Posted on 09/07/2007 8:06:16 AM PDT by SmithL
Susan Polk concluded her testimony Thursday at a hearing to determine whether she must pay the county $219,373.13 to cover the costs of her murder trial.
"I'm being billed for services I supposedly desired," Polk told Superior Court Judge Thomas Maddock at the hearing, which was continued from Aug. 21. "I didn't desire them."
Contra Costa County has billed Polk, 49, for the costs of attorneys, legal services and expert witnesses. County officials say Polk will be able to pay once her Orinda home, which is listed at $1.5 million, is sold.
Wearing a green County Jail jumpsuit and gold-plated reading glasses, Polk on Friday contested more than a dozen of her trial expenses -- including $102,775 for a two-attorney legal team and $31,612 for a psychologist who never testified.
A jury convicted Polk of stabbing to death her husband, Felix Polk, in 2002 during a bitter divorce. The couple met three decades earlier, when Susan Polk was a teenager and Felix Polk was her psychologist. She said her husband attacked her in their Orinda home and she stabbed him in self-defense.
She represented herself at her trial, which lasted more than three months.
In the years preceding the 2006 trial, Polk retained several private attorneys. But, when she had no liquid assets, she also worked with attorneys appointed by the court from the public defender's office and the county's panel of private attorneys.
When a defendant cannot afford an attorney, a judge appoints a public defender or a private attorney paid for by the county. In Polk's case, the county placed a lien on her house in August 2005 to collect reimbursement at the end of the trial if the county considered it appropriate.
During the same month, Polk asked the presiding judge to appoint defense attorney Daniel Horowitz to represent her. She said at Thursday's hearing that she asked for Horowitz because he threatened her.
Polk said Horowitz visited her in County Jail in April 2005. She said he introduced himself, and he told her that if she refused to retain him and his co-counsel, Ivan Golde, they would use their influence with the media and she "better be worried about what they might say about me."
Horowitz said in an interview that he originally visited Polk in County Jail to get her story so he would be able to pitch himself as a commentator for CNN or another cable network during her upcoming trial.
"She asked me, 'Will you represent me?'" Horowitz said. "At the time I took the case, I believed in her."
Shortly after Polk's trial began, a mistrial was declared because Horowitz's wife was killed. Polk fired him several months later.
In court Thursday, Polk acknowledged that the presiding judge had informed her in 2005 that she might have to reimburse the costs of Horowitz's representation.
Her attorney, Edwin Bradley, questioned Polk on Thursday as she sat next to him at the defense table rather than on the witness stand. Polk, who studied California law while representing herself, often cited statutes to back up her answers.
Unlike her behavior at trial, she spoke to the judge in a polite tone.
The court has ordered her home to be sold through a bidding process similar to a probate sale. Bids must be received by Oct. 8, when the highest bid will be announced. Buyers can continue bidding that day, but they must pay 10 percent cash to buy the house.
Maddock set Sept. 20 for attorneys to make final arguments.
This woman belongs incarcerated for life, with no possibility of seeing the light of day.
How a jury could let her walk free is a travesty.
she got 16 to life....
I was confusing her with Andrea Yeats. She was the one who drowned her kids in the bathtub, then pleaded insanity and was found "not guilty by reason of insanity".
Polk was the one who stabbed her husband to death.
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