Probe, prosecution of Christian-Newsom slayings had hefty price tag
"Nearly every unit of the department was utilized at some point in the investigation."
One of Knoxville's most horrific crimes is likely to go down in the record books as one of the state's most expensive prosecution efforts.
It is difficult to pin a price tag on the investigation of the January 2007 torture-slayings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, and resulting prosecutions. Some figures - jury expenses, expert witnesses, defense bills, for example - are readily available, and they tally more than $1.1 million so far. Others, including the man-hours expended by teams of local, state and federal agents, are impossible to quantify but are sure to exceed the costs ever incurred in any other single investigation.
As John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols, noted, there has never been a case in Tennessee like this one.
"Not four defendants where the death penalty is sought (against each)," Gill said. "It is unprecedented."
Lemaricus Davidson
Calling the cavalry
The crime was itself unprecedented: a young couple kidnapped by strangers, held captive, beaten, tortured, raped and killed. The scope of the probe was also extraordinary. Entire squads from both the Knoxville Police Department and Knox County Sheriff's Office were joined by teams of agents from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
The U.S. Attorney's Office set up a "war room," with three state prosecutors joining as many as a half-dozen federal prosecutors managing the effort first to find Christian after Newsom's body had been discovered, and, second, to hunt down their killers.
"From the very start, you had an indication of people fleeing the state," Gill said. "The feds came in as a result, which is extraordinary (in a local murder case). You start out with horrific crimes and very little information. It was very confusing to have so many people out beating the bushes. But, at the same time, it was very helpful to have all that assistance."
Federal and state judges were enlisted to issue search warrants. Cellular phone providers were called on to provide information for those search warrants.
KPD employed its Special Operations Squad, and the Knoxville branch of the Marshals Service assigned its entire fugitive squad to take down accused ringleader Lemaricus Davidson, who was hiding in a vacant house in Mechanicsville, and his convicted helper, Eric Boyd.
Eventually, the manhunt for the couple's killers led to Lebanon, Ky., where law enforcers from the Kentucky State Police, local police there and the Kentucky branch of the Marshals Service joined in. KPD, KCSO and the ATF sent agents there. Then-Sheriff Tim Hutchison employed his agency's helicopters in the Kentucky hunt for suspects Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas and Vanessa Coleman.
All of that cost money - lots of it.
But no one can say just how much.
"Nobody quantifies (the law enforcement side of a case)," noted Susan Shipley, a Knoxville attorney who is a veteran of capital murder defense work.
Law enforcers in this case say it is simply impossible to try.
"There's no way," said Martha Dooley, KCSO spokeswoman for Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones, when presented with the News Sentinel's request for information on the office's work in the case.
KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk had a similar reaction.
"Nearly every unit of the department was utilized at some point in the investigation," DeBusk said.
Those included the agency's entire violent crimes section of the Criminal Investigation Division and its supervisors, its 15-member Forensics Unit and the Organized Crime Unit. There were teams of patrol officers from two patrol districts, a search and recovery team, and the Special Operations Squad, DeBusk said.
KCSO also devoted teams of patrol deputies, detectives and forensics specialists to the initial manhunt, which spanned five days, and the ensuing follow-up probe, which spanned months.
Crime laboratories of both the TBI and FBI processed 850 pieces of evidence gathered from eight crime scenes. The Knox County Medical Examiner's Office sent both its chief and an investigator to the Chipman Street house where the couple had been held captive.
There were also plenty of suits involved, including Police Chief Sterling Owen IV, since retired, two KPD deputy chiefs, Hutchison, Jones and at least two of KCSO's chief deputies as well as public information officers from both agencies.
The feds likewise can't quantify how much manpower was devoted to the first phase of what would be a three-year prosecution effort that's still not over.
But if trial testimony is any indication, there easily could have been more than 100 law enforcers in two states involved in the initial effort to round up suspects and start building a case. And with annual salaries for those lawmen and women ranging from roughly $37,831 for a crime scene technician to $52,352 for a patrol sergeant, the cost of the law enforcement arm alone easily could be in the hundreds of thousands.
And that was just the beginning.
Launching the war
Even the most mundane trial is expensive.
Consider a 2009 Duke University study that estimated it costs $1,416 for one day in court with one judge, one clerk, one court reporter and two bailiffs. That figure, however, can't even offer a baseline for the prosecution effort in this case.
As for the two-bailiff estimate, it was actually closer to four in the Knoxville cases. Court security? A half dozen inside court and more outside in the racially charged case of black defendants and white victims. In the state prosecution effort, even the judge had a security detail.
