Kraft Lawyers Reportedly Spent $5.5 Million : Trial: A defense attorney blamed the high cost, which does not include lawyers’ fees, on prosecutors for including so many murders.

Serial killer Randy Steven Kraft’s lawyers reportedly spent $5.5 million on investigators and other expenses during his six-year defense, but the attorneys Saturday blamed the high costs on prosecutors for including so many murders in his case.

“If you are dealing with a single murder, yes, that’s a high figure,” said Kraft attorney James G. Merwin. “But we had to investigate 37 murders. We had to do things you wouldn’t have to do in the average homicide trial.”

The $5.5 million--all at public expense--does not include the salaries for Kraft’s three court-appointed lawyers, whose fees ranged over the years from $50 to $95 an hour. Those records remain sealed. But the lawyers’ salaries should be significantly lower than the $5.5 million in expenses, if the attorneys billed for 40-hour work weeks.

Kraft, 44, was sentenced to death in Orange County Superior Court two weeks ago for 16 Orange County murders. Legal experts had put the total cost of his trial at a minimum of $10 million.

All defense costs, including attorney fees and expenses, were ordered sealed by Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas until Kraft’s appeals are exhausted. But the Orange County Register reported Saturday that state controller’s records put the Kraft expenses at $5,495,200 between 1983 and 1989.

Merwin on Saturday would not confirm the state controller’s figures, citing the judge’s order. But Merwin did not refute the figures, either. Instead, he responded that the case was unique and that everyone knew the numbers would be high.

Besides the three lawyers, the Kraft defense included up to 15 investigators, paralegals, secretaries, a crime lab team, computer and graphics experts, expert witnesses, and considerable travel expenses.

Kraft was charged with 16 murders, but both sides treated it as a 37-murder case. Prosecutors had added 21 other murders in court papers for possible use at the penalty phase of his trial, including six in Oregon and two in Michigan. The victims, most between the ages of 18 and 25, had been found almost always dumped along freeways or in remote areas over a span of 11 years.

Shortly before the trial began July 19, 1988, prosecutors accused Kraft of eight more murders, all in Los Angeles County, to make the total 45. But they agreed not to include them in the penalty phase, which kept the official number for trial use at 37.

Kraft’s trial had been repeatedly delayed as the defense lawyers argued to the court they needed more time to prepare against all 37 murders.

On travel expenses, Merwin said there was no way to prepare without sending defense staff out of state.

“We had to spend a lot of time in Oregon and Michigan investigating those murders,” Merwin said. “But when you have 37 murders spread over that many years, you have witnesses to track down from all over the country.”

Kraft attorney William J. Kopeny said Saturday that the defense argued all along that prosecutors should cut down the number of murders involved in the case.

“We said several times to Bryan Brown (Kraft’s prosecutor), just tell us any one of these murders that you aren’t going to use,” Kopeny said.

Brown ended up presenting 24 murders to the jury: The 16 in the guilt phase, plus the six Oregon and two Michigan murders in the penalty phase.

“If we had known from the beginning he would just use 24 murders, we could have saved a lot of time and money that we invested looking into those 13 other murders,” Kopeny said.

But during pretrial hearings, prosecutors ridiculed the defense arguments about the size of the case.

“We don’t determine how many murders are in a case, the defendant does,” Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks said during the debate last year. “It was Kraft’s decision how many people he was going to kill.”

Most prosecutors believe Brown had no choice but to inform the court he might use 37 murders. For example, if Kraft were convicted of only two or three murders in the guilt phase instead of 16, then Brown might have been forced to include all of the other murders in the penalty phase to make sure jurors understood they were dealing with a serial killer.

Merwin said Saturday that most of the defense expenses were for investigators.

“You have to remember that our client maintained that he did not kill anyone,” Merwin said. “That means that we had an obligation to determine who might have. The police had a list of nearly 500 suspects, and we had to spend a lot of time checking out all those names.”

Merwin said there was also considerable expense on expert witnesses, and he pointed out they all made more money per hour than Kraft’s attorneys.

For example, a pathologist hired to review all the medical evidence had to come in from out of state to testify. A jury expert from Wisconsin made two trips to Orange County to present defense evidence that Kraft could not receive a fair trial unless his case were broken up into multiple trials.

Some prosecutors privately criticized the defense for what they believed to be needless expense.

For example, the defense hired a tire expert with more than 30 years experience with the Firestone Co. in Akron, Ohio, to show that a tire track was not made by Kraft’s vehicle. But prosecutors claim no one had ever believed it was, and many jurors later said they considered the expert’s full day of testimony a waste of their time.

Further, the defense lawyers brought in numerous character witnesses for Kraft during the penalty phase of the trial, many from out of state. But some jurors said later that they were bored with the long parade of people talking about Kraft’s good points and that it had little impact on them.

Merwin defended the defense costs.

“We did not spend a penny we did not think was necessary,” Merwin said.

Judge Cardenas was in charge of overseeing and approving all defense costs, and over the past several years has defended the three attorneys as having “high integrity.” Cardenas said he turned down some of the lawyers’ expense requests, such as cost-of-living increases for the defense staff.

Kopeny said Saturday he believed it was inappropriate for the state controller’s office to make any figures available that might reflect the defense costs.

“The judge meant for them to be sealed and that’s the way it should have remained,” Kopeny said.