Fulton County taxpayers have spent nearly $216,000 to pick a jury to hear the death penalty case of courthouse rampage suspect Brian Nichols. Yet after more than a year, not a single juror has been chosen.

And it's possible many, if not all, of those expenses will have to be paid again if a new jury pool is needed because so much time has passed since the current group of 1,000 potential jurors took their oaths in January 2007, some legal experts say.

"I would imagine you're not going to be able to recoup that money," said veteran death penalty defense attorney Jimmy Berry. "Almost everything that's been allocated is gone. I don't think you can now come back and reclaim any of it."

Most of the debate in recent months has focused on the cost of paying the attorneys to represent Nichols, charged with murder in the March 2005 deaths of a judge and three other people. More than $1.5 million in public funds has been allocated so far to the defense team.

But there has been little discussion of the lesser costs, such as expenses related to finding 12 jurors and six alternates.

According to records, Fulton County had spent $215,801 in jury-related expenses for the Nichols case by the end of 2007.

Most of that money, $174,566, was for printing the questionnaires and other documents. New questionnaires may have to be printed if new prospective jurors are called.

The balance of the costs included $24,550 for jurors' $25 per diem; $12,425 for transcripts of sessions with prospective jurors; and $4,260 for postage and supplies.

The seemingly mundane expenses are for one of the more critical components of a death penalty trial, said Gwinnett County defense attorney Christine Koehler.

"I certainly would expect they will have to relitigate some things," Koehler said.

Prosecutors raised questions in October about the amount of time that had passed since the potential jurors were sworn in the previous January. At the time, Senior Judge Hilton Fuller ruled it was too soon to tell. Fuller removed himself from the case this month.

"I don't know if I've ever heard of a jury being selected, filling out questionnaires and coming back after 14 months," said Stephen Bright, a death penalty attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights.

Fuller delayed the trial five times because of funding issues. He stepped aside after a national magazine reported he told a reporter "everyone in the world knows" Nichols did it.

Koehler said the new judge on the case, James Bodiford from Cobb County, will have to consider "fairly quickly" the question of the "ripeness" of the prospective jury pool. Bodiford has not set a trial date.

Fuller, from DeKalb County, and Bodiford were chosen because all Fulton County judges excused themselves from the case.

"The question the judge will have to answer is if we can still use this [jury panel]. It's an unusual situation," Bright said.

"Even the most conscientious juror has probably read something" about the case, Koehler said.

Law professor Michael Mears of Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, who once headed the state public defender system, said the passage of time is not a problem, though some prospective jurors may have different attitudes because of their experiences in the past year. For example, Mears said, some of them may have since become crime victims.

"I don't see that as meaning they have to start all over with the jurors," Mears said.

But in October, when the first group of prospective jurors was called back for individual questioning, two in the group of 22 no longer lived in Fulton County. An additional six said they were too biased.

"Lives change," said Emory University law professor Paul Zwier.

"This is the first time, in my experience, there has been this kind of delay."