Teen murder case sapping county coffers
EPHRATA, Wash. — A 13-year-old boy who loves turtles and video games is brutally stabbed to death. Two 13-year-olds stand accused of his murder.
The killing of Craig Sorger last year robbed three families of their sons and robbed this quiet farm town of its sense of security.
But the cost of crime is measured in dollars as well as tears, especially in a small town.
The murder investigation and trial continue to steal scarce resources from a cash-strapped community. The lone Ephrata police detective has worked overtime investigating the murder, while other cases gather dust. Prosecutors say they’re offering more plea bargains because they can’t afford trials. And county commissioners recently enacted a hiring freeze, in response to mounting criminal justice costs.
“There’s a price to be paid, and the public at large is paying it,” said Chief Deputy Prosecutor Stephen Hallstrom.
The murder trial of Jake Lee Eakin and Evan Drake Savoie, both 13, could cost Grant County nearly $1 million. At the same time, leaders of the central Washington county are struggling to pay up to $1.4 million in unanticipated public defender bills, stemming from the disbarment of the county’s longtime public defender earlier this year.
Trials cost time, too. The prosecuting attorney for the Sorger murder recently spent two weeks focusing solely on that case – and that was just for a hearing to determine whether to try the boys as adults. During those two weeks, that attorney’s other cases either went to one of the 10 other lawyers in the prosecutor’s office, or they simply had to wait.
“There’s a huge effect,” Grant County Prosecuting Attorney John Knodell said, sitting at a paper-strewn desk flanked by pictures of his family and a bust of Lincoln. “We have made our charging decisions a lot less aggressive.”
Driving into Ephrata through fields of wheat and alfalfa, the little town of 6,800 people looks like a nostalgic vision, the type of place where people move to escape the crime of the big city. But to hear Knodell and Hallstrom talk, the whole county seethes with barely contained violence, from meth cookers to child abusers.
Prosecutors recently charged Maribel Gomez, 29, of Ephrata, with manslaughter in the death of her 2-year-old son, Rafael. In Quincy, another small Grant County town, a 15-year-old girl was charged last week with second-degree murder in the death of her newborn baby.
When children die, the public wants justice. But the demands of high-profile cases pressure prosecutors to plea-bargain lesser crimes. Knodell and Hallstrom believe it’s a dangerous trade-off.
“It creates a greater environment of lawlessness,” Knodell complained. “The people in the jail – they know what kind of burden the system is under. That affects their decisions.”
Every county suffers the same problem, though smaller, rural counties tend to be hit harder. A decade ago, the average Washington county spent 50 percent to 60 percent of its budget on criminal justice, according to Sophia Byrd, law and justice policy director for the Washington State Association of Counties. Now the average is about 70 percent, with some counties spending more than 80 percent of taxpayers’ money on catching, prosecuting and jailing criminals.
Despite all the money being spent, the system doesn’t always work. The Washington State Bar Association recently scrutinized public defense practices, which vary widely among counties. Their findings: massive inequalities, failure to meet constitutional standards, and chronic underfunding. Their recommendations: state funding and oversight.
Local leaders have turned to state money as the solution before – of course, that money comes from taxpayers too, and there’s never enough to go around. In 1999, the state Legislature passed the Extraordinary Criminal Justice Act, designed to help counties struggling with aggravated murder cases. The act was inspired by the plight of Okanogan County, which suffered financially to pay for the trial of a man accused of killing an Omak police officer in 1998.
The demand for state money far outstrips the need, though. In 2003, King County requested $10.5 million, mostly to help defray the cost of prosecuting Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. The county got $807,000.
Grant County can’t ask for relief under the Extraordinary Justice Act because none of the murder cases there is aggravated, meaning none is eligible for the death penalty. For that, prosecutors are grateful. The thought of a death penalty case in their county gives them the chills. There’s just no way their local taxpayers could foot the bill for all the expert witnesses, attorneys and appeals such a case requires, they say.
“Talking about how finances affect charging decisions – in a perfect world, they shouldn’t,” Hallstrom said. “We shouldn’t have to figure out, roads or the death penalty? Guns or butter?”