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Tuesday, March 20
CONTENTS
1. Senator insists Bush aides testify publicly
2. It was not just a bad idea. It may have been against the law
3. Prosecutor's firing was urged during probe
4. An historical perspective on the controversy over US Attorney firings
5. Lawmakers owe more to children in custody
6. A high price for anti-murder
1. Senator Insists Bush Aides Testify Publicly
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The New York Times
Monday, March 19, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Democratic senator leading the inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors insisted Sunday that Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush must testify publicly and under oath, setting up a confrontation between Congress and the White House, which has said it is unlikely to agree to such a demand.
Some Republicans have suggested that Mr. Rove testify privately, if only to tamp down the political uproar over the inquiry, which centers on whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement.
But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seemed to rule out such a move on Sunday. He said his committee would vote Thursday on whether to issue subpoenas for Mr. Rove as well as Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William K. Kelley, the deputy White House counsel.
“I do not believe in this ‘We’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t,” Mr. Leahy said on “This Week” on ABC, adding: “I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”
Lawmakers in both parties agree that the fate of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales may rest on what happens this week, as the White House and Congress come to blows — or find a compromise — over the testimony lawmakers are demanding. With Mr. Bush at Camp David, the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, spent the weekend in Washington weighing whether to allow Mr. Rove and the others to talk and, if so, under what conditions.
In response to Mr. Leahy’s comments on Sunday, Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said the administration was standing by its earlier promise that Mr. Fielding would give Democrats an answer on Tuesday.
“Fred has been talking with folks on Capitol Hill, analyzing various statements and conversations with folks on the Hill, and we will get back to them,” Mr. Snow said in a brief telephone interview.
He would not say which way White House officials were leaning.
“This is a complex matter and deserves careful consideration,” Mr. Snow added.
Dan Bartlett, counselor to Mr. Bush, has said it is “highly unlikely” that the president would waive executive privilege to allow his top aides to testify publicly. One Republican strategist close to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to appear to be representing the administration, said: “No president is going to let their senior staff assistant to the president go testify. Forget that. They might agree to do an informal interview, but they’ll never testify.”
Democrats, citing a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, say presidential advisers, including 47 from the Clinton administration alone, have frequently testified before Congressional committees, both while serving the president and after they had left the White House.
Even so, legal experts say precedent does not play a role in decisions about whether to waive executive privilege; each administration, in effect, writes its own rules. The Bush administration has been particularly protective of executive privilege, and Republicans close to the White House say the decision about whether, or how much, to cooperate will come down to a calculation of the political risks and rewards.
Senior White House officials have given public testimony in the past, including before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. But more times than not, it has come on the administration’s terms; Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to appear before the Sept. 11 commission, but only in private and without being required to take an oath.
When Congress and the president have not been able to resolve fights over executive privilege, it has sometimes been left to the courts to decide — most notably during the Nixon administration and the legal battle over the White House tapes. But the courts have also tried to steer clear of the wrangling over executive privilege when it is deemed strictly political.
Television talk shows on Sunday were filled with discussion of the prosecutors’ dismissals, and whether they would cost Mr. Gonzales his job. While Mr. Gonzales did not appear on any of the programs — he declined requests from at least two networks — two of the prosecutors who had been fired spoke out, as did at least five senators, including Mr. Leahy and a Republican colleague on the Judiciary Committee, Senator John Cornyn of Texas.
None of the Republicans who took to the airwaves on Sunday offered a spirited defense of the administration, but Mr. Cornyn and others did take exception to the Democratic vow to subpoena White House officials and accused some Democrats of trying to turn the issue to their political advantage.
“I’ll join Senator Leahy in getting to the facts and following the facts where they may lead,” Mr. Cornyn said. But he accused some Democrats of crossing a line “into basically a political witch hunt,” citing the role of Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as head of the subcommittee running the investigation into the dismissals of the prosecutors.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Leahy’s Republican counterpart on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, sounded cautious when asked if he still had confidence in Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Specter, a former Philadelphia district attorney, has clashed with the attorney general on a number of issues — including the administration’s domestic eavesdropping program — but said Sunday that he was “reserving judgment” until the inquiry was completed.
