County's $2 million secret

Months after two men were convicted and sentenced for murder, Yakima County officials are refusing to release records of how defense attorneys in the case spent $2 million in taxpayer dollars.

County officials have turned down a public records request by the Yakima Herald-Republic on the grounds that billing records are sealed by a Superior Court judge and the courts are not governed by the Washington State Public Records Act.

The bills were submitted to Yakima County by several attorneys defending two men convicted of killing a father and his 3-year-old daughter in their Yakima apartment in 2005.

The Herald-Republic, which has chronicled the unprecedented cost of the case as it unfolded over the course of three years and has worked for months to gain access to the billing records, will file suit today against Yakima County.

Herald-Republic Editor and Vice President Sarah Jenkins said Thursday the records quest is more than a simple exercise in open government and that the unusual procedural history of the case, along with the huge billings by defense attorneys and the fact that those same billings remain off-limits, has long-term implications on public policy.

"This isn't about the
Herald-Republic's right to this information -- it's about the people's right to know how $2 million of their money was spent," she said.

The newspaper is suing only as a last resort, she said, noting the Herald-
Republic has incurred more than $10,000 in legal fees in the case so far during a time when slumping revenues are causing significant concern in much of newspaper industry.

"We have tried every tack short of a lawsuit to break through this unfathomable system," she said. "Part of the frustration has been that we never get a yes or no on our request for documents. It's always, 'We'll have to ask somebody else.'"

Yakima County Prosecutor Ron Zirkle said he supports the newspaper's attempt to gain access to the billing records but also does not want to run afoul of the court.

He said his deputies will file a motion, supplementary to the newspaper's lawsuit, asking the court for direction. "My job is to follow the law," he said, "only I don't know what the law is."

The dispute centers on the billings submitted by court-appointed attorneys for Jose "Junior" Sanchez and Mario "Gato" Mendez, who were accused and convicted in the shooting deaths of 21-year-old Ricky Causor and his 3-year-old daughter, Mya, during a drug rip-off in Yakima in February 2005.

By the time the trial was over earlier this year, two sets of lawyers for Sanchez, who was a candidate for the death penalty, had racked up nearly $1.5 million in defense spending. The team defending Mendez, who was not considered for the death penalty, spent just over $561,000.

But the dispute also exposes shortcomings in the statutory framework of potential death penalty cases in Washington and fears by some that defense attorneys are deliberately trying to bankrupt counties as a way of scaring off prosecutors.

Prosecutor Zirkle made a controversial call early on when he gave Sanchez's defense team of Jackie Walsh and Steve Witchley a year to prepare a report on their client called a mitigation packet. Walsh and Witchley, both from Seattle, were on a short list of lawyers in Washington qualified to handle such cases.

The mitigation packet is an informal practice in Washington based on case law that requires prosecutors to consider circumstances in a defendant's background that might mitigate the decision to seek the death penalty.

It is not required by law, but prosecutors, mindful that roughly half of the state's death penalty cases have been overturned by the courts over the past 20 years, have adopted the practice as a hedge against such appeals.

By law, prosecutors contemplating the death penalty have 30 days to file notice. They can extend the deadline, however, with permission from the defense.

Despite being given a year to prepare, Walsh and Witchley missed the first deadline, then broke several more before they were tossed off the case by Superior Court Judge James Hutton for misconduct related to their handling of a witness in the case.

The state Attorney General's office recently confirmed it is investigating the witness-tampering allegations against Walsh and Witchley. A spokesman for the Attorney General's office would not, however, discuss the case in detail, and the extent of the inquiry remains unclear.

By the time they were taken off the case, they'd had racked up roughly $1 million in pretrial costs. Not until October 2006 -- more than a year and a half after the first 30-day deadline passed -- was the mitigation packet ready. The packet, however, was made moot by Zirkle's decision not to seek the death penalty on other grounds.

In an interview last December, Zirkle said he rejected the death penalty against Sanchez because he feared weak evidence in the case wouldn't survive scrutiny on appeal.

After a delay of nearly 21/2 years, Sanchez finally went on trial last November. He was convicted of aggravated first-degree murder by a jury and was sentenced to life in prison without parole, the only other possible sentence than the death penalty for aggravated murder.

Mendez pleaded guilty to first-degree murder before Sanchez went on trial and testified Sanchez was the shooter. In March he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

A central figure in the case has been Superior Court Judge James Lust, who ordered the records sealed after he was appointed to oversee requests for defense spending. In that role, Lust came to be known as "the budget judge."

Brendan Monahan, the Herald-Republic's attorney, said having a judge sign off on all the financial paperwork in the case was a setup peculiar to Yakima County that blurred the judiciary's role.

"The fact that the person who approved the payments was wearing a robe is an interesting wrinkle," he said, "but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the administrative action." That makes the records administrative in nature and thus subject to the state's open record laws, he said.

The state Legislature last year amended the Public Records Act to make it clear that legal fees paid for by taxpayers are public records, and an appeal ruling last month in a Thurston County case applied the new rule retroactively, Monahan said.

"We don't have any objection to the redaction of protected work product, we simply want to know where the money went," he said.

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com

• Jobs
  www.yakjobs.com
• Homes
  www.yakhomes.com
• 
• 
  
• Autos
  www.yakwheels.com

• All Special Pubs Channels YakJobs.com YakWheels.com YakHomes.com Playdate Yakima Bride Yakima Wheels (Print) Home Buyer's Guide Baby Brag Book Graduates 2009 Summer in the Valley Prep Football 2009 Women in Business
• Advertisement