A man who served as an expert witness in an indigent defendant’s case asked county supervisors to pay him $5,000 for his work on Friday, but the board’s attorney questioned whether they could.
Thomas Simpson said he presented the county with an invoice for some work he did for the public defender’s office a couple of years ago and asked to get paid.
“It’s been a couple of years since the work was done. I just wanted to know if there were any questions I needed to answer or what I might need to do to get that invoice paid,” he said.
Board attorney Wayne Dowdy said he’s not sure whether the board can legally make the payment and said he wants an attorney general’s opinion on the matter.
“I have all sorts of questions about the procedure. I cannot find the statute that allows the public defender’s office ... or the judge, really” to order such a payment,” he said.
Dowdy also questioned the invoice’s “nice, round figure” with no apparent itemization of the services rendered.
“We don’t know what we're paying you for. We have no earthly idea,” he said. “It’s just a nice, round figure of $5,000 for an indigent’s trial, and we’d like to know.”
Dowdy asked Simpson how arrived at that figure.
“This was the amount that was approved,” Simpson said. “I was approved to work a certain amount of hours. I worked far, far beyond those hours. That was just the amount I was allowed to bill for.”
Simpson’s appearance helped clear up some of the matter for supervisors, who were unaware of the nature of his work.
“I thought you did some kind of labor for them,” Supervisor Lee Fortenberry said, referring to more blue-collar work.
“I call it labor,” Simpson said. “I spent many, many hours working on the case. I sent the bill for that and then they continued the case. The public defender was approved for a second round of funding and I worked on it further.”
Officials asked Simpson what his work involved.
“I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to talk about it,” he said.
Dowdy suggested the board meet with Simpson in executive session, citing the potential for litigation, and try to discern the merits of the invoice and the legality of paying it.
“There is a dispute about the board of supervisors being asked for the first time to pay a significant amount of money, $5,000. That is quite a precedent,” he said.
Supervisor Robert Accardo told Simpson the board understands he wants to get paid, and the county wants to pay its bills.
“As a board, we are responsible for the people’s money. We like to pay bills for the county but we’ve got to be responsible for the county,” he said. “Can you be a little more patient with us?”
“Absolutely,” Simpson said.
Supervisors have expressed concerns that paying the invoice would lead to more expenses to hire expert witnesses in the future, and that the money should come from the public defender’s budget.
Public defender Paul Luckett recently said the use of expert witnesses — and the county’s payment of their services — is nothing new. He said the public defender’s office typically uses expert witnesses two or three times a year. He said a judge weighs the relevance of their testimony before granting permission to hire them and then draws up a court order directing supervisors to pay the witness.
Later in the meeting, Dowdy noted that a previous judge’s order for a purchase rankled the State Auditor’s Office, which penalized the county.
“Ten years ago, another judge, not either of the two circuit judges now but another one, sent a bill over here for some kind of TV that he bought. and had the bill sent to us for the courtroom,” Dowdy said. “So anyhow, we paid it, and what happened in that audit? It was a violation and we got written up that year.
“There are a lot of aspects to this. Everybody wants to obey a court order and nobody wants to get cross with a judge.”
“We don’t want to get cross with the State Auditor, either,” Accardo said.
County Administrator Tami Dangerfield noted audit findings — including unauthorized purchases — stick with a county’s financial record and can negatively affect the amount of funding they receive.
“Your state funding depends on how your state audits go,” she said.
Dangerfield said she remembers the incident with the judge’s TV because it occurred when she was county purchasing agent and she got written up by the Auditor’s Office for it.
She cited that past experience as an indication to proceed with caution.
“I was written up for it, not the judge,” Dangerfield said.
