In a one-month span from December 2005 to January 2006, California carried out its last two executions, administering lethal drugs to condemned killers Stanley “Tookie” Williams and Clarence Ray Allen.

But execution day was not the end of the line for just Williams and Allen. It also ended more than two decades of taxpayer-funded legal costs for challenging their convictions and death sentences.

An unprecedented trove of records obtained by the Bay Area News Group shows the final price tag for all the state and federal appeals for Allen, the oldest death row inmate California ever executed, was more than $761,000. Appeals for Crips street gang co-founder Williams, who gained international notoriety on death row, cost the public nearly $1 million — enough to pay the annual University of California tuition of about 76 students.

The debate over such costs is at the heart of California’s first political campaign since 1978 to repeal the death penalty, clear the state’s bulging death row and replace capital punishment with life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Secretary of State last month qualified the so-called SAFE California Act for the November ballot.

Death penalty opponents, who in the past have argued executions are unfair and immoral, are now urging voters to think with their wallets — saying the ultimate punishment has become too expensive for deficit-ridden California. Death penalty supporters say overall cost estimates are inflated and no reason to do away with executing the state’s most heinous killers.

But this newspaper’s review of the Williams and Allen cases — both considered typical for California’s death row — show the combined state and federal legal costs to see the state’s 724 condemned inmates through the nation’s most sluggish death penalty system would likely exceed $700 million. And that does not include the expense for the attorney general’s office to defend those death sentences in the courts.

Although death penalty supporters say such costs can be reduced drastically if federal judges stop meddling and the state Supreme Court moves more swiftly, the past 30 years of death row appeals suggest the expenses are inevitable if California retains capital punishment.

“I don’t know what the solution is,” said Carlos Moreno, who reviewed such appeals as both a California Supreme Court justice and Los Angeles federal judge. “Under the current system, it just takes too long and is too expensive.”

As the Williams and Allen cases illustrate, both the state Supreme Court and federal judges have built in a system that gives death row inmates automatic rights to investigate and press their appeals, with cost just the price of doing business.

An evidentiary hearing in Williams’ case, which failed to persuade the Supreme Court to accept his arguments, cost more than $111,000 for a single stage in his appeal, records show.

Federal judges paid Allen’s lawyers, investigators and paralegals nearly $500,000 for his unsuccessful district court appeal, which lasted more than a decade.

“That’s what it costs,” Moreno said. “I’ve seen it. I don’t think we’re overly generous.”

Records show the cost of these appeals and clemency dwarfs the expense and time of ordinary appeals for a murderer sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Williams’ appeals went on for 24 years, Allen’s for 26.

In contrast, a murderer serving life without parole gets a lawyer for an initial state appeal, which is done in a few years, and often has little or no legal support for a federal appeal. California has more than 4,400 life-without-parole inmates, according to prison figures.

The average cost of life-without-parole appeals is about $17,000, according to just compiled data from the six appellate projects that defend such inmates across the state. Just the clemency costs for Williams and Allen were $30,000 and $53,000, respectively.

“It certainly says we have a penalty that is far too expensive,” said Jeanne Woodford, the former San Quentin warden leading the measure’s campaign. “We’re spending this amount of money for a handful of people and it doesn’t really do anything for public safety.”

The California ballot fight is coming at a crucial juncture in the nation’s death penalty conflict. Connecticut on April 25 became the 17th state to outlaw capital punishment. And studies in states such as Maryland, Nevada and Indiana have suggested the death penalty is a costly burden on justice systems.

The measure’s supporters stress California has executed just 13 inmates in more than three decades, with little reason to believe the pace will quicken soon. Executions have been on hold for more than six years as a result of legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedures.

There is ample dispute over the true cost of continuing California’s death penalty. A study last year co-authored by prominent federal appeals court Judge Arthur Alarcon found the state could save billions of dollars by abolishing the death penalty. The study cited the greater cost of death penalty trials, appeals and housing death row inmates.

Death penalty supporters say the figures are overblown.

“How do you put a price on justice?” asked McGregor Scott, a former Sacramento U.S. attorney heading the campaign against the measure. “The numbers that have been advanced … are really made up out of whole cloth.”

In fact, no firm numbers exist for some of the costs, such as the difference between housing a death row inmate and a murderer serving life. The Alarcon study, citing California prison officials’ public statements in 2005, estimated it costs $90,000 a year more to house a death row inmate than other inmates because of tighter security and other issues. But the state Department of Corrections said last week there is no reliable figure on that cost.

However, no one disputes the major additional expense of a death row inmate’s unfettered right to contest a death sentence through the state and federal courts, or the cost of clemency proceedings in the months before an execution.

The coalition opposing the measure says the costs can be lowered significantly, in large part by trimming what it considers unnecessary rounds of litigation. It also says there is hope a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year reinstating a California death sentence will severely curtail future appeals and thus expenses.

“It doesn’t have to cost that much,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. “There is an awful lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be done.”

Victims’ families argue that costs should not drive the death penalty debate. That focus angers Barbara Christian, the mother of Terri Winchell, a 17-year-old Lodi girl murdered 31 years ago. Winchell’s killer, Michael Morales, was given a last-minute reprieve from a February 2006 execution as a result of the lethal injection challenge.

“You cannot put a value on a human life that is taken by a violent murder,” she said. “It is beyond cost. Get the executions done speedily after trial and sentencing, and the state will save money.”

Experts, however, say the price for carrying out the death penalty will be part of the equation if California’s death row continues to add inmates. In fact, some predict the Williams and Allen appeals may wind up looking downright cheap in the long run.

“If nothing much changes, it’s just going to get worse,” said Alarcon, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge. “It might just go up.”

Howard Mintz covers legal affairs. Contact him at 408-286-0236 or follow him at Twitter.com/hmintz