Already, the uproar over the dismissals has led to the resignation of Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, whose plan to remove 7 of the nation’s 93 United States attorneys was detailed in e-mail messages made public last week. The messages showed that during the last two years, Mr. Sampson had consulted extensively with the White House about planning for the firings, information that contradicted earlier assertions by Justice Department officials that the White House was not involved.
Mr. Schumer said his aides had spoken Saturday night to Mr. Sampson’s lawyer, and had received indications that Mr. Sampson “wants to come forward.” Speaking on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Mr. Schumer said, “It’s a real possibility that he will voluntarily testify.”
The lawyer, Brad Berenson, said in an e-mail message on Sunday that he had no comment on his client’s plans.
Democrats want to know who hatched the plan to remove the prosecutors, and why. They suspect that the prosecutors were removed for either pursuing or failing to pursue politically charged cases, including ethics scandals and voter fraud investigations. One of the seven prosecutors, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, said on “Fox News Sunday” that he considered his dismissal “a political hit.”
Mr. Iglesias was removed after Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, complained to Mr. Bush about what he viewed as lax prosecution of voter fraud cases in his home state. Mr. Bush has said he passed on the complaint, in general terms and without mentioning any prosecutors’ names, to Mr. Gonzales.
Another of the fired prosecutors is Carol C. Lam, whose work as the United States attorney in San Diego resulted in the conviction of Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman now serving eight years in prison. On Sunday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a member of the Judiciary Committee, cited Ms. Lam’s dismissal in echoing Mr. Leahy’s demand for public testimony from Mr. Rove.
“I think he should come up to the committee and speak under oath about it,” Ms. Feinstein said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
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2. It Wasn’t Just a Bad Idea. It May Have Been Against the Law
By Adam Cohen
The New York Times
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Bush administration has done a terrible job of explaining its decision to fire eight United States attorneys. Story after story has proved to be untrue: that the prosecutors who were fired were poor performers; that the White House was not involved in the purge. But the administration has been strangely successful in pushing its message that the scandal is at worst a political misdeed, not a criminal matter.
It is true, as the White House keeps saying, that United States attorneys serve “at the pleasure of the president,” which means he can dismiss them whenever he wants. But if the attorneys were fired to interfere with a valid prosecution, or to punish them for not misusing their offices, that may well have been illegal.
In law schools, it is common to give an exam called the “issue spotter,” in which students are given a set of facts and asked to identify all the legal issues and possible crimes. The facts about the purge are still emerging. But based on what is known — and with some help from Congressional staff members and Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University — it was not hard to spot that White House and Justice Department officials, and members of Congress, may have violated 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1520, the federal obstruction of justice statute.
Some crimes that a special prosecutor might one day look at:
1. Misrepresentations to Congress. The relevant provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, is very broad. It is illegal to lie to Congress, and also to “impede” it in getting information. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty indicated to Congress that the White House’s involvement in firing the United States attorneys was minimal, something that Justice Department e-mail messages suggest to be untrue.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made his own dubious assertion to Congress: “I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons.”
The administration appears to be trying to place all of the blame on Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who resigned after reportedly failing to inform top Justice Department officials about the White House’s role in the firings. If Mr. Sampson withheld the information from Mr. McNulty, who then misled Congress, Mr. Sampson may have violated § 1505.
But Mr. Sampson’s lawyer now says other top Justice Department officials knew of the White House’s role. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, said last week that “Kyle Sampson will not be the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy.” Congress will be looking for evidence that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty knew that what they told Congress was false or misleading.
Convictions of this kind are not common, but they happen. Just ask former White House aide David Safavian, who was convicted last year of making false statements to a Senate committee.
