‘Murder insurance’ offers Texas counties a way to pay huge expense of death penalty trials

On Dec. 8, 2013, San Antonio Police Officer Robert Deckard was shot in the forehead during a highway chase of armed-robbery suspects on Interstate 37 that took him into Atascosa County.

A seven-year veteran of the Police Department, Deckard spent 13 days in intensive care at San Antonio Military Medical Center before he died. He was 31 and a father of two. Shawn Ruiz Puente, then 32, and Jenevieve Ramos, 28, were charged with capital murder.

Puente’s trial, the first in Atascosa County since 1996 to carry a possible death penalty, is set for August in the stately 1912 courthouse in Jourdanton.

Texas counties are largely responsible for the defense of indigent people accused of crimes, and the expense of a death penalty trial can be devastating. But Atascosa County, with 48,000 people and dwindling revenues from a waning regional oil and gas boom, has dodged that budget nightmare.

It is among 178 Texas counties that pay annual premiums for a sort of murder insurance offered by a quasi-public organization of experienced, well-paid defense lawyers that sends an entire legal team to the covered counties to represent defendants who face possible execution.

The alternative can be financially crippling. Jasper County, near the Louisiana border, paid out more than $1.1 million to defend three white supremacists who in 1998 chained a black man, James Byrd, to the back of a pickup and dragged him 3 miles before dumping his headless body. Property taxes were raised 6.7 percent over two years to cover the trials’ costs.

In 2009, Gray County, in the Panhandle, spent nearly $750,000 — a tenth of its entire annual budget — for the death penalty trial of a man already serving two consecutive life sentences in Missouri. The county had to raise taxes and withhold employee raises. A defense attorney remarked that if prosecutors had sought only life without parole, it would have cost the county about $10,000.

About five years ago, Atascosa County signed on with the Lubbock-based Regional Public Defenders Office, said De’Ann Belicek, the county’s indigent defense coordinator. She said that after Officer Deckard was killed, she immediately thought of the RPDO contract.

“Literally, the second we hear of any capital murder, we call the Lubbock office and within an hour or two they send one or both of their attorneys from the San Antonio field office,” Belicek said. “A case like that can bankrupt a county.”

She said the San Antonio-based RPDO lawyers, Anna Jimenez and Lisa Jarrett, have gotten along well with Atascosa County judges and the district attorney’s staff.

“There’s never any behind-the-back antics,” Belicek said. “They’re always prepared, always file the right motions, and I would even say that by coming so quickly it might help the district attorney decide whether to seek the death penalty.”

If prosecutors decide to seek life without parole rather than the death penalty, the defense team might stay on the case anyway, a decision made case by case.

The RPDO has one of the most peculiar pedigrees of any Texas state agency — quasi or not.

Texas is in the minority of states that don’t provide counties full or at least 50 percent funding for their indigent capital murder cases. Famous for sending more defendants to death than any other state — having executed 538 people since 1982, more than a third of all U.S. executions in that time — Texas has also historically underfunded indigent legal defense and court-appointed lawyers at the county level.

A study called the Fair Defense Report by the Austin-based, nonpartisan Texas Appleseed group stated in 2000 that Texas was “the only state in which capital cases are defended almost exclusively by members of the private bar rather than by public defender programs” and that Texas’ more skilled capital murder lawyers could barely be found in some parts of the state.

Enter the Lubbock County Commissioners Court, which got a state grant in 2008 to provide attorneys in capital cases for about 85 West Texas counties.

“While it may not seem like a natural fit because Lubbock County is very red and Republican, they had a lot of foresight, took the risk and deserve some praise,” said Ray Keith, RPDO’s current director. “A lot of farmers and ranchers are very aware of risk and reward.”

The murder insurance idea proved so successful that regional public defender offices soon opened in Midland and Amarillo, then Uvalde, Kingsville, Corpus Christi (the office there later moved to San Antonio), Clute, Burnet, Wichita Falls and Terrell. The counties pay an annual premium based on their population and history of capital murder cases. Only those with fewer than 300,000 residents can participate.

RPDO has 43 employees, including five investigators, 15 attorneys (making $104,000 annually) and 12 specialists who can develop evidence of mitigating circumstances that might convince juries to impose life without parole rather than the death penalty. It gets about half its funding from participating counties and half from a true state agency, the Texas Indigent Defense Commission.

It doesn’t raise money on its own. And it’s not an advocacy organization. It takes no official position on the death penalty.

A TIDC-funded study of the Regional Public Defenders Office by two national authorities on state indigent defense systems said the Texas group had made a “huge difference in the delivery of capital defense representation in rural Texas,” closing some 112 cases in its first eight years, only six resulting in the death penalty. The audit mainly suggested staffing changes and increased state funding and pointedly said, “Burnout is becoming a problem in RPDO.”

In 2014, total indigent defense costs across Texas came to about $230 million, of which counties contributed about $186.7 million.

“Most attorneys would agree that an entirely state-funded indigent defense system is the best way to go,” TIDC director Jim Bethke said. “But the RPDO is a great alternative because it forces the state and the counties to collaborate.”

A fully state-funded agency that might aggressively represent cop killers would not be politically palatable to a Republican-controlled Legislature. But counties that offer only underpaid, indifferent legal assistance have a good chance of getting their case overturned on appeal, and counties often must pay for a retrial.

Bethke says he encourages counties to join RPDO but has found that dozens of smaller ones still think the program is unneeded.

“They say, ‘We’ll never file a death penalty case,’ but if they have a sheriff or judge killed, they’ll insist on using the death penalty. But then it’s too late to call RPDO,” he said.

When Anderson County in East Texas had a mass killing in 2015, its officials belatedly inquired about joining RPDO, but were told, much like an uninsured driver after a crash, that insurance doesn’t work that way.

Atascosa has joined the four other counties in its judicial district — Frio, Karnes, La Salle and Wilson — in paying $60,000 annually for RPDO assistance. Some larger counties pay upward of $150,000 a year, and some pay just $1,200, such as tiny McMullen County, population 707 in 2010. That county hasn’t had a capital murder case in at least 60 years.

“I thought it was something that would protect the taxpayers of our county,” McMullen County Judge James Teal said. “La Salle had two or three murders in the past several years, and with the Eagle Ford (oil and gas boom) we had changing demographics.

“There was no opposition among the commissioners,” Teal added. “It was a no-brainer.”