Alan Mauldin
MOULTRIE — Colquitt County requested information this week from the district attorney’s office to help determine the potential costs of a capital murder case winding its way through the courts.
Although there are no estimates at this time of the local costs of the trial, it is estimated that the total cost in Georgia of a successful death-penalty prosecution, followed by appeals and execution, could reach $3 million or more. Most of those costs will be borne by the state.
No trial date has been set for Johnny Jerry Thompson, who is accused in the 2004 quintuple homicide in rural Colquitt County.
A deadline of March 31 was set earlier this year for the filing of motions in the case.
Thompson, 49, is accused of the execution-style murders of Jamie Cruz Resendez, 25, his wife Katrina “Tina” Darlene Resendez, 29, the couple’s 3-year-old son Juan Carlos Resendez, Katrina’s mother Betty Watts, 50, and family friend and housekeeper Liliana Alegria Aguilar, 30.
Investigators said all five were found shot to death.
Five of the 25 counts of which Thompson is accused could carry the death penalty as they allegedly were committed under statutory aggravating circumstances of other capital felonies.
County Administrator Bryan Shuler said Friday that the county is starting its budget process and wants to plan for the trial’s costs.
“It’s something that a county government has to address when these things come up,” Shuler said of the trial. “We’ve contacted the DA’s office and requested some information from them.”
The county will be responsible for security, but it was not known Friday whether it will be required to provide more funds for defense other than its annual contributions to the state’s public defender system.
The county budgeted $292,887 in the current fiscal year that ends June 30 as its contribution to the state public defender system.
Officials said the total cost to the county will depend on the length of the trial, whether the jury is sequestered, and most significantly if a change of venue is granted.
“We’ve been researching what the county’s obligation would be under the new statute,” Southern Judicial Circuit District Attorney David Miller said.
Although the county’s direct costs will be a fraction of the total cost of the Colquitt County case, death penalty cases can easily cost several million dollars for the states in which they occur, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center.
The center has estimated that the defense costs for a death-penalty case in Georgia average $150,000 to $200,000.
Prosecution teams put in the same amount of work in the cases, Dieter said. While prosecutors are paid regardless of whether they were working on a capital case, the time spent on a death-penalty case is time not spent on others.
Three million dollars is a good conservative estimate of the total cost of a capital case in Georgia, Dieter said, including the trial itself and sentencing phase, appeals and housing an inmate until execution.
“Nothing about a death-penalty case is cheaper, whether it’s pre-trial motions, experts,” he said. “In all cases you need the high end of everything.
“Change of venue is more likely to be given in a death-penalty case. As long as the state asks for the death penalty there will be more motions, and because it’s life-and-death some of those (requested) experts will be allowed. You’re talking about multiple millions before this is resolved in 15 years.”
That includes jury selection, which alone can take weeks depending on individual state’s laws, Dieter said.
“Every juror has to be asked their opinion on the death penalty,” he said. “In typical trials you don’t ask people their political views, their religious views.”
In contrast, Dieter said that housing an inmate who receives a life sentence for 40 years costs about $25,000 per year, for a total of about $1 million. Capital murder trials average about 10 times the cost of a murder trial in which prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