2. Calling the Prosecutors. As part of the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, Congress passed an extremely broad obstruction of justice provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (c), which applies to anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,” including U.S. attorney investigations.
David Iglesias, the New Mexico United States attorney, says Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, called him and asked whether he intended to bring indictments in a corruption case against Democrats before last November’s election. Mr. Iglesias said he “felt pressured” by the call. If members of Congress try to get a United States attorney to indict people he wasn’t certain he wanted to indict, or try to affect the timing of an indictment, they may be violating the law.
3. Witness Tampering. 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (b) makes it illegal to intimidate Congressional witnesses. Michael Elston, Mr. McNulty’s chief of staff, contacted one of the fired attorneys, H. E. Cummins, and suggested, according to Mr. Cummins, that if he kept speaking out, there would be retaliation. Mr. Cummins took the call as a threat, and sent an e-mail message to other fired prosecutors warning them of it. Several of them told Congress that if Mr. Elston had placed a similar call to one of their witnesses in a criminal case, they would have opened an investigation of it.
4. Firing the Attorneys. United States attorneys can be fired whenever a president wants, but not, as § 1512 (c) puts it, to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.
Let’s take the case of Carol Lam, United States attorney in San Diego. The day the news broke that Ms. Lam, who had already put one Republican congressman in jail, was investigating a second one, Mr. Sampson wrote an e-mail message referring to the “real problem we have right now with Carol Lam.” He said it made him think that it was time to start looking for a replacement. Congress has also started investigating the removal of Fred Black, the United States attorney in Guam, who was replaced when he began investigating the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Anyone involved in firing a United States attorney to obstruct or influence an official proceeding could have broken the law.
Much more needs to be learned, and Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee, has been admirably firm about insisting that he will get sworn testimony from Karl Rove and other key players. It is far too soon to say that anyone committed a crime, and it may well be that no one has. But if this were a law school issue spotter, any student who could not identify any laws that may have been broken would get an “F.”
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3. Prosecutor's Firing Was Urged During Probe
By Dan Eggen
The Washington Post
Monday, March 19, 2007
The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general's chief of staff warned the White House of a "real problem" with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.
The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys.
A Justice spokesman said there was no connection between Lam's firing and her public corruption investigations, and pointed to criticisms of Lam for her record on prosecuting immigration cases.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants" in a criminal investigation of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just quit as the CIA's top administrator amid questions about his ties to disgraced former GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
The next day, May 11, D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, sent an e-mail message to William Kelley in the White House counsel's office saying that Lam should be removed as quickly as possible, according to documents turned over to Congress last week.
"Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following," Sampson wrote, referring to "[t]he real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."
The FBI raided Foggo's home and former CIA office on May 12. He was indicted along with Wilkes on fraud and money-laundering charges on Feb. 13 -- two days before Lam left as U.S. attorney.
The revelation that Lam took a major step in the Foggo probe one day before Sampson's e-mail message was sent to the White House raises further questions about the decision to fire her, Feinstein suggested.
"There were clearly U.S. attorneys that were thorns in the side for one reason or another of the Justice Department," Feinstein said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "And they decided, by strategy, in one fell swoop, to get rid of seven of them on that day, December the 7th."
A Justice spokesman yesterday referred questions about the meaning of the "real problem" e-mail to Sampson's attorney, Bradford Berenson, who declined to comment.
"We have stated numerous times that no U.S. attorney was removed to retaliate against or inappropriately interfere with any public corruption investigation or prosecution," Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said in a statement. "This remains the case, and there is no evidence that indicates otherwise."
In recent weeks, Justice officials have repeatedly criticized Lam's record on immigration enforcement, although they had defended her record in a letter to Feinstein last year. Sampson had targeted Lam for firing since the process began in early 2005, documents show.