"The sheriff's department had undercover deputies crawling the hallways looking for crackpots," Shipley said.
So double that Duke estimate.
In the murder cases, the entire court, complete with that massive security apparatus, was literally transported to Nashville twice and to Chattanooga once for jury selection in three of the four trials. Again, no one can offer up numbers, but there would have been hotel rooms, meals and transportation costs.
"They were lucky to get anybody to handle this case at all. Everything they do or don't do is going to be scrutinized. There was so much public outrage the defense attorneys were taking a personal risk." Susan Shipley, Knoxville attorney
The first person to be tried was Boyd, accused in a federal indictment of being an accessory to a fatal carjacking by hiding out Davidson after the killings.
Boyd appeared in U.S. District Court before his April 2008 trial 13 times for various pre-trial hearings. Each time, the Marshals Service boosted its security three-fold. Jury selection spanned three days. His trial lasted five days, and a sixth day was afforded for sentencing. He is currently serving an 18-year prison term.
So, if you used the Duke figure as a base and then doubled it for the extra security, merely opening the courtroom doors cost more than $60,000 over that span of time.
The U.S. District Court clerk's office did not respond to a request for the cost of Boyd's defense. Attorney Phil Lomonaco, appointed to the case after Boyd fired court-appointed lawyer Richard Gaines, said he can't recall how much he billed.
There is typically a $6,100 cap on defense fees in routine federal cases, but that cap was lifted in Boyd's case because of the sheer volume of evidence through which Lomonaco had to wade. He would have billed an average of $110 for every hour he spent on the case.
He worked a lot, he said.
"There were a lot of facts, a lot of evidence," he said. "We had to go through a ton of material."
And until this week, he wasn't finished. An appeal had been pending in the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. A single trip to Cincinnati, where the federal appeals court is located, cost taxpayers more than $650, according to a travel voucher filed by one of Lomonaco's legal associates.
The court shot down the appeal Thursday. Boyd still has one other, remote appeal option, but those are usually summarily dismissed with little additional paperwork.
The U.S. Attorney's Office assigned two prosecutors to the case. One, a veteran, earns more than $100,000 a year, the other, then a relative newbie, a bit less. The office can't say exactly how many hours the pair devoted to the case. A third veteran, whose salary also topped $100,000, presented the case to a federal grand jury over a period of weeks.
But Boyd's trial was merely a prelude to the main event.
Pulling out the big guns
Most killers in Tennessee work alone or in pairs.
There are rare exceptions. In 1986, for instance, authorities in Gatlinburg charged four people in the slayings of Rocky Top Village Inn clerk Melissa Suttles Hill and security guard Troy Dale Valentine.
But only two of the four were tried, with convicted mastermind Edward "Tattoo Eddie" Harris being sentenced to death. The remaining two took deals to testify against their co-horts.
And that's the way it usually works, according to veteran capital defense attorney Jim Simmons of Nashville. Faced with a band of killers, prosecutors hone in on the most culpable when seeking death and use the less culpable to shore up a capital murder case against the ringleaders.
But with an outraged public and an outspoken set of surviving relatives, Nichols opted to seek death against not only ringleader Davidson but also compadres Cobbins, Thomas and Coleman.
"I think that was very unusual because typically they'll use the others to take on the most culpable one," Simmons said. "I have never tried (a capital case) with multi-defendants."
With even one death penalty case, the cash register goes into overdrive. The Duke study estimated that a capital murder case costs some $329,000 more in court-related expenses than a noncapital murder case.
Nichols' aide Gill acknowledged that prosecutors can and sometimes do weigh the extra costs of seeking death against the cheaper alternative of a life sentence.
But dollar signs were nowhere to be found in the room when Nichols and his staff considered the unprecedented move of seeking the death penalty against all four accused in the Christian/Newsom case.
"I don't think that was even a close (call) in the consideration of this case," he said.
Gill argues that the decision did not carry an additional price tag for his office.
"We would have spent the same money on personnel if that case had never occurred," he said.
That's true - technically. In practice, however, it's not so clear.
Assistant District Attorney General Leland Price set aside his regular caseload to do nothing but work on Christian-Newsom over a three-year period. That meant other staffers had to shoulder the cases he left behind. His partner in the case, prosecutor TaKisha Fitzgerald, kept her normal caseload but lengthened her days to do so.
Figures put a state prosecutor's average annual salary at $60,000. So, factoring in just Price's time, the state invested a minimum of $180,000. That doesn't count Fitzgerald's work and the costs of support staff, including two victim-witness advocates.
