know what expenses have been allowed and the legal reasons for allowing them.

The critics and the Fulton County District Attorney want to treat the Nichols case like any other case. However, it is an extraordinary case that requires lawyers with the time and ability to defend it and the payment of expenses necessary for it to be tried fairly.

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