Lam and six other U.S. attorneys were fired Dec. 7, and another was let go months earlier, with little explanation from Justice Department officials. The dismissals, along with allegations of political interference and shifting explanations from the Bush administration, have led a handful of lawmakers to call for Gonzales's resignation. Sampson quit last week.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is leading the call for Gonzales's resignation, said yesterday that he thinks "it's highly unlikely he survives.
"I wouldn't be surprised if, a week from now, he's no longer attorney general," Schumer said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Gonzales acknowledged last week that "mistakes were made" in the firings but rebuffed calls for him to quit. President Bush said that he has "confidence" in Gonzales but that he was "not happy" with the way the firings were handled.
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4. An Historical Perspective on the Controversy over US Attorney Firings: In Making Its Inquiry, Congress Must Not Ignore That the Power to Remove is an Incident of the Power to Appoint - And Both are Necessary for the Proper Enforcement of Law
By Douglas Kniec
special to FindLaw.com
Monday, March 19, 2007
Recently, there has been much talk of a "scandal" in the Department of Justice - based on claims that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales improperly allowed politics to govern the removal of a number of U.S. Attorneys. The facts still remain to be ascertained, by Congressional inquiry. Hopefully, the facts will show that the law was administered without partisanship or favoritism.
As Congress inquires into this matter, it must be careful not to subvert the intended constitutional structure, and historical traditions in this area, by allowing its own political calculus or motivations to play a role.
From a historical perspective, the supervisory relationship between the President, his Attorney General and the nation'sbranch law offices, the U.S. Attorney's Offices, is quite well-established. Thus, Congress should examine the relevant history, before making potentially baseless accusations concerning Attorney General Gonzáles's efforts to oversee his department.
The History of The Relationship Between the Attorney General and Local U.S. Attorney's Offices
At the founding of the Republic, the contours of the relationship between the Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys were perplexing, and unsatisfactorily-defined. In those times, supervision of U.S. Attorneys was rather oddly given to the State Department, which had little interest in such matters; after all, U.S. Attorneys' jurisdiction is overwhelmingly domestic, not international. As a result, U.S. Attorneys pretty much did as much (or as little) as they wanted.
Appointed in 1790, Edmund Randolph, America's first Attorney General, wisely asked for "directive" authority over the independently-minded officers who ran local U.S. Attorneys' offices. However, Congress adjourned without addressing his request - and as a consequence, Attorneys General regrettably were compelled to operate in a rather haphazard way for close to 80 years. (Randolph even received only a half salary and was expected to supplement his income with the private practice of law. Ruefully, Randolph would describe himself as something of "a mongrel" settling for the scraps from the Cabinet's table.)
By 1870, however, Congress had recognized both the need to create a formal Department of Justice, and the importance of placing the Department's components under well-articulated lines of authority. The value of executive supervision of local offices had finally been grasped.
Historically-uninformed voices seeking short-term political advantage jeopardize this value with hasty calls for Gonzales's removal or resignation. Any claims that the Attorney General ought to take a hands-off approach regarding local U.S. Attorney's Offices are historically inaccurate. Worse, they ask us to repeat a mistake that Congress reversed as far back as 1870.
Historically, the Executive Has Received the Benefit of the Doubt on Removals of Executive Branch Officials
Not only does the Attorney General historically have authority with respect to local U.S. Attorney's Offices, but he (or she) has also enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on removals of executive officers such as U.S. Attorneys, including those subject to Senate confirmation.
Why? Quite simply because it is the executive who is in the best position to evaluate U.S. Attorneys' performance, and who is responsible for it. In 1923, Chief Justice Taft, the only member of the Supreme Court to have also served as president of the United States, affirmed that removal authority vis-à-vis executive officers, even those subject to Senate confirmation, was an incident of the president's power to nominate, not the Senate's power to confirm. Taft put it this way in the landmark case of Myers v. United States: "The power to prevent the removal of an officer who has served under the President is different from the authority to consent to or reject his appointment. When a nomination is made, it may be presumed that the Senate is, or may become, as well advised as to the fitness of the nominee as the President, but in the nature of things the defects in ability or intelligence or loyalty in the administration of the laws of one who has served as an officer under the President are facts as to which the President, or his trusted subordinates, must be better informed than the Senate, and the power to remove him may therefor be regarded as confined for very sound and practical reasons, to the governmental authority which has administrative control. The power of removal is incident to the power of appointment, not to the power of advising and consenting to appointment, . . ."
