SANTA ANA – Authorities covertly recorded more than 100 hours of jailhouse conversations between the Huntington Beach man charged with killing eight people in a Seal Beach salon and an informant, court documents reviewed by the Register reveal.

Deputy Public Defender Scott Sanders contends in a pretrial motion that prosecutors and police installed an audio-recording device in Scott Evans Dekraai's one-man cell Oct. 19, 2011, one week after Dekraai was charged with the deadliest mass killing in Orange County history, and recorded his conversations for six days. The informant, in custody after a weapons conviction, was in a nearby cell.

Sanders said in his motion that he is not questioning the legality of the secret recordings but is seeking to determine whether the informant initiated the conversations or enticed Dekraai into talking about his meetings with his own attorneys, the shootings or his background.

If the conversations were enticed or pre-arranged, Sanders contends in his motion, it could be a violation of Dekraai's rights to legal representation because they took place after Dekraai was represented by a lawyer.

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