If all goes as expected, the worst mass killer in Orange County history, Scott Dekraai, will be sentenced Friday, Sept. 22, to eight terms of life without parole, one term each for the people he fatally shot in Seal Beach six years ago.

But the sentence comes with a relatively high price tag after a judge rejected the death penalty and concluded local prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies had engaged in misconduct, according to records and interviews.

As of Sept. 6, the Dekraai case has cost taxpayers at least $2.5 million, according to an analysis by the Southern California News Group. That estimate would make the case more than twice as expensive as an average death penalty case – $1.08 million – from the date of arrest to sentencing, according to a 2011 study by a Loyola Law School professor and a senior federal appellate court judge.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which said it did not track what it spent to prosecute Dekraai, noted it is more concerned with justice than with costs.

“The OCDA exists to pursue truth and justice for the people and does not put a price on either,” said spokesperson Michelle Van Der Linden. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has argued the misconduct findings are misguided and incorrect.

Whether all the money in the Dekraai case was well spent or necessary may depend on your point of view. Prosecutors wanted Dekraai to be put to death. The public defender wanted the result that was achieved: life without parole. Even with higher costs, the case opened a window on what the courts found to be systemic abuse of defendants’ civil rights.

The $2.5 million estimate covers only part of the actual costs. Other expenses, such as prosecutor salaries and costs incurred when the state took over the case, are either unknown, not compiled or undisclosed.

Dekraai case estimated costs

Assistant public defender Scott Sanders – $842,635

50 percent of his total compensation, adjusted yearly, for five years and 10 months

Defense co-chairs – $174,278

10 percent of the salaries, adjusted yearly, for attorneys Lisa Kopelman, Seth Bank and Sara Ross

Court full days – $672,960

96 full days at $7,010, an average cost provided by the Judicial Council of California

Court half days – $70,100

20 half days at an average of $3,505

Grand Jury – $370,373

Amount paid by Orange County to the Grand Jury for an investigation into the informant scandal, according to the county auditor-controller

Jail – $290,250

2,150 days at $135, an average cost provided by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department

County Counsel – $106,750

650 hours for Elizabeth Pejeau and 350 hours for Kevin Dunn, multiplied by their hourly total compensation for 2016

Total – $2,527,346 (Not including undisclosed or untracked prosecution costs)

Average California death penalty cost – $1,083,753

Taken from a 2011 report; “Executing the will of the voters?” and adjusted for inflation

Dekraai confessed to police shortly after the rampage and formally pleaded guilty on May 2, 2014. Experts say the penalty phase of his trial could have ended sometime that year. The sentencing, now scheduled for Sept. 22, could have been held about three years ago.

“If this case had been prosecuted from the outset by the Orange County District Attorney within the most fundamental parameters of prosecutorial propriety, this defendant would likely today be living alongside other convicted killers on California’s Death Row in the state prison at San Quentin,” the judge in the Dekraai case, Thomas Goethals, said from the bench during a key ruling last month.

Instead, over the past three years, the Dekraai case veered into an exploration of allegations of widespread misconduct on the part of prosecutors and local sheriff’s deputies, allegations that Goethals eventually ruled were valid. The cost to taxpayers grew steadily during those years.

Peter Collins, an associate professor of criminal justice at Seattle University – a Jesuit institution – and an expert on death penalty cost benefit analysis, put it this way:

“The price of misconduct is steep.”

Of course, not all of the costs connected to Dekraai were related to misconduct, or avoidable.

The meter started running the day Dekraai killed his estranged wife and seven others at a Seal Beach beauty salon in a custody fight over their son. He has been in county jail since the day of the killings, Oct. 12, 2011, at an average cost of about $135 a night, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Despite Dekraai’s confession to police soon after the shootings, prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies bugged his cell at the Orange County jail and sent a prolific informant to spy on him, according to documents filed by the defense in court. The goal, according to those documents was to get Dekraai to say on tape why he committed his crime. But at the time, Dekraai already had an attorney, and the use of an informant was a violation of his constitutional rights, the court ruled.