Today, the powers of the office of the Attorney General fully reflect Taft's insight. It is described as the "chief law enforcement officer of the United States, . . .guid[ing] the world's largest law office in the central agency for enforcement of federal laws." The United States Attorneys serve as the nation's principal litigators, but as the DOJ website clearly specifies, they do so "under the direction of the Attorney General."
True, a wise Attorney General will give sufficient professional latitude to each U.S. Attorney in order to best accomplish the prosecutorial and civil defense needs of each district. But latitude is not unaccountability - just as the refusal to micromanage is not an abdication of authority.
The Bush Administration Hardly Invented What Is Long-Established Removal Authority
History reveals that a defense of executive removal authority is far from merely the product of some wild-eyed theory of "unitary executive" invented by the Bush administration. Rather, it is -- as every president since Ulysses S. Grant has insisted -- a vital principle, consistent with "a faithful and efficient administration of the government." After all, said Grant, "What faith can an executive put in officials forced upon him, [or] those, too, whom he has suspended for reason?" Put another way, a boss without power to hire and fire will typically be crippled in his or her effectiveness.
The eight dismissed U.S. Attorneys may all be fine men and women; that is not inconsistent with their having been dismissed. The Constitutional system, as it has taken form over our history, puts the choice of dismissal solely in the President's hands (as he is chooses to be informed by his Attorney General). Accordingly, the President is within his rights to dismiss a U.S. Attorney even for the simple reason that he preferred someone else for the job.
Some have suggested at least some of the U.S. Attorneys were dismissed in order to shield criminal wrongdoing - that is, dismissed so that criminal prosecutions that they had overseen would fade away or be resolved with lenient plea agreements. Before making such serious accusations, however, the Congress ought to come forward with hard proof, not the whine of innuendo.
Moreover, and significantly, none of the dismissed prosecutors has come anywhere close to making that accusation. Surely, it should not be inferred.
In making its inquiry, then, Congress should be careful not to subvert what history has so well provided: the executive's ability to dismiss its officers is the structural mechanism by which the President "takes care" that the law is faithfully executed.
Douglas W. Kmiec is Chair and professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University. He is also the former constitutional legal counsel to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
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5. Justice for the young
Lawmakers owe more to children in custody
Daytona Beach Journal News editorial
Monday, March 19, 2007
When the state takes children into custody, it has the highest degree of duty to keep them safe.
But too often, children taken into the juvenile-justice system are treated more like underage criminals. And there's no better evidence of that than the death of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson.
Children have died in state custody before. Shawn Smith, 13, committed suicide in the Volusia Regional Detention Center in 2001. Anthony Dumas, 15, hanged himself in 2000 in a Broward County facility while workers watched. Two years earlier, Chad Andrew Franza, 16, did the same thing at a Polk County facility contracted to the Department of Juvenile Justice.
A 17-year old named Daniel Matthews died in 2003 at a Pinellas County boot camp after being hit by another detainee. Twelve-year-old Michael Ibarra-Wiltsie was smothered to death in 2000 by a counselor in an Ocala camp. Omar Paisley, 17, died of appendicitis in 2000 in a Miami-Dade facility after complaining of severe pain, complaints guards ignored for three days.
But Anderson's death in January 2006 was different. Captured on videotape, it riveted lawmakers' attention. Anyone with a high-speed Internet connection could watch 22 minutes of punches, kicks and volatile chemicals shoved in his nose in a futile attempt to revive him. At some points in the tape, Anderson's slight body was surrounded by seven employees of the Bay County boot camp where he was held.
