Orange County Misconduct Scandal Costs Taxpayers $2.5 Million in Failed Capital Prosecution

The failed capital prosecution of Scott Dekraai for the worst mass murder in Orange County, California history has cost taxpayers more than $2.5 million—more than double the average cost of a California death-penalty case—and the pricetag for continuing investigations into official misconduct by the county district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices continues to rise. Unlike most capital cases, the costs were not primarily for the trial itself, but the product of a multi-year investigation and court hearings into decades-long abuses by Orange County law enforcement involving the deliberate misuse of jailhouse informants to obtain incriminating statements from targeted prisoners, including Dekraai. “The price of misconduct is steep,” said Seattle University criminal justice professor Peter Collins, an expert on death penalty costs. Dekraai pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder in May 2014, and in normal circumstances, the penalty phase of the case would have been completed later that year. However, for the past three years, the case has been dominated by the informant scandal. In May 2015, Judge Thomas Goethals disqualified the entire Orange County District Attorney’s Office from involvement in the case after finding that prosecutors had engaged in widespread misconduct, failed to disclose the improper practices, and repeatedly lied to the court about it. Additional failures by the county sheriff’s office to comply with court orders to produce records related to the scandal extended the length of the court’s investigation, and ultimately led to the court barring the state from pursuing the death penalty. According to an analysis by the Southern California News Group, taxpayers had already spent more than $2.5 million on the case, not including costs incurred by the Orange County District Attorney’s office—which said it did not track what it spent on the case—or by the state attorney general’s office after it took over the case. Known costs include approximately $1 million for defense costs over the nearly six years the case has been pending; an estimated $743,000 in costs for court time and personnel; more than $370,000 in costs for a grand jury investigation; $290,000 in pretrial incarceration costs; and more than $100,000 for the county to provide legal representation to the sheriff’s department during the investigation. In addition to prosecutor salaries and other prosecution costs, the $2.5 million estimate does not include the costs of the Orange County District Attorney’s appeal of the order removing it from the case; any state money spent on the ongoing investigation into the county’s informant abuses; nor the costs of a U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation into the informant scandal. Dekraai is scheduled to be sentenced on September 22 to eight terms of life without parole.

(T. Saavedra, “Taxpayer cost for mass murderer Scott Dekraai’s case tops $2.5 million,” The Orange County Register. September 17, 2017.) See Costs and Prosecutorial Misconduct.