Staff file photo / Ed Runyan From left, attorney John Juhasz, defendant Kimonie Bryant and attorney Lynn Maro stand during Bryant’s plea hearing last December in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. Juhasz and Maro worked on Bryant’s case for more than three years in the Sept. 21, 2020, shooting death of Rowan Sweeney and shooting of four adults in Struthers.

YOUNGSTOWN — Most people would say the biggest cost to the Youngstown area when a male burst into a home in Struthers on Sept. 21, 2020, shot 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney to death and seriously wounded four adults was the loss of an innocent little boy.

But what about the financial cost?

The O.J. Simpson murder case in the early 1990s cost Simpson an estimated $6 million. He hired what was called the “Dream Team” and was acquitted of killing his ex-wife and her friend.

One New Jersey law firm founder estimated late last year that an average murder trial is likely to cost a defendant about $100,000. It could be three times higher in major cities like Los Angeles or New York, David Gelman told Fox News.

The three defendants in the Struthers case faced capital murder charges in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. They are Brandon Crump Jr., 21, who was convicted at trial last month on all counts and will be sentenced May 1; Kimonie Bryant, 27, who accepted a plea deal that calls for a 20-years-to-life sentence; and Andre McCoy Jr., 23, who accepted a plea deal calling for a 15-years-to-life sentence.

None now faces the possibility of the death penalty.

All three defendants were indicted on death-penalty-level offenses, though Crump was a juvenile at the time of the crimes and prosecutors say he was never in danger of getting the death penalty because the Ohio Supreme Court banned it in 2005 for offenders who committed a murder as a juvenile.

The plea deals the other two defendants accepted eliminated the possibility of the death penalty.

Though prosecutors say the evidence they produced at trial convinces them that Crump was the shooter, they also said it doesn’t really matter whether Crump was the shooter or not. He is equally responsible for the aggravated murder under Ohio’s complicity law regardless of whether he pulled the trigger or not.

The complicity law “says that a person who is complicit with another in the commission of a criminal offense is as guilty as if he or she personally performed every act constituting the offense,” former Assistant Prosecutor Mike Yacovone said during closing arguments in the trial.

Crump and Bryant were deemed indigent, meaning they did not have enough money to pay for their own attorney, so Judge Anthony D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court appointed attorneys to represent each of them. McCoy paid for his attorney, Walter Madison, which means there are no public records indicating how much Madison is being paid.

The first person charged in the case was Bryant, who initially was viewed as the shooter. Two attorneys were appointed to represent him because he was indicted on death-penalty-level charges. They are veteran lawyers John Juhasz and Lynn Maro. They have been on the case for about 3.5 years. All three defendants await sentencing.

When Crump was indicted, veteran attorneys Lou DeFabio and Ed Hartwig were appointed to represent him.

$100,000 SO FAR

Court records state the amount of money paid to the attorneys for Crump and Bryant add up to about $100,000 so far. But the bills Judge D’Apolito has approved so far cover only legal services and expert services rendered up to Feb. 22, 2023, in Crump’s case and up to Sept. 21, 2023, in Bryant’s case.

The records indicate Juhasz had earned $38,962 through Sept. 21, 2023, while Maro had earned $24,800 through Sept. 11, 2023. The total for the two is $63,653 so far.

All of the attorney reimbursements were paid at $125 per hour. That is the rate attorneys make when they work on cases in Mahoning County that involve the death penalty. That rate rose to $125 per hour from $75 per hour while this case was pending. A murder case that does not include the possibility of the death penalty is paid at $75 per hour. Many other types of cases are also paid at $75 per hour.

Maro said at least part of the cost for public defenders in Mahoning County is reimbursed to the county by the Ohio Public Defender’s Office. She said Tim Young, Ohio Public Defender, got the rate increased several years ago.

“Private practitioners are charging $200 an hour, and we’re making 50-60 bucks an hour on the court-appointed list,” she said. “He did that hoping to draw more people to the court-appointed list.”

“We’re at critical mass on that. We are so low on court-appointed attorneys, they’re getting burned out.”

For his legal work in the Crump case so far, DeFabio was paid $10,025 in a single payment Feb. 22, 2023. DeFabio was the only attorney for Crump during his trial, but DeFabio has not yet submitted a bill for the trial. Hartwig was paid $9,912 for his legal work so far in a single payment on the same day as DeFabio. The total paid to the two attorneys so far is $19,997.