The Knox County Finance Department did provide an accounting of some witness expenses billed by the prosecution, totaling $22,488. An examination of court files provided more detail.
Prosecutors paid $100 a pop to house at the Hilton each of five witnesses from Kentucky for each of the four murder trials, for instance.
It cost nearly $2,000 to fly in and put up for the night a cellular phone provider from Kansas.
There were bills for food and lodging for a variety of other witnesses as well as mileage and food expenses for deputies transporting the defendants from Kentucky.
At the request of the News Sentinel, TBI spokeswoman Kristin Helm calculated the cost of the agency's DNA testing on 200 samples sent to the lab at $64,260.
"This cost does not include the time spent by our crime scene team or other disciplines who worked this case," Helm said.
Gill acknowledged death penalty cases are much pricier. But in this case, he said, it was all money well spent.
"We don't seek the death penalty unless there are very sound reasons to do so," Gill said. "But it is going to take more resources."
Attorney Shipley pointed out that, unlike defense attorneys in a capital case, the DA's office has an entire crime laboratory at its disposal and needs no permission from state budget-crunchers to pursue expert testing and testimony.
"Nobody puts limits on how much testing the prosecution gets to do," she said.
Not so with the defense.
Defending the indefensible
While neither law enforcement nor the prosecution can or must put a public price tag on its work, court-appointed defense attorneys are required to do just that, so the spotlight often shines on defense bills in the wake of a high-profile case.
Recall, for example, the public outrage over the money afforded defense experts and attorneys in the years-long prosecution of Knox County's only accused serial killer - Thomas Dee "Zoo Man" Huskey. So far, the Huskey defense tab tops $750,000.
It's hard to compare the Huskey case to the Christian/Newsom case. The tab in Huskey's case covers expert expenses and attorneys fees for a capital murder trial that ended in a hung jury, four rape trials and appeals that ultimately led to the dismissal of the original murder charges.
In the Christian-Newsom case, the defense bill, including the cost of expert witnesses and testing, for all four capital murder trials is so far at just more than $910,000.
The tally, which includes attorneys fees, expert witnesses and forensic testing, breaks down this way:
* Cobbins: $346,139
* Davidson: $283,557
* Thomas: $210,394
* Coleman: $74,060
Cobbins was the first to be tried and, therefore, his defense team shouldered responsibility for most of the early legal heavy-lifting, so his bill is highest.
Coleman's parents initially funded her defense before running out of money, and lead attorney Ted Lavitt hasn't filed any vouchers for defense experts, so her bill is lowest.
For the defense, there is no unfettered access to cash in a capital case. The state Administrative Office of the Courts must approve funding for all defense requests. There are limits on which experts they can use, what those experts can charge and from how far away they can travel to testify.
"It has to be a person they approve of," Shipley said. "You have to get approval from the state before you can even hire that person. We spend a lot of time fighting with the state to get funding."
A defendant facing death is entitled to two attorneys who must be veterans of criminal defense and, particularly, capital murder. After all, it isn't a client's freedom at stake but his or her life.
In this case, there wasn't a defense attorney in town willing to step up to the plate.
"These were horrible facts," said Simmons, who has defended some 25 capital murder cases in 20 years.
"They were lucky to get anybody to handle this case at all," Shipley said. "Everything they do or don't do is going to be scrutinized. There was so much public outrage the defense attorneys were taking a personal risk."
Judge Richard Baumgartner, who since has resigned after confessing unrelated official misconduct, pressed local attorneys qualified to handle death penalty cases into service. He tapped Kim Parton and Scott Green to represent Cobbins; Tom Dillard and Steve Johnson to represent Thomas; David Eldridge and Doug Trant to represent Davidson; and Russell Greene to assist Lavitt in Coleman's defense.
None wanted to be interviewed on the impact the high-profile case - which generated death threats against them - had on his or her practice. They each issued brief statements reminding an outraged public that they were duty-bound to represent their clients once tapped by Baumgartner.
But Simmons and Shipley know the price the attorneys of some of the state's most notorious defendants paid.
"There's nobody making money off death penalty cases," Simmons said.
Most defense attorneys of the caliber appointed in the Christian-Newsom case can earn $250 to $300 per hour in private practice. The state, instead, pays them $75 to $100 per hour in a capital case.
"We can't bill for paralegals and support staff," Simmons said. "(The state rate) doesn't cover your overhead expenses."
For a solo practitioner like Parton, taking on such a high-profile death case essentially shuts down her practice, said Simmons and Shipley, both of whom also operate on their own.
"It prohibits you from taking other cases," Simmons said. "They are extremely time-consuming."
