Opinion ID: 2820439
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Final Considerations

Text: We leave for future reviewing courts to discern the outer boundaries of what else constitutes the contours of what fits within the phrase “reasonable protective housing.” We suggest that “reasonable” protective housing implies that there is some rough correlation between a witness’s ordinary living arrangements and those provided to a witness while they are in protective housing. It likely would not have been reasonable, for example, for the State to put Payton in The Plaza Hotel 31 for the entirety of her stay in protective housing. In this case, the State paid less than $14,000 to house Payton (and, presumably, her immediate family) for approximately eight months. Such an expense, in these circumstances, is not unreasonable. 31 The Plaza Hotel is a historic New York luxury hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan, where Payton and her family could have been accommodated, with the same sum of money spent in the present case, for approximately three weeks. 40