The Price of Justice

When 20-year-old Ina Stephanie Weiner took off from her home in Miami early last September and headed for Montreal in her mother's panel truck, she said she was going to take along a friend and drop him off in New Jersey. A week later, in the farm lands of Somerset County, Md., Ina's badly beaten and decomposed body was found stuffed into her sleeping bag. Police charged that her New Jersey-bound friend, Henry King, 23, of Chesapeake, Va., had killed her, then stolen the truck and her belongings. King was eventually caught in Indiana.

It was a chilling case of casual violence, but peaceful Somerset County had an extra reason for dismay. Although the deadly encounter was between two out-of-state transients, Somerset County's 9,000 taxpayers would have to bear the cost of the trial.

Murder trials do not come cheap, and because witnesses would have to be brought from Florida, New Jersey and Indiana, estimates ran as high as $25,000. That is more than one-third of the entire amount that Somerset County spends on its sheriff's and prosecutor's offices in a normal year. Some officials claimed that the county simply could not afford the trial, but they failed in all efforts to get special funds from the state. Nonetheless, the county prosecutor, Robert Horsey, 39, vowed: "We will prosecute this case properly whether we have the money or not. The county will pay whether it can afford it or not. The law is the law. We will do everything necessary for the case, and we will present the bill to the county."

In the midst of this contretemps, Prisoner King mysteriously acquired a hacksaw blade, sawed through a barred window of the county jail and escaped.

"Fifty people already have said to me that this will save the county the cost of trying him," Prosecutor Horsey observed, "but that was just a jesting comment. We are still planning on trying him when we get hold of him again."

In less than 24 hours King was recaptured at his mother's house in Chesapeake, which means Somerset County still confronts the expense of a trial, plus the small added cost of extraditing the prisoner from Virginia.

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