Last Friday, OC Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals ruled that he was taking the death penalty option away in the murder case of Scott Dekraii, thereby putting a seeming legal end to Orange County's jailhouse snitch scandal. The years-long drama, in which Dekraii's public defender found decades of illegal use of jailhouse informants by sheriff's deputies and a knowing district attorney's office, drew national attention and delayed the penalty phase for Dekraii, who confessed to murdering seven people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011. Although Goethals' ruling is expected to not get appealed, the fallout from this will reverberate in OC legal and political circles for decades to come.