Utah County agrees to pay $1.8M for defense of man charged with capital murder, settling lawsuit

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah County will pay $1.8M for Michael Jayne's capital murder defense.
Jayne's lawsuit argued inadequate funding violated constitutional rights for effective counsel.
Settlement may influence future capital cases' funding; Utah County faces budget constraints.

PROVO — A man facing the death penalty in Utah County succeeded in forcing county officials to pay his attorneys nine times more than originally promised.

Michael Jayne, who is charged with aggravated murder in the death of Santaquin Police Sgt. Bill Hooser, filed a lawsuit in April claiming his defense was hampered because it did not have the funding needed for a death penalty case. He compared the money for his case — a $200,000 cap on attorneys' fees, with $140,000 for other expenses — with the $1 million initially approved for the defense of Tyler Robinson, who is accused of killing Charlie Kirk.

Jayne filed the complaint without the assistance of attorneys, but Judge Jill Parish appointed a local defense attorney — Neal Hamilton — and a Colorado law firm that specializes in civil rights cases to represent him in the federal lawsuit. Elizabeth Wang, a partner in that firm, said this was a case where the county wasn't meeting its constitutional obligation to indigent defendants facing the death penalty.

"As I learned more about … the kinds of contracts that (Utah County is) providing to people that they're seeking the death penalty against, I just thought the whole thing was abhorrent," Wang said after the settlement was announced. "It clearly, to me, was unconstitutional. It did not comply with the ABA (American Bar Association) guidelines for capital funding, which requires high-quality defense and legal representation. … The ABA guidelines say very clearly that there are not supposed to be any caps."

In a July hearing, Judge Parish said the $200,000 cap for capital cases seems "just flat out per se unreasonable. It cannot equate to constitutionally effective counsel."

The judge then ordered the parties to work to settle the lawsuit and provide more funding. Jayne's attorneys said Friday that Utah County has agreed to pay $1.8 million for Jayne's defense, including the fees and expenses it has already paid. The settlement also allows for Jayne's defense attorneys to obtain more funding if a panel of attorneys qualified for capital cases approves it.

This settlement could lead to other defendants asking for similar funding.

"This one victory is on behalf of Michael Jane," Wang said. "But anybody who is facing capital charges should be asking for this contract."

Long-time defense attorney Mark Moffat called the settlement "a big deal" as death penalty cases have been historically "grossly undercompensated."

"A model like that has been in place for a while," he said, noting Utah County opted out of a statewide defense fund and contracts individually for each case. Death penalty cases are "the most difficult work in the criminal justice system."

Until last week, Utah County was seeking the death penalty in four cases — more than the rest of the state combined.

There are currently three men on death row in Utah, with the most recent execution in 2024.

Utah County Commissioner Skyler Beltran responded to the settlement announcement with this statement, "The original contract, which the defense team agreed to, was based on the contract used by the Utah State Indigent Defense Commission. The resolution we ultimately reached reflects a cooperative effort by the County and the defense team to adequately fund the constitutionally afforded defense while also working within the realities of a finite local government budget funded by taxpayers."

In the July hearing, an attorney representing Utah County pointed out that Jayne's attorneys signed the contract he asserted was inadequate.

"The problem here is the victim of the bad decision is someone who had no say whatsoever in the decision," the judge said. "It's the person whose constitutional rights are at issue."

Jayne, 44, of Garrett, Indiana, is accused of killing Hooser on May 5, 2024. He left a traffic stop in a semitruck he was driving, flipped around on I-15's northbound lanes near Santaquin and drove into Hooser, according to charging documents. His attorneys claim Jayne did not see Hooser and did not intentionally kill the sergeant.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.