Taxpayers will spend $465,270 for murder suspect Donna Moonda's defense.

Court records made public yesterday revealed the amount, though particulars of the budget remained sealed. U.S. District Judge David Dowd of Akron, Ohio, said the money will be distributed to Mrs. Moonda's three lawyers, her private investigator and experts working on her case.

Judge Dowd said he agreed to keep individual expenditures secret because defense lawyers feared that disclosing them "might in some fashion set forth the strategy of counsel" as they prepared for the trial.

Mrs. Moonda, 47, of Mercer County, Pa., is accused of arranging her husband's murder on the Ohio Turnpike in May 2005. Her 25-year-old lover, Damian Bradford, has admitted to shooting and killing Dr. Gulam Moonda, 69, a wealthy urologist.

Mr. Bradford said he and Donna Moonda set up the crime, which was supposed to look like a highway robbery. He said she promised to give him half of her inheritance and life insurance proceeds for killing her husband. Mr. Bradford has agreed to testify against Mrs. Moonda in return for a 17¹/₂-year prison sentence.

Mrs. Moonda says she is innocent. She is being held without bail in an Ohio jail.

Prosecutors have charged her with murder for hire and related crimes. They will seek the death penalty against her when she stands trial in June.

Because Mrs. Moonda is a suspect in her husband's murder, she has been unable to spend any of the $1.8 million they held in joint accounts. A Pennsylvania law called the Slayer's Act prevents her from gaining access to that money.

She also has been unable to collect another $683,000 in life insurance proceeds from her husband's death. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. has asked a federal judge in Pittsburgh to take possession of that money and ultimately decide how it should be distributed.

Mrs. Moonda said she did not have enough money of her own to fight a death-penalty case, so she asked for three court-appointed lawyers to defend her. Prosecutors opposed her request as excessive, but Judge Dowd granted it.

He ruled that the case against Mrs. Moonda was unusually complex, primarily because the government is seeking to execute a woman who did not pull the trigger herself.

She also asked for taxpayer funding for a private investigator, a psychiatrist and a "mitigation specialist," who would be part of the effort to save her life if she is convicted. Her lawyers say a psychiatrist should be part of the defense in every capital case.

Mrs. Moonda has no known history of mental illness, but she says she was addicted to drugs. A year before her husband's murder, a Mercer County hospital fired her from her job as a nurse anesthetist for stealing the painkiller fentanyl.

Before pleading no contest to the drug charge, she checked into a rehabilitation center in Beaver County. Police say it was there that she met Mr. Bradford, an admitted drug dealer with a cocaine addiction.