Jailhouse informant program used for decades, and sheriff's dept. tried to cover it up, brief says
Judge Thomas Goethals of the Orange County, California Superior Court has threatened several times to send people at the county sheriff’s department to jail for shredding or playing discovery games with evidence about the department’s jailhouse informant program, the Orange County Register has reported in the past.
But the 5,653 pages of evidence that the department did disclose last December could also get it in trouble. According to a brief (PDF) Orange County assistant public defender Scott Sanders filed last week, the documents show that the sheriff’s department has been running a jailhouse informant program for decades, often in violation of defendants’ civil rights, with the knowledge of high-level officials. That’s all contrary to the claims the department has made publicly, as the Los Angeles Times has reported.
And, as the Huffington Post has reported, Sanders says the documents show that the department took steps to cover up false testimony by its deputies shortly after Sanders began looking into the use of informants. Among other things, Sanders says, the department stopped calling informants “informants” in official papers and started calling them “sources of information,” then changed internal manuals to make it look like those were two truly different categories of inmate. Numerous documents appear to be missing, Sanders says, suggesting many more discoverable documents were withheld.
Meanwhile, Sanders says, there’s evidence that prosecutors in the district attorney’s office delayed turning over evidence and possibly withheld it for tactical advantage—which, if proven, would violate Brady v. Maryland.
The filing came in the prosecution of Scott Dekraai, who in 2011 opened fire on the salon where his ex-wife worked, killing her and seven other people and wounding a woman in her 70s. Dekraai has pleaded guilty to the murders, but the case has been stymied at the penalty phase. That’s partly because Sanders, Dekraai’s defense attorney, uncovered serious misconduct through the case, including evidence suggesting widespread use of informants that violates inmates’ right to an attorney under Massiah v. United States, and evidence of a cover-up by prosecutors that would violate Brady.
Those disclosures were enough to prompt Goethals to take the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office off the case in 2015, and later denounce testimony from two sheriff’s deputies as untrue. However, it didn’t resolve the other major dispute in the case: whether Dekraai should still be eligible for the death penalty. The California Attorney General’s office, which inherited the case, recently said the state would continue to seek death in the case under relatively new Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Sanders’ brief renews his request to rule out the death penalty. It also asks Goethals to order certain records not destroyed and order more documents turned over.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s department, Lt. Lane Lagaret, declined to comment to the Los Angeles Times. The Orange County Register reported Friday that Lagaret could be implicated because he formerly ran the unit that handled jailhouse informants.
The Orange County Register has reported that the department is currently being investigated by the California Attorney General’s office and an Orange County grand jury, and the Department of Justice is investigating both the sheriff’s department and the District Attorney’s Office.
Prior coverage:
ABA Journal: “Secret Snitches: California case uncovers long-standing practice of planting jailhouse informants”
