Death penalty fund unable to cover all defense lawyers' bills: TOULON, Ill. -- Stark County Circuit Judge Scott Shore was dismayed when bills for lawyers defending a death penalty case in his court were refused payment by the state. The reason? The Capital Litigation Trust Fund, created to help ensure competent handling of death penalty cases, ran out of money to pay defense lawyers at the end of the last fiscal year. The same thing happened in some other rural counties, and local officials are worried that it will happen again during the new fiscal year that began in July, possibly jeopardizing prosecution of some death penalty cases.

Apparently Ohio isn't the only state running out of money to pay for death penalty cases; it's happening in Illinois, as well. Granted, Illinois counties are not yet refusing to prosecute death penalty cases for fiscal reasons (and probably couldn't, in any event). However, if the state continues to run out of money at the end of the fiscal year -- and despite requests for increases in the budget for the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, given that the state is expected to have a significant overall shortfall by midyear which will require state agencies to have a major midyear recision of a portion of their current budget, one does not expect any such increase to happen ...

Wending out of that thicket of digression, let's put it this way. I suspect what will happen is not simply that lawyers will refuse to take on capital cases. After all, the fund is still there, however reduced it may become. What will happen is that lawyers will refuse to take on cases after a certain date. For example, they will refuse to take on cases after January (the middle of the fiscal year) because they know that bills submitted after a certain point will be refused. (Said bills also cannot be resubmitted at a later date; you cannot bill for work done in a prior fiscal year, especially after you've billed once for that work during the current fiscal year.) So if you happen to get nobbed for a capital crime from, say, May through December, you're fine. (There's a bit of overlap because the fiscal year doesn't start until July 1, but they can probably do work early on and hold the billing until after that date, as long as some of the work was done after that.) You get arrested after January 1, well ... just your tough luck, isn't it?