Cinco Murder Defense Costs Are Revealed

Not including lawyers’ fees, taxpayers spent $476,555 in defense expenses for Joselito Cinco, who was sentenced to death for killing two San Diego police officers, according to court documents.

The bulk of the sum, about $255,000, was spent on experts and consultants, both forensic and legal, about $100,000 was spent on investigating the case and $50,000 or so on law clerks and paralegals, the documents indicate. The rest of the money went toward expenses, including $53 for office supplies and $130 for Cinco’s broken glasses.

The documents do not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars also spent on the case in attorney’s fees, which reportedly pushed the total cost to nearly $1 million. Cinco, a former Spring Valley auto mechanic, was convicted in 1988 of the 1984 killings.

But the papers, now open records after a lengthy legal battle over a novel state law designed to keep secret the cost of legal defense in death-penalty cases, provide a first-ever glimpse of how defense attorneys spend public funds in capital cases.

A senior San Diego County prosecutor who helped try the Cinco case said the sum seemed like “an awful lot” and suggested that its disclosure might prompt the Legislature to consider review of the novel law.

“It’s healthy to have this kind of information,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Richard J. Neely said, adding that it was particularly valuable data “in this day and age of limited resources.”

Cinco’s defense attorney, however, said that expenses in Cinco’s case were often responses to moves initiated by county prosecutors, who he said went overboard in trying to prove the case.

In addition, defense lawyer John G. Cotsirilos said, any capital case was bound to be costly and it is important to keep even six-figure expense sums in perspective.

“You tell a defense attorney you want to kill his client, and he’s going to do everything in his power to defend his client,” Cotsirilos said. “If litigation like this isn’t going to be costly, then no litigation under the sun is going to be costly.”

Cotsirilos filed the documents last month after a Vista Superior Court judge decided in April that the cost of defending Cinco must be made public. The documents were made available after Cotsirilos decided not to appeal the ruling by Judge Charles R. Hayes.

The judge was the first in California to interpret a 1977 state law that 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 feels 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 death, San Diego County prosecutors asked Hayes to unseal the records, saying no case could be more final and arguing that the secrecy should end when the case did.

Cotsirilos maintained that, although the public had a right to know how its money was spent, he was obligated not to disclose an accounting of the costs in the case because of the rules protecting lawyers’ confidences.

The lawyer said that he had no objection to making public a lump sum. But he said he could not release the names of experts or consultants, or the details of conversations he had with or about them, because that information would violate his ethical obligation to keep certain matters secret.

In his April 27 ruling, Hayes ordered Cotsirilos to prepare an accounting of his costs, saying that if there was something improper in an expenditure, the public would have to know so that it could pressure the Legislature to enact new safeguards.

Hayes repeatedly has said he has seen nothing unusual in the way the money in the Cinco case was spent.

The judge also ruled that Cotsirilos’ accounting had to include the names of experts or consultants. But, citing the rules protecting lawyers’ confidences, the judge deleted any reference in the ledger sheet that explained what expertise a particular person had, or what he or she may have done on the case.

The judge also ruled that, because of those same rules, the application that a defense attorney makes for public funds, as well as any closed-door hearings with a judge on the request, must stay secret.

Cotsirilos said $85,000 of the money spent went toward challenging the composition of Cinco’s jury pool, which the defense alleged had too few minorities.

Because of extensive publicity in San Diego, Cinco’s case was transferred to Orange County, where the same challenge was mounted and took 18 months to resolve. After interviewing about 400 potential jurors, only one minority juror, a Latino woman, was picked.

Cotsirilos said the law required him to make the challenge. He told that to prosecutors before the transfer, but “they were determined to go to that county for what they thought were tactical reasons,” raising the case’s cost, he said.

Taxpayers also bore the cost of the thousands of hours of attorney’s fees, because Cinco was indigent.