That tape -- combined with state administrative officials' attempts to block its release and cover up the actual cause of Anderson's death -- drove the issue home. Within months, lawmakers had abolished military-style "boot camps" like the one where Anderson died.
But did they do enough?
There's already been another death. Dillon Taylor Peak, 14, died in June at a state-funded Outward Bound program in DeSoto County after becoming ill and suffering seizures. His parents claim he didn't get medical treatment soon enough, and a state investigation released in January found that, while Outward Bound staffers weren't guilty of neglect, they failed to follow strict guidelines that would have sent Peak to the hospital instead of back to his tent.
State officials say they're also investigating two incidents at a Department of Children and Families-contracted facility for mentally ill and disabled juvenile offenders in Liberty County. One boy was supposedly "manhandled" by staff. The other received a broken arm during a struggle with employees.
Debate during the current legislative session seems to be focusing on whether Anderson's family should be compensated for his death; Gov. Charlie Crist is pushing lawmakers to approve a $5 million claims bill. Crist is right; the state should acknowledge its responsibility in the boy's tragic death.
But lawmakers shouldn't stop there. For the sake of more than 9,000 children who are taken into state custody every year, the state should develop stronger controls that protect their safety. The bulk of juvenile-justice programs are contracted out to private providers, and that's where most of the problems have been -- suggesting that the state should get tougher with its oversight of these "outsourced" contracts. At the same time, lawmakers should recognize that more problems surface when programs are chronically underfunded.
For many of the troubled children removed from their homes by the state, juvenile-justice programs offer their best hope for getting their lives on track. But to make that crucial difference, programs must be safe. Lawmakers should recognize that their work in juvenile justice is not done.
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6. A high price for anti-murder
By Asjlyn Loder
St. Petersburg Times
Monday, March 19, 2007
Governor Charlie Crist's first legislation - the antimurder bill signed March 12 - could cost Hernando County $2.3 million a year.
The state won't pay for it. Instead, the bill will fall to county taxpayers already clamoring for tax relief.
"It's a good law. There's no question it will save lives," said Hernando County Commissioner Dave Russell, a former state legislator. "Just help us out a little bit."
Other counties are likewise reeling. In Pinellas County, the measure could cost as much as $32,600 a day, said Elithia Stanfield, deputy county administrator in Pinellas County.
"It's very frustrating because there are some legislators that say local governments are spending money like drunken sailors," Stanfield said. "And then they do this."
The bill requires violent felons who violate probation to stay in jail until a judge decides if they are a danger to the community.
The bill could add another 2,500 people to the prison population in the next five years, at a cost of $270-million, according to the senate cost estimate.
But the estimate didn't include the cost to local counties of arresting and putting offenders in county jails. That cost, the senate analysis concluded, is "indeterminate but could be significant."
In Hillsborough County, cost estimates were conservative: just $100,000 a year, or $274 a day, estimated Darlene Hansford, population analyst for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
That's because the county already has a judge dedicated to probation violators, she said. That means shorter stays - about 26 days last year - and lower costs. But Hillsborough is one of only three counties with a separate court.
"There are some angry counties out there," Hansford said. "In some counties, it's really going to cost them."
Each county used different measures to count the cost: average jail stay of probation violators, cost per day to house an inmate, number of probation violators that would be held under the law.
Pasco and Citrus Counties still haven't calculated the potential cost, said officials in both counties.
The bill moved so quickly that counties didn't have time, Russell said.
The antimurder legislation was proposed twice before, when Crist was state Attorney General. But it failed both times, in part because of skeptics wary of overburdening counties.
There are some measures in place meant to lessen the cost, including the relaxation of a "zero tolerance" policy that increased jail populations, Russell explained.
But most counties don't know yet what it will cost, and that alarms him.
"We'll know next year," he said, "When we get the bill."
Times staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.
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