The Boston Marathon Bomber has (IIRC) a public defender. Local news says that the attorney(s) were expelled from Russia for posing as FBI agents. I assume I’m paying for this?
So who decides what is a reasonable expense? If this were allowed and the guy probably has at least three attorneys, his defense is probably going to run well over one million dollars.
As a side question: Now, just suppose Tsarnaev had a $400k bank account. He obviously isn’t destitute, but he couldn’t afford a million dollar defense. How does that work?
The federal defender agency has a budget. They sometimes hire private counsel on a case that would eat up all of their resources, but sometimes handle them in-house. I was once appointed to represent a defendant in a major federal prosecution. I was paid $75 per hour. I needed to go to Europe twice, and had to ask the judge for authorization for those expenses.
He probably wound get an appointed attorney. However, in the case I mentioned above, my client spent about $200,000 for private counsel and ran out of money. He then was eligible for an appointed attorney.
In one case that I know of, in Illinois, the defendant had to post $1,000 bail to get out of jail, and when the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor, the bail money was confiscated to pay to the public defender’s office, and the fine still had to be paid separately.
When I am appointed counsel around here, for misdemeanors my fees cannot exceed $3,000 and for felonies $5,000. Expenses cannot exceed $1,000. All are limits which cannot be exceeded “without good cause” and approval of the judge. If you go to the judge and tell him that special circumstances exist that you will need to hire experts, paralegals, investigators, etc. then I have never had a position where he won’t approve it.
He won’t approve an O.J. style defense, but if it is really someone that is needed to give the guy a good defense, it will be approved. States will obviously vary.
Wonderful system. You could spend your life savings defending against some bogus charge by an overzealous DA, be acquitted or have the charges drop and end up broke. There has to be a better way.