Attorneys for East Area Rapist suspect want more lawyers, investigators to defend client
His public defenders call it a David-vs.-Goliath story: the defense team representing the man suspected to be one of California’s most notorious serial killers against the assembled army of prosecutors and investigators whose job it is to convict him.
Now overwhelmed Sacramento defense attorneys for Joseph DeAngelo are pleading with Southern California judges for more resources to represent the man prosecutors allege is the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist.
DeAngelo’s defense team in court papers filed last week are calling for judges to appoint defense attorneys and investigators from Orange, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties to help shoulder the load in a case expected to take years and cost millions of dollars to resolve.
“The cost of defense has been borne by the Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office alone,” DeAngelo’s defense team – Sacramento County supervising public defenders Alice Michel, Joseph Cress and Norm Dawson – argued in its filing to Santa Barbara Superior Court late last week. “Without additional assistance, Mr. DeAngelo will not have constitutionally adequate counsel.”
For nearly two years, the Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office has gone it alone, the defense team argues in its court papers, outspent and outnumbered by a team of prosecutors and investigators assembled from the counties where prosecutors allege DeAngelo waged his murderous wave of terror in the 1970s and 1980s.
DeAngelo, 74, faces 13 murder counts and 13 counts of kidnap for robbery filed in connection with a series of rapes he is believed to have committed from 1974 through mid-1986. He remains held without bail at Sacramento County Main Jail.
DeAngelo, the former Auburn police officer, faces the possibility of a death sentence in connection with 12 slayings that began in Sacramento County with the Feb. 2, 1978, shooting deaths of Katie and Brian Maggiore, a young couple killed while walking their dog in Rancho Cordova.
He also faces the possibility of a death sentence if convicted of four slayings in Orange County, four in Santa Barbara County and two in Ventura.
A 13th killing in 1975, the slaying of Visalia journalism professor Claude Snelling, is not being prosecuted as a capital crime because the death penalty was in limbo at the time over legal challenges.
At least another 51 were raped. Another 37 rapes believed to have been committed by the East Area Rapist have gone uncharged, DeAngelo’s attorneys say in their papers.
“This is a case of unprecedented magnitude. Such an amassing of resources by the prosecution from other counties has never been seen in the prosecution of a single defendant in a single county,” the attorneys wrote. “This would be a true ‘David versus Goliath’ story except in this version, David has no stone and he is bound tightly by his own sling. The mismatch in this case is absurd.”
DeAngelo’s defense team points to the combined budgets of Contra Costa, Orange, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura counties.
The total pencils out to $380 million – outpacing Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office and its $36 million budget by a more than 10-to-1 margin.
And the Public Defender’s Office is expecting no money in the budget in the immediate future – not from Sacramento County in its 2020-21 budget, nor from a proposed $20 million funding bill introduced last year by state Assemblyman and former Sacramento County sheriff’s Capt. Jim Cooper, D-Elk Grove, that died in committee.
“The Sacramento (County) Public Defender and Sacramento County taxpayers are solely on the hook for all of the defense costs,” the defense attorneys argue.
DeAngelo’s last court date appeared to trigger the filing. Defense attorneys at the Jan. 22 hearing pleaded to push the preliminary hearing into January 2021.
Defense attorneys argued they needed the extension to pore over the more the more than 250,000 pages of evidence and tens more thousands of pages of DNA evidence turned over so far by prosecutors and to prepare for a May preliminary hearing that could stretch into the summer.
Prosecutors in January said they anticipated calling as many as 150 witnesses at a marathon six-to-eight-week preliminary hearing.
DeAngelo defense attorneys are forecasting upwards of 200 or more witnesses.
But Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White set a May 12 preliminary hearing date over defense objections at the Jan. 22 hearing telling attorneys and a packed gallery that victims and witnesses now in their 60s, 70s and 80s are growing older and may not be available when the case finally gets to trial.
“People are not going to live forever, and it’s not the people’s fault that these crimes were committed so long ago,” White said from the bench.
This story was originally published February 24, 2020 at 3:16 PM.
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