"You have to front the expenses yourself," Shipley added. "This is a case where defense counsel had thousands of dollars in copying expenses alone. You have to finance that yourself."
Attorneys in capital cases are required not only to mount a defense but also to assume a conviction and, therefore, prepare for sentencing even while readying for trial. It is in the sentencing stage that most expert witnesses are employed.
One legal misstep by the defense could net a defendant a new trial later, upping the price tag even more, Shipley said.
Then, there's the fallout from public opinion, which could keep new business away in the future.
"Certainly, you don't get any thanks from the public," Simmons said. "If you lose one of these, they never go away. You start the appeals process and that goes on for 20 years. … I have never asked for a death penalty case. I got involved because a judge called me."
Housing the troops
Taxpayers didn't just shoulder the burden of the investigation, prosecution and defense. They also had to cough up big bucks to care for the ordinary citizens called upon to decide the suspects' fates.
In Boyd's case, jury expenses were relatively cheap. Exact figures weren't provided by the U.S. District Court clerk's office, but jurors in federal court are paid $40 per day. Eighty were summoned for a three-day selection process, and 14, including two alternates, spent five days hearing and deciding the case. The likely jury cost, then, totaled roughly $12,400.
Knox County did not get away so cheap. The state murder trials spanned two weeks each. In three of those trials, jurors were selected from Nashville and Chattanooga and had to be bused here. The 12 jurors and four alternates selected in each case were housed in area hotels, guarded by a "matron" and "two or three" court officers overnight each night, said Criminal Court Clerk Joy McCroskey. For their troubles, jurors were paid $11 a day.
The total price tag for paying, transporting, feeding, housing and entertaining jurors: $161,862.
"It's very expensive, but it had to be done," McCroskey said. "These cases combined are probably the longest I can remember that we've had to sequester a jury."
Lodging accounted for much of that tab. It cost between $20,000 and $25,000 to house each jury panel and its security minders at an area hotel for the duration of each trial. Meals also took a chunk of change. Lunch from the Lunchbox Restaurant for a single day could run as high as $200. Salsaritas? $225 for one meal. Rothchild Catering? $368. Copper Cellar? $333. Calhouns? $389. At three meals a day for a total of nearly 40 days, the food bill took the largest slice of the jury expense pie.
Gentry Trailways billed the county $1,900 for a charter bus to take jurors from Nashville to Knoxville and back again. There were two such round trips. The cost to take jurors from Chattanooga to Knoxville and back again was slightly cheaper - $1,700.
McCroskey said transportation costs could have been much higher had the county been forced to keep a charter bus available throughout the trial to ferry jurors to and from the courthouse, various outings and restaurants.
But court security officer Dennis Bowman has a chauffeur's license and offered to drive jurors around in a KCSO bus normally used to transport inmates.
"We got lucky," she said.
The county also forked out thousands to entertain jurors. They went to the movies - $100 or more for each flick. They caught a Tennessee Smokies baseball game - $133 - and visited the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame - $34.
"Would you want to sit all those weeks with nothing on your minds but those cases?" McCroskey said.
The county paid to rent and stock a hospitality room at the hotel with snacks and games, she said.
"I'd want that if I was on a jury like that," she said. "You think about being locked up that long. You feel like a prisoner yourself."
McCroskey said the county will be able to bill the state to recoup some of that expense, although it is still taxpayers who ultimately foot the cost.
Settling in for the siege
The trials are over, but the price of justice in the Christian-Newsom case continues to climb.
Cobbins and Thomas escaped death, with their respective juries sentencing them instead to life without parole. Coleman, deemed by her jury panel a facilitator only, was sentenced to 53 years. Davidson was the only one of the quartet to draw death.
The court battles aren't over. Motions for new trial, filings required in all jury trials that end in conviction, are pending. Cobbins, Thomas and Coleman will each get a shot at a state court appeal. If they lose, the law allows them to essentially fire their trial attorneys, get new ones and launch another set of appeals.
Davidson's death sentence guarantees him a slew of appeals in both state and federal court. Eventually, a team of state and federal lawyers will be assigned to try to save his life.
All of those appellate fights will be funded by taxpayers.
Shipley insisted that taxpayers can't well complain if they want killers to be put to death.
"It's absolutely not cost-effective (compared with life without parole)," she said. "If people in the state of Tennessee want the death penalty, they're going to have to pay for it."
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/ap...ayings-had-he/
"It's absolutely not cost-effective (compared with life without parole)," she said. "If people in the state of Tennessee want the death penalty, they're going to have to pay for it."
Lynchings were cost effective, and certainly would been appropriate in this case!
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