A hearing began this week to determine whether Orange County prosecutors continue to hide evidence of misconduct in the wake of a long-running informant scandal that has tainted criminal cases and marred the county justice system's reputation over the past decade.
The judge presiding over the proceedings questioned whether Orange County law enforcement has reformed its ways in the wake of widespread misconduct allegations that were investigated and confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein said that he had read assistant public defender Scott Sanders' 424-page "tome" detailing the allegations and concluded that the effort to withhold evidence in the case "looks like a conspiracy," although he quickly walked back his use of the term and said "it seems like there was some type of plan involved" to refuse to turn over evidence to the defense team.
The judge also questioned whether the Orange County District Attorney's Office had made meaningful enough reforms in the wake of the informant scandal and the subsequent DOJ investigation. He asked a senior prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney's office to report back with specifics about what "remedial actions" had been taken.
The hearing resumed Tuesday morning, and is scheduled to restart again next Monday.
Backstory on a scandal
The hearing is being held in the context of a decades-old murder case that was ordered retried in 2022 after Sanders said he discovered that the top prosecutor in the case, Ebrahim Baytieh, now a Superior Court judge, had failed to turn over evidence that could have helped his client's defense.
Sanders has accused Baytieh of being at the center of an "enormous web of deception" designed to cover up misconduct that helped prosecutors win cases while cheating defendants out of their right to a fair trial.
Efforts to reach Baytieh were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for the Orange County Superior Court told LAist that sitting judges are prohibited from commenting on active cases.
The proceedings threaten to reopen an embarrassing chapter in Orange County law enforcement history — the "jailhouse snitch scandal" — which led to overturned convictions and dropped or lessened charges in dozens of criminal cases. Sanders says new details he uncovered could give defendants in nearly 100 other cases evidence to question whether law enforcement carried out misconduct. Such evidence could potentially lead to additional cases being reconsidered and convictions overturned.
The case in the spotlight
The case at the center of the hearing involves Paul Gentile Smith. He is accused of stabbing Robert Haugen to death and setting his body on fire in Haugen's Sunset Beach apartment in 1988. Baytieh handled the case against Smith when he was a prosecutor. Smith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2010.
But starting in 2014, when the O.C. snitch scandal broke, evidence came to light that jailhouse informants were misused in his case. As part of the probe into the allegations, O.C. sheriff's deputies refused to testify about their use of informants in the Smith case, which led a judge to throw out Smith's murder conviction and order a new trial.
Sanders is now asking a judge to drop charges against Smith completely because of what he says is continued law enforcement misconduct.
As for Baytieh, O.C. District Attorney Todd Spitzer hired an independent law firm to look into Baytieh's handling of the case, and Baytieh was subsequently fired in 2022. The former prosecutor went on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.
Spitzer issued a statement to LAist this week that his office had already addressed misconduct by Baytieh in the Smith case and that dropping charges against Smith would be "unconscionable."
Why this matters
Sanders argued this week that law enforcement's misconduct in the Smith case went beyond the misuse of jailhouse informants. And he says it continues to this today, despite O.C. law enforcement's assertions that they've made reforms.
Sanders said 15 pieces of evidence in the Smith case, including letters between investigators and informants and an interview with a key witness, hadn't been turned over to Sanders until he discovered, recently, that they existed.
Prosecutors are required by law to turn over any evidence that could be favorable to defendants. Failing to do so is known as a "Brady violation."
Sanders told the judge that he thought prosecutors were "absolutely" still withholding evidence that could help Smith's case. He said given the history of misconduct in the case, and what he said was an unwillingness by the DA's office to investigate that misconduct, "it's just not reasonable to think that when they came across exculpatory evidence, they turned it over."
The judge said he would let Sanders make his case. That gives the defense team an initial win, since the judge could have denied Sanders' request to hold a hearing on the misconduct allegations and proceeded with Smith's trial.
The judge also said he wanted to determine whether Smith could get a fair trial considering the hostility against Sanders among Orange County law enforcement. He noted that this hostility had been documented in an appeals court ruling that dated back to Sanders' discovery of the use of a secret, unconstitutional jailhouse informant program while defending Scott Dekraai, accused of killing eight people in a Seal Beach beauty salon.
Sanders said he had additional evidence of law enforcement hostility against him: He said that O.C. Sheriff Don Barnes had recently filed a complaint against Sanders with the state bar, including allegations related to the Smith case.
In an email to LAist, Carrie Braun, a spokesperson for the sheriff's office, denied that Sheriff Barnes had made allegations to the California State Bar about Sanders in regards to the Smith case. She wrote that despite Sanders' assertions, the sheriff had no hostility toward him for uncovering informant misuse "because those issues resolved nearly a decade ago."
The State Bar would not confirm whether a complaint against Sanders had been filed, per their rules.
The snitch scandal origins
It was Sanders who first exposed the widespread and abusive use of jailhouse informants by Orange County prosecutors and law enforcement.
That led to a federal civil rights investigation that lasted six years and ultimately concluded the Orange County District Attorney's Office and Orange County Sheriff's Department "engaged in a pattern or practice of conduct … that systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."
When the report was released in 2022, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote that: "The failure to protect these basic constitutional guarantees not only deprives individual defendants of their rights, it undermines the public’s confidence in the fundamental fairness of criminal justice systems across the county.”
'Full accounting' still due?
The misconduct happened under the previous O.C. district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, who lost his re-election bid to Spitzer in 2018. Spitzer has implemented reforms and pledged not to tolerate cheating among prosecutors and law enforcement.
But, years later, Sanders says he's still uncovering misconduct that prosecutors haven't owned up to.
"It sometimes feels like we haven't made an inch of headway," he told LAist last week.
