Brothers Gerald and Louis Garzone may have to pay with jail time and restitution for their roles in illegally harvesting body parts, but they don’t have to pay the salaries of the district attorneys and detectives who worked to bring charges against them for their crimes.
In two opinions this week in Commonwealth v. Gerald Garzone and Commonwealth v. Louis Garzone, the same three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania overturned a trial judge’s ruling that the “extraordinary” costs incurred by the district attorney’s office and county detectives in preparing the complex case for trial only for the defendants to plead guilty at the start of the trial could be repaid by the defendants. The judge only included costs for the prosecutors, who spent all of their time on this case and excluded the “non-extraordinary costs” of salaries for prosecutors or detectives working on multiple matters at once. The costs, including salaries of the prosecutors and detectives and the cost of convening a grand jury, totaled $90,028 in Gerald’s case and $90,101 in Louis’ case.
