Bills submitted to public agencies are public record, but Carr oddly chose a stream-of-consciousness approach in many invoices, even when referring to his own death-penalty-eligible clients.
"He just snuck up and blasted her in the head," he wrote of his client Larry Gary, now serving a life sentence for murdering his Phoenix girlfriend in November 2007. "I don't think she ever saw it coming. So he blows his girlfriend of five years' head off. Not good."
Phoenix attorney Taylor Fox served as co-counsel with Nate Carr for four years in the Israel Naranjo murder case.
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In a February 2009 invoice for four hours, Carr wrote: "Heavy work. We are getting down to the nitty-gritty. I think we are good, but it's dirty Basta and not-so-smart Steinle."
This would be Naranjo prosecutor Eric Basta and Judge Roland Steinle.
The following month, Carr said this about Dr. Brad Bayless, a prosecution expert witness in Naranjo: "Lots of impeachment material — he's the state's whore."
He charged the county three hours, or $375, to come up with that observation.
After interviewing a pair of Phoenix homicide cops in August 2010, Carr wrote, "Those two make me dislike cops even more. They are so full of garbage. I will destroy them on the stand."
Finally, this one from June 2009, an invoice for what Carr claimed was three hours of video-watching: "Looking at new video of our client from the past. He looks like a killer, not a retard."
The latter reference is to the fact that Naranjo is mentally handicapped.
Jim Logan said he never advised Carr to tone down his commentary on official county paperwork.
"It was very weird, but I never said a word to him about it," Logan said. "Why should I have?"
Maricopa County's lucrative criminal-defense niche began to explode in 2005, within months after Andrew Thomas became county attorney.
Death-penalty filings increased exponentially during Thomas' controversial reign, which ended when he resigned in 2010 to unsuccessfully run for Arizona attorney general.
By 2008, Maricopa County had become the nation's unofficial capital-punishment capital, with about 150 death-penalty cases pending — up by two-thirds from three years earlier. It didn't help that the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Ring v. Arizona mandated retrials for several convicted murderers (now they would be sentenced by juries, not judges).
Death-penalty cases are among the most expensive, time-consuming, and rigorous in the justice system. One reason is that most murder defendants are unable to afford lawyers, and the courts must appoint counsel to represent them — at great cost to taxpayers.
In Maricopa County, defense attorneys appointed to murder cases usually come from one of three Public Defender agencies. The country also contracts with private lawyers to take on cases with several defendants, who may be pointing fingers at each other and legally cannot have attorneys from the same agency representing them.
Jim Keppel, the county's presiding criminal judge during the height of the courthouse crisis regarding death-penalty cases, says there just weren't enough judges, prosecutors, and qualified defense attorneys to handle the load during the unprecedented blitz of capital filings under Thomas, who since has been disbarred. (Pending death-eligible cases have shrunk from the peak of about 150 to about 65 since Thomas' departure.)
Maricopa County tried at the time to lure more private attorneys into the death-penalty-defense fold by increasing the hourly rate for first-chair lawyers to $125 an hour and second-chair attorneys to $95 an hour. Mitigation specialists — who are similar to private investigators, but whose sole task it is to find reasons for jurors to possibly spare guilty clients — got bumped up to $55 an hour.
Twice-suspended attorney Stephen Johnson, still months away from getting his law license back, made his reentry in early 2007 as a death-penalty mitigation specialist.
Since then, Johnson has become the Zelig of Maricopa County's criminal-justice system.
In part, his ubiquitous presence is testament to how desperate county officials were during the Andrew Thomas era to lure practically anyone to work on the rash of capital cases that emerged.
Johnson has collected more than $1 million from Maricopa County since 2007 as either a co-counsel and mitigation specialist in a series of murder cases. That's about $200,000 a year, not bad for a fellow so down on his luck a decade ago that he moved back in with his parents.
A bear of a man, Johnson is known around the courthouse as gregarious and likable. But he long has taken on (and authorities have allowed him to take on) more clients and cases than he can handle. As a result, he inevitably has gotten in trouble with the State Bar of Arizona.
The Arizona Supreme Court suspended Johnson for the second time in May 2004, more than a year after he admitted lying to the state Court of Appeals about why he hadn't submitted legal paperwork on time for an incarcerated client.
More than a dozen people had filed complaints against Johnson before the suspension, claiming he ignored their cases after collecting fees.
"It is apparent that Mr. Johnson's only concern is to receive whatever amount of money he receives with as little or no work as possible," the parents of one of Johnson's incarcerated clients wrote in 2002.
"Mr. Johnson believes he is above and beyond the law."
Johnson's 2004 suspension was for six months and one day — the extra day signifying the formal proceedings he would have to undergo to be reinstated.