Cost Can Decide If, How Cases Are Tried

Like it or not, cost is a factor prosecutors now weigh when deciding whether to try cases.

And not always just for simple crimes like bounced checks.

Consider the case of Larry Leombruno, a 46-year-old registered sex offender convicted again this summer.

Last year, Leombruno had posed as a psychiatrist and hired at least two teenage boys to help with some yard work around his southern Kootenai County home.

After getting to know the boys, he had them put on special glasses he claimed put them under a trance. Then he molested them.

By 1996, one of the teenagers had moved to the Midwest.

“In order to take that to a full trial, we would have had to transport the victim from the Midwest - along with an accompanying adult - and lodge him for a week as well as put on some expert psychological testimony,” Prosector Bill Douglas said.

To save money, his office struck a deal, Douglas said.

In exchange for Leombruno’s guilty plea, they dropped one charge and recommended the repeat offender serve three years in prison - four years less than he was sentenced to on a previous conviction.

Leombruno previously had been convicted of molesting another teenage boy. He served less than a year in a California institution for sex offenders.

“That’s the wrong direction,” said the angry father of one of the victims. “Sentences are supposed to get tougher, not easier.”

Besides, saving money was the worst reason to treat Leombruno lightly, said the father, who asked that his name not be used to protect his son.

“Let’s say it cost $2,000 to bring that boy in and put him up for a week,” he said. “So what? What will it cost in time, pain and money when this guy gets out early and messes up again? He’s done it three times already.”

The father, a retired southern California cop now living in Harrison, was so outraged that he and his wife testified at Leombruno’s sentencing that the plea bargain was too lenient.

In a rare move, the judge ignored the prosecutor’s recommendation and gave Leombruno the maximum - 15 years.

But dad is convinced it was luck that things worked out as they did.

Without his and his wife’s testimony, he said, Leombruno would have been free in three years. As it now stands, that’s when Leombruno will first be considered for parole - a hearing the victim’s father already is making plans to attend.

“This guy’s got to stay put away,” he said.

, DataTimes