DeFabio has been working on the Crump case since April 2021 — nearly three years.

Three expert witnesses for Bryant added $17,091 to the total cost so far, which brings the public’s total cost to $100,850 for legal fees and expert witnesses.

TOO HIGH? TOO LOW?

When asked what the public should think when told legal and expert fees so far have been about $100,000, Maro, who is running for Mahoning County prosecutor in the November general election said, “There is no way to answer that question. There are people who are going to say ‘Really? That’s all?’ There are people who are going to say ‘If we just executed them in the rotunda, we wouldn’t have to waste that money.’ I get feedback from both camps.

“What I will say is if we are going to execute someone, the ultimate punishment from which there is no way to reverse if we are wrong, then we need to spend the resources to ensure that you have the right person. If we are going to have it, we need to make sure we are doing it right.”

As for the long filings on the constitutionality of the death penalty, Maro said such filings “have to be filed to preserve the issues for appeal. If we don’t file that motion challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty, then when the federal appeals start, they will not address it. You have to file it now or it is waived forever.”

She said if such filings were not done in the common pleas court, “in federal court, they are going to say we provided ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to do it.”

DeFabio did not file motions regarding the death penalty because he knew there was no way Crump could get the death penalty.

LOWER HOURLY RATE

Initially, the hourly rate for DeFabio and Hartwig was $125 because Crump was indicted the first time on charges that included the possibility of the death penalty, but when Crump was indicted a second time after issues were raised about his bindover from juvenile court, he was no longer facing the death penalty. As a result, the hourly rate for DeFabio dropped to $75 per hour, DeFabio told The Vindicator.

“What I don’t think the public understands is the trial took two weeks, and the week before you are really focused. But you are not making money. Anybody who is not making money for three weeks, how do you pay your bills?” DeFabio said.

Maro told the Vindicator last week that the Bryant case was a death penalty case from the outset. That triggers a lot more work than types of murder cases and a higher hourly rate paid to the attorneys for such defendants.

“As soon as we are appointed to a death-penalty case, we need to hire a mitigation investigator, a mitigation expert,” Maro said. The amount of work to file motions in a death penalty case is “at least twice what it is in a non-death-penalty case,” she said.

An example of Maro’s claim is when she and Juhasz filed multiple motions asking for the death penalty to be dismissed from Bryant’s indictment. Some of the filings were an inch thick.

“Each case differs on how much you are going to get paid,” she said. “This case had a whole external hard drive full of documents with social media and cellphone records from everyone — from Crump, from McCoy, from Kimonie (Bryant),” she said.

The case slowed at several points by the need to give attorneys time to review all of the available documents.

EXPERT WITNESSES

Bryant has had three expert witnesses. One is Frederick Bieber, doing business as Advanced Genetics of Jamaica Plain, Mass. He earned $11,700 for his work associated with DNA evidence in the case. It was for a trip to a lab in Virginia where DNA in the case was analyzed, and Bieber observed the process.

Bieber was paid to drive the six hours to and from the lab and paid for 28.5 hours of observation time on four consecutive days in July 2022. He was paid $400 per hour for the observation time and $200 per hour for travel time. He earned $400 per hour for phone time and also was paid mileage for the travel time, plus other expenses, such as hotel, taxi, parking and airfare.

Another $1,025 was paid to James F. Crates of Columbus for his death-penalty mitigation work on behalf of Bryant in the event that Bryant needed to defend himself against the death penalty at trial. Bob Stinson of Westerville, Ohio, also was paid $225 for death-penalty mitigation work.

The total so far for legal work and expert witnesses for Bryant is $80,853.

ANOTHER VOICE

Mark Lavelle, a defense attorney not involved in the Struthers murder case, said it would not be fair for him to judge whether the $100,000 figure is appropriate “without knowing everything that went into it.” He said it also would be difficult to say what an average amount is to serve as defense counsel in a murder case.

“We bill hourly. It is significantly less than we charge in private practice because the hourly rate (in a court-appointed case) is scheduled in conjunction with the county and the public defender of the state.” He said the $125 per hour for a capital case and $75 for a non-capital case “are significantly less than our hourly rate we charge” when a client hires his or her own attorney.

Have an interesting story? Email Ed Runyan at erunyan@vindy.com.