Judge rebukes legislative panel

ATLANTA --- The judge presiding over the case of Brian Nichols released a letter Thursday chiding a legislative panel considering his impeachment.

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Valerie Rowell/Staff

Rep. Barry Fleming (left): Lawmaker from Harlem questioned the judge in Brian Nichols' case about a $2 million tab for defense spending.

The lawmakers' request for documents about defense spending was ill-informed and asked the judge to act illegally, the letter says.

"Simply put, I do not monitor expenses or requests by counsel," retired DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller wrote in the four-page letter to House Majority Whip Barry Fleming, R-Harlem. "I have never been asked to approve time or expense sheets, and I have not done so. I have never suggested to the defense team that they have billed too much, or too little, for that is not the trial judge's role."

Judge Fuller was responding to a pair of letters in which Mr. Fleming, who leads the panel weighing the judge's fate, asked for information about the defense spending in Mr. Nichols' case, which has soared to $2 million. In the letters, Mr. Fleming suggested the large tab for Mr. Nichols' case was an attempt to undermine death-penalty cases by bankrupting the state's indigent defense system.

"The people of Georgia are entitled to know if the Court's approval of the excessive expenditure of public funds is being used to indirectly subvert the ends of justice," Mr. Fleming wrote in one of the letters.

But Judge Fuller said a law passed in 2004 by the General Assembly gave the Public Defender Standards Council the responsibility for approving the payments to the attorneys hired for Mr. Nichols' case. Judge Fuller said he has only ordered the state to pay costs the council had already agreed to or for psychiatric evaluations required by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Judge Fuller blamed a delay in the trial on the state's hesitance to cover those expenses.

Mr. Nichols is charged with killing a Fulton County judge, a court reporter, a sheriff's deputy and a federal agent during a 2005 rampage that began at the Fulton County Courthouse. The judge also wrote that he was bound by law to keep sealed some of the information requested by legislators. Mr. Fleming, who is running for Congress, did not respond to telephone messages left at his offices in Harlem and Atlanta.

Reach Brandon Larrabee at (678) 977-3709 or brandon.larrabee@morris.com.