Judge Orders Defense Costs Made Public : Courts: Ruling in Cinco case is first to balance public’s right to know how its money is spent against the attorneys’ right to confidences.

Stressing that taxpayers have a right to know how their money is spent, a Vista Superior Court judge ordered Friday that the cost of defending Joselito Cinco, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of two San Diego police officers, be made public.

It was the first ruling in California on a special law that keeps private the cost of legal defense in death-penalty cases.

But, after studying the novel issue for nearly 10 months, Judge Charles R. Hayes delayed the actual disclosure of the amounts spent to defend Cinco--a former auto mechanic convicted in the 1988 murders. Cinco’s defense reportedly cost nearly $1 million.

Instead, Hayes gave both Cinco’s defense lawyer and the San Diego district attorney’s office until May 29 to decide whether to appeal his order, which balances the public’s right to learn how its money is spent defending people accused of murder against the rules protecting lawyers’ confidences.

The judge was the first in California to face that issue, which developed from a provision in a 1977 state law that details how defense lawyers go about obtaining public money to spend in death-penalty cases.

In his decision, Hayes did not grant prosecutors all that they had asked for in their original request to unseal the records. The actual application that a defense lawyer makes for public funds, as well as any closed-door hearings with a judge on that request, have to stay secret, Hayes ruled.

Both defense attorney John G. Cotsirilos, a San Diego lawyer, and Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Sullivan said Friday that they were uncertain whether they would appeal Hayes’ ruling.

Cotsirilos said he has “never had any objection to the public knowing the costs.” The only “troublesome” aspect of Hayes’ ruling, he said, was that, to be fair, prosecutors should have to say how much they spent, too.

Without mutual disclosure, Cotsirilos said, an explicit description of the high cost of capital-case defense alone could fuel a drive to persuade the Legislature to change the law to give prosecutors--that is, the adversary--a voice in how a defense should be funded.

Sullivan said he does not know whether San Diego prosecutors will honor the challenge Cotsirilos posed. But he added that records have always been available to find out what it costs to run the district attorney’s office.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that the public doesn’t have information to say that cases are expensive to prosecute, especially death-penalty cases,” Sullivan said.

The law Hayes had to interpret sets up a process in capital cases by which a defense lawyer asks a judge for public funds to pay for “investigators, experts and others” that the lawyer thinks would be helpful.

The law itself does not say whether the secrecy should end when the case ends. Cinco, 29, committed suicide in December, 1988, in his cell at San Quentin, making his case one of the first to become final since the Legislature restored the death penalty in 1977.

After Cinco’s suicide, prosecutors asked Hayes to unseal the records, saying they believed that the secrecy should end when a case ends, noting that no case could ever be more final. The judge held an initial hearing on the request last July.

In Friday’s ruling, Hayes pointed out to prosecutors that the law specifically says that the defense lawyer’s application for funds and any hearings the judge and lawyer may hold on that request should stay secret.

That sort of “plain and unambiguous” language ended the contention that either the applications or transcripts of the hearings should be released, no matter what the stage of a case, he said.

But Hayes noted that the law does not provide for continued confidentiality of documents after a case is over. Since it was plain that a lawyer had to make a final accounting of where the funds went and the state law could have covered that report, but didn’t, the accounting had to be made public if it was asked for, he said.

A lawyer’s ethical concerns simply had to give way, he said.

No attorney-client privilege stood in the way, Hayes said, since that privilege is held by the client but dies when the client does. Cinco was dead, so no privilege remained, he said.

As for the rules that protect an attorney’s theories of a case--known formally as “work product”--the public interest “in a fair picture of where its money was spent” simply was more important, he said.

That’s because, if there were something improper in an expenditure--and Hayes repeatedly has said he has seen nothing unusual in the Cinco case--the public would have to know so that it could pressure the Legislature to enact new safeguards, he said.

Hayes’ ruling affects not only a tentative ledger that Cotsirilos has provided in the case--the defense lawyer said he is due next week to provide a final accounting--but also the records he used to make up the accounting, such as vouchers and invoices.

Under the ruling, even the names of expert witnesses that Cotsirilos consulted but did not call at Cinco’s trial, and the amounts they were paid, were ordered disclosed.

However, certain numbers on the records themselves--such as addresses, credit card numbers, and phone numbers--will not be released and will have to be erased from the records, Hayes said. There is no legitimate public interest in that sort of private information, he said.

Cinco was convicted and sentenced to die in June, 1988, for killing two police officers in San Diego’s Balboa Park on Sept. 14, 1984.

Because of extensive publicity, Cinco’s trial was moved to Orange County, where a jury found him guilty of the murders, which occurred when Cinco and another man were trying to avoid misdemeanor citations for providing liquor to two teen-age girls.