Goethals eventually learned prosecutors and deputies had made improper use of informants in other cases and removed the district attorney’s office from the Dekraai prosecution. He also took the death penalty off the table on Aug. 18, specifically citing misconduct and concerns that local officials would withhold favorable evidence in the penalty phase of Dekraai’s case.

Truth, justice and billable hours

There is no agreement, nationally or in California, on the average cost of a death penalty case. Estimates vary widely from state to state. Likewise, the $2.5 million estimate on the Dekraai case isn’t complete, in part because it’s derived only from information made available by public agencies or included in academic studies.

Some of the key elements that aren’t included in the Southern California News Group’s estimate – how much prosecutors spent on lawyer compensation, for example – aren’t tracked by the Orange County District Attorney.

“The OCDA is not a private law firm, we do not document billing hours as we do not bill clients,” said Van Der Linden.

“The OCDA is unable to provide time spent on the Dekraai case because the information does not exist,” she said. “Efforts by the Orange County Register to estimate or extrapolate costs have been repeatedly discouraged as reckless and unprofessional.”

Some county agencies were able to provide estimates of their costs associated with the case.

The County Counsel’s office estimated their two attorneys worked 1,000 hours representing the sheriff’s department at the proceedings, at an extrapolated cost of $106,750.

Some legal experts argue that tax money spent on prosecutions should be tracked.

“They only care about the headlines of seeking the death penalty,” said Mario Mainero, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. “They don’t care about the costs.”

Still, Mainero, whose name has been mentioned in political circles as a possible challenger to Rackauckas in 2018, also noted that the district attorney’s office may have inadvertently saved taxpayers money.

Because he’ll be serving a life sentence, not a death sentence, Dekraai will be housed in lower-cost prison cells instead of San Quentin’s Death Row. He also won’t be eligible for automatic, taxpayer-financed appeals that can drag on for decades.

“Their incompetence ended up saving a lot more in these other costs,” Mainero said.

Expenses, known and otherwise

The $2.5 million estimate also does not include money spent by the Fourth District Court of Appeal to hear an appeal on the case, expenses by the California Attorney General to prosecute Dekraai, or any state money spent to investigate the informant scandal, an inquiry that is continuing. A request to the state for the time spent on the case by three deputy attorneys general – two of whom took over the case around January – went unanswered.

Additionally, the estimated price tag excludes the ongoing cost of a U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation into the county’s so-called “snitch scandal.”

In the long run, even successfully obtaining a death penalty sentence can often prove costly and frustrating to some taxpayers , said Collins, the Seattle professor. More than three-quarters of the death penalty convictions in Washington state eventually are reversed, he said.

“That’s a big problem, when you spend so much money to try to get the outcome you want and 20 years later, it gets reversed,” Collins said.

“Whether you are for (the death penalty) or not, you can agree that’s a waste of time.”

The highest single cost for Dekraai’s case to date could be the public money spent to keep him off Death Row.

Dekraai’s defense probably ran close to $1 million, an estimate derived by calculating Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders’ time on the case – after consulting with those familiar with the litigation – and dividing it by his total compensation. The same was done to calculate the cost of other defense attorneys who worked on the case.

Sanders declined to comment for the story.

Another large expense in the Dekraai case was daily court costs, estimated at $743,060. That figure was based on an average of $7,010 a day provided by the Judicial Council of California multiplied by 96 full days. Half days amounted to an estimated 20 at $3,505 each.

Collins said the process of analyzing the costs of death penalty cases is important, if only because it shows the differences – in tax dollars – between sentences of death and life in prison. He hopes the information will expand the debate over the death penalty to include financial costs, as well as whether executions are or aren’t humane.

“There is no easy way to make these cases cheaper,” Collins said.

“The costs are due to super due-process, and if we take away those, it’s stripping people’s rights.”