Since arriving in Idaho, Kohberger has remained at the Latah County Jail located beneath the county courthouse. The cost to the county is about $194 per day to house him there, the sheriff’s office said, which so far has totaled about $91,000 since he was brought to the state in January 2023.

By comparison, the state pays an average of about $87.50 per day to house a person in an Idaho prison.

To get Kohberger to Idaho, the Pennsylvania State Police escorted him aboard a Pennsylvania state plane from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport. The cost of the flight was about $14,100, KTVB reported. Moscow police were not sent an invoice for the flight, the city’s finance department told the Statesman. But it’s unclear whether any agency in Idaho was billed for those costs, which were excluded from the Statesman’s totals; Pennsylvania State Police have yet to fulfill the Statesman’s request for public records.

The Latah County Sheriff’s Office, which manages the jail and provides the bailiffs for court, has not experienced any other cost increases associated with Kohberger or the case, jail personnel told the Statesman by email.

The Idaho court system covers the expenses at the Latah County Courthouse, including judges’ salaries. The state court system is unable to distinguish the costs of a specific case, including for two appeals filed in the Kohberger case with the Idaho Supreme Court, Nate Poppino, spokesperson for the state court system, told the Statesman.

The same would apply to the grand jury seated by Thompson in May 2023 exclusively for the Kohberger case to review the four first-degree murder charges and one count of felony burglary against him. The grand jury unanimously indicted Kohberger during three days of hearings overseen by senior Judge Jay Gaskill of the 2nd Judicial District in Nez Perce County, according to court records.

The running tally for the Kohberger case excluded the judges’ time. But court costs are among those that the financial studies showed increase in a death penalty case. Those cases were as much as eight times more expensive for the judicial system, according to the Washington study, which was co-authored by Bob Boruchowitz, director of the Defender Initiative at Seattle University’s law school.

Overall, the studies found that pursuit of a death sentence on average cost taxpayers upward of $1 million more than when prosecutors sought life imprisonment in aggravated first-degree murder cases.

“Regardless of what one feels about the death penalty, if you’re spending millions of dollars to kill one person … how is that a good investment?” Boruchowitz previously told the Statesman.

Thompson is leading the prosecution of Kohberger and is joined on the case by Ashley Jennings, his office’s senior deputy prosecutor. Thompson earns about $120,000 each year, while Jennings is paid $104,000 annually, according to the Latah County Clerk’s Office.

In April 2023, Thompson requested help from the Idaho attorney general’s office on the case, which Judge granted. Idaho Deputy Attorneys General Jeff Nye, who leads the office’s criminal law division, and Ingrid Batey were appointed to the Kohberger case.

The agreement between the attorney general’s office and Latah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which the Statesman obtained from the prosecutor’s office, stipulates that the attorney general’s office covers travel to and from North Idaho by state vehicle, including gas, and in-office printing costs. The prosecutor’s office reimburses for hotel stays and meal costs. So far, the attorney general’s office has billed for about $6,500 and incurred about $380 in expenses for gas, according to invoice records.

Nye makes $166,000 in annual salary, while Batey earns $110,000, each according to Transparent Idaho. It is unclear how many hours per week the two work the Kohberger case. Nye and Batey did not respond to the Statesman, and neither did Dan Estes, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, despite repeat requests over a month.

Unlike defense attorneys, most prosecutor’s offices don’t tally the time they spend on capital cases, death penalty cost studies from Washington in 2015 and Oregon in 2016 found. As a result, settling on public costs for prosecutors, in addition to court, is challenging, said Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Joshua Ritter, who previously worked as a county prosecutor.

“The problem with calculating costs with a government agency, including with man-hours, is no one keeps track of it,” Ritter told the Statesman in a phone interview. “It’s just government workers doing their job. There’s no kind of billable hours and invoicing of the work, even overtime.”

Defending Kohberger an ‘enormous undertaking’

After Kohberger’s arrest, Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall of the 2nd Judicial District in Latah County appointed Anne Taylor, Kootenai County’s chief public defender, to represent Kohberger. Jay Logsdon, Taylor’s chief deputy, joined her on the case. Both are death penalty-qualified attorneys, per state requirements for capital cases, and Taylor’s pay rate was set at $200 per hour, while Logsdon will make $180 per hour.

In comparison, the salaries for prosecuting attorneys on the case amount to about $50-$57 per hour, based on a 40-hour work week. The highest paid attorney from the attorney general’s office assigned to the case makes $80 per hour.

Kohberger is considered an indigent defendant because he can’t afford legal representation, so the cost of his public defense team is covered by the county. The money for that is paid out of its general fund, and the county received no emergency funds to help with those costs, Latah County Clerk Julie Fry told the Statesman.

“The taxpayers have to cover the costs — the Latah County taxpayers,” Fry said by phone.

In March 2023, Marshall also appointed to Kohberger’s defense a third attorney, mitigation expert Elisa Massoth, who maintains a private practice in Payette County. Like Logsdon, Massoth is paid $180 per hour for work on the case, according to a record obtained from the Latah County Clerk’s Office.

Mitigation involves research work into a defendant’s background completed in preparation for sentencing if a jury returns with a guilty verdict.

“It’s an enormous undertaking,” Boruchowitz said. “The need to document every single part of the client’s life for the sentencing phase is much greater when death is on the table. The prosecutor needs to know it, too, but the defenders have got to spend considerable time, energy and funds doing that.”

It is unclear how many hours each public defender has committed to the case. Attorneys on both sides of the case remain subject to the court’s gag order and Taylor told Judge at a pretrial hearing earlier this month that the defense hasn’t responded to media inquiries.

“There are things that we can say publicly, but we choose not to,” she said. “Our team doesn’t even so much as answer ‘no comment’ to emails, to calls, to people trying to talk to us because we just don’t want to do that. It’s easier to say nothing.”

After Kohberger’s legal defense was appointed, Latah County established a “public defense extraordinary services” account. The fund essentially acts as a budget from which his public defenders can cover costs to prepare for trial.

Shortly thereafter, Judge appointed an out-of-county judge to oversee and approve the defense’s use of the county fund for expenses. Judge selected Judge Mark Monson of the 2nd Judicial District in Nez Perce County as the case’s “resource judge,” according to a Latah County District Court record obtained by the Statesman.

“One of the things that I’m concerned about is how much this costs taxpayers,” Judge said at a pretrial hearing this month.

The possible defense expenses Monson would review include salaries, travel, investigative charges and fees for expert witnesses. Each of those specific costs and expenses are sealed, per a January 2023 order Monson issued, because he determined the interest in privacy outweighs the interest of public disclosure and cited a desire to preserve the right to a fair trial.

However, through last week, Kohberger’s defense has spent almost $1.4 million, according to Latah County budget records.

Ritter estimated the costs so far for the prosecution on the case would be roughly commensurate.

“It would not surprise me at all,” he told the Statesman. “None of this is viewed as a cost, even though it’s a cost to taxpayers, because it’s not seen as above and beyond the normal budget. … If it was a private enterprise, it’s something you would absolutely be keeping an eye on. When it’s the government, it’s a whatever-it-takes kind of mentality.”

Last week, Judge rescheduled a hearing for arguments over a trial change of venue for June 27. Kohberger’s trial date has not been set. It isn’t expected to start until at least spring 2025.

_____

©2024 Idaho Statesman. Visit at idahostatesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.