The Most Expensive Criminal Cases in U.S. History

By the time the McMartin Preschool trial ended in 1990, it had cost Los Angeles County taxpayers more than $15 million (or about $37 million today), making it the most expensive criminal case in U.S. History.

At trial, 124 witnesses testified over 33 months. In the end, the district attorney was unable to get any guilty verdicts on more than 100 counts of child molestation against teachers and workers.

After interviewing hundreds of children, investigators chased countless claims that, in retrospect, are suspiciously ostentatious: teachers smashing up turtles and hacking apart rabbits as class punishment, or molesting young kids in secret tunnels burrowed underneath the school building. 

Today, the McMartin Preschool Trial is remembered as being emblematic of a nationwide “satanic panic,” one of many cases from the 1980s in which a conspiracy about a shadowy cult conducting mass child abuse captivated the American public.

But it also goes down in history for its price tag. Read on for the other criminal trials in its company.

Unlike with the McMartin Preschool trial, there was never any doubt about whether a crime occurred in Oklahoma City.

A truck bomb containing thousands of pounds of explosives detonated at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on the morning of April 19, 1995, killing 168 people and wounding several hundred others. It remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history. 

Accordingly, the trials around the bombings would be expensive. And, in an ironic twist, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two men responsible for an attack against the federal government, would receive millions of dollars of legal defense from that very same government.

McVeigh, the mastermind and lead perpetrator of the attack, was defended for $13.8 million. That included $4.5 million on lead attorney fees and an additional $5 million for investigators and expert witnesses.

The money, ultimately, did not protect him. A federal jury in Colorado found McVeigh guilty on eight counts of first-degree murder and one count each of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of such a weapon and destruction by explosive, and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection at an Indiana federal prison in June 2001, making him the first federal inmate to be executed in 38 years. 

Nichols’s defense cost more than $6 million, with his lead attorney making $125 per hour. In federal court, Nichols was found guilty on a conspiracy charge but acquitted of the murders. Later, in state court, he was found guilty of the murders. On those charges, he was given 161 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Between the investigation of the bombing and the prosecution of the defendants, the federal government spent $82.5 million.

Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency was historic for its unprecedentedness, but the corruption scandal that followed it in Illinois was likewise beyond comparison.

Months after Obama vacated his seat on the U.S. Senate, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, was charged with attempting to sell the position for approximately $500,000, according to a federal indictment. As governor, it had been Blagojevich's responsibility to appoint Obama’s successor.

Blagojevich was impeached by a nearly unanimous vote in the Illinois House of Representatives and then unanimously removed from office in January 2009 after his trial in the state Senate.

While it is difficult to put an exact figure of his criminal trials, they were undoubtedly costly. His defense on his first trial cost $2.6 million, paid for in part by his leftover campaign funds. That trial resulted in a single conviction (for lying to the FBI), with the jury deadlocked on the other 23 charges. 

After that verdict, Blagojevich argued it would be a waste of “tens of millions” of taxpayer dollars for the federal government to attempt a retrial.

But Blagojevich was retried—and convicted—on an additional 17 counts, including wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to solicit and accept bribes.

According to CBS, Blagojevich’s defense team cost $2,600 per day for a trial that lasted more than two months. They add that the FBI wiretapping investigation that preceded his arrest cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.  

Illinois Public Radio said that his first corruption trial was hard to accurately price, but that it could have cost as much as $30 million, noting that the jury alone was paid more than $67,000 for their work.  

In the end, Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison, which he began serving in December 2011. That sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump in 2020, after Blagojevich, who’d appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice, had served eight years.

The “Trial of the Century,” for the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, allegedly at the hands of retired National Football League player O.J. Simpson, was a national spectacle. But it was also a financial albatross—both for the city of Los Angeles and for Simpson himself.

Los Angeles County spent approximately $9 million for Simpson’s trial in 1995 (equivalent to about $19 million in 2025), including an estimated $4 million to the district attorney’s office for his prosecution and $3 million to the sheriff’s department for his jailing and transportation in the 15-plus months between his arrest and acquittal.

As for Simpson, his own costs may have matched or exceeded those of the county. He paid for his own defense—upwards of $50,000 per day, according to some estimates. In order to foot that bill, he not only relied upon his considerable savings, but also signed sports memorabilia from his holding cell, which were then sold by his agent.

Simpson was acquitted of the murders in October 1995, but his financial woes didn’t end there. A separate civil trial found Simpson liable for the killings in 1997 and ordered the former footballer to pay $33.5 million to the two families as penalty. 

Simpson would later coordinate and execute an armed robbery of sports memorabilia—some his own—at a Las Vegas casino hotel room in 2007. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison and released after nine on October 1, 2017.

At the time of his death in 2024, Simpson still had not paid the victims’ families most of what he owed them.