Thursday, January 15, 2009

Shawnee County asks AG to investigate Hecht

The Shawnee County Commission is asking the Attorney General to investigate outgoing-DA Robert Hecht for the way that he has been paying himself for appellate work. Here is an article from the Topeka Capital-Journal. The article states that Hecht made $245,231.19 last year, and $127,275 of that was for the appellate work that he did.

Here is a follow-up article in the Topeka Capital-Journal reporting on previous DA's practices.

[Update: here is another follow-up article detailing some of the amounts for which Hecht submitted claims.]

2 comments:

Randall Hodgkinson said...

I've often wondered about how this works in counties with full time appellate prosecutors. How do other counties pay their prosecutors to do appeals?

Carl Folsom said...

I've heard that many counties pay the prosecutors by the appeal. Most of the time, the payments must be approved by the county commission (which is why Hecht is getting in trouble, for the payments not being approved). I'm guessing that counties like Sedgwick just have salaried appellate attorneys.