The Brief

Imagine you’re sitting on a jury, having been asked to judge a person’s guilt or innocence for a serious crime. You are supposed to base your decision solely on witness testimony and the evidence presented by prosecutors and the defense team.

But what if prosecutors have withheld evidence that could have helped prove the defendant’s innocence? What if they failed to tell the jury that some of the witnesses are actually government informants, perhaps getting money or favors in exchange for delivering the kind of testimony that secures a conviction?

That’s illegal. And that’s exactly what happened in dozens of criminal cases in Orange County over at least a decade — until an assistant public defender brought to light what’s come to be known as the “snitch scandal.”

The discovery unraveled what should have been a slam-dunk conviction in the county’s deadliest mass shooting in modern history, the 2011 Seal Beach salon shooting. The misconduct was so bad that a judge threw the entire O.C. District Attorney’s Office off the case and spared the perpetrator — who had already confessed — from the death penalty.

Sentencing was also delayed — for three, painful years for victims — while the court investigated police and prosecutor misconduct. But that’s not all.

Here’s a short list of some of the other consequences that have followed:

• The district attorney at the time was ousted from office in the next election. 
• The Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation — which resulted, just this month, in a settlement. 
• Dozens of serious criminal convictions were lessened or overturned.  

Now, we’re awaiting a judge’s decision in one of the cases unraveled by the scandal — a decision that could raise fresh doubts about whether the O.C. justice system’s lauded reforms are sufficient to rectify past injustices.

What’s this pending case all about?

Specifically, San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein must decide whether O.C. law enforcement can be trusted to fairly retry a man, Paul Gentile Smith, accused of stabbing his childhood friend Robert Haugen to death in 1988 and then setting the body on fire in the victim’s Sunset Beach apartment. Or, whether prosecutors have cheated so badly that Smith should be allowed to go free.

Smith was convicted of murder in 2010. But after it came to light that jailhouse informants were illegally used in his case, a judge threw out the conviction in 2021 and ordered a new trial after sheriff's deputies refused to testify about their use of informants in the case.

Prosecutors have admitted they failed to turn over evidence that they are legally required to disclose to the defense. But they say there’s DNA evidence tying Smith to the murder, and that they won’t use any tainted evidence involving informants to try to convict Smith in the retrial.

“The victim's family and society deserve justice and the Defendant can and will receive a fair retrial,” Seton Hunt, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case, wrote in a December court filing.

Orange County assistant public defender Scott Sanders — the one who originally uncovered the snitch scandal and is defending the accused — says prosecutors can’t be trusted to turn over all of the evidence that could help Smith prove his innocence. In court documents and at hearings over the past year, he identified dozens of pieces of evidence in the case that hadn’t previously been disclosed by prosecutors.

“They will never tell the truth,” Sanders said at a December hearing. He’s asking the judge to dismiss murder charges against Smith.

The judge has already indicated he believes prosecutors acted badly.

“At the very least, there was misconduct,” Goldstein said at a December hearing in the case. “There’s no way we’re all leaving here at the end of the day thinking there was not misconduct.”

What’s so bad about using informants?

It's not illegal for authorities to use confidential informants or “snitches” — in or out of custody — to collect information. But once someone has been charged with a crime, the Sixth Amendment guarantees them the right to have an attorney present during questioning by a law enforcement representative, including an informant secretly working for law enforcement.

This is sometimes called the "Massiah" rule after a Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors must also turn over evidence from, and about, jailhouse informants used in a defendant's criminal case because it could help the defendant question the informant's credibility. Failing to do so violates the 14th Amendment and related court decisions, which require prosecutors to share with defendants any evidence they have that could help them prove their innocence.

This is sometimes known as the "Brady" rule after another Supreme Court case.

The origin of the OC snitch scandal

More than a decade ago, Sanders, the assistant public defender, discovered that local law enforcement had been strategically putting informants in jail cells with certain defendants from whom they wanted to get information and/or confessions. For years, they hid the entire program. When questioned about the use of jailhouse informants during the Seal Beach salon mass shooting case, several sheriff’s deputies lied under oath or refused to testify.

A federal civil rights investigation followed and concluded in 2022 that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated” criminal defendants’ constitutional rights. Since then, the scandal has unraveled dozens of criminal convictions, including 35 homicide cases.

District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who was elected in 2018 on a promise of reform, beefed up training for prosecutors and implemented strict rules for jailhouse informants, including requiring his consent before they’re used. The DA also started something called a Conviction Integrity Unit — people who think they were wrongly convicted can request that the DA reexamine their case.

Spitzer also later fired one of his top prosecutors, Ebrahim Baytieh, after an independent investigation found that Baytieh had withheld evidence about informants in the Sunset Beach murder case — the same case awaiting a retrial decision from Judge Goldstein.

Baytieh 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.

About the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit

The Conviction Integrity Unit investigates claims of factual innocence and wrongful convictions in Orange County. The bulk of the case reviews are initiated by the 12-person unit (half of them part-time).

The entity’s work resulted in the DA dropping charges in 67 cases where evidence was improperly handled by the O.C. Sheriff’s Department, according to Kimberly Edds, a spokesperson for the DA’s Office. That issue, in which some deputies were waiting weeks to book evidence or not booking it at all, came to light in 2019.

Individuals can also request to have their case reviewed. If the Conviction Integrity Unit decides the application has merit, they’ll open an investigation. If the DA determines, based on that investigation, that they’ve lost confidence that a person was fairly and lawfully convicted, they’ll notify all parties and assist the defendant in reopening their case.

The Conviction Integrity Unit has received 296 applications for conviction review since it was established in 2020, according to Edds. She declined to say how many applications resulted in an investigation, saying the office doesn’t discuss investigations.

None of the applications for case review have resulted in the DA proposing a case be reopened, Edds told LAist.

In a statement to LAist, Spitzer wrote: “We are extremely proud that over the last few years and hundreds of case reviews by our Conviction Integrity Unit we have yet to discover a single instance when a convicted defendant was either wrongly convicted or was determined to have been factually innocent.”

So is the snitch scandal over?

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced it had reached settlement agreements with the O.C. District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department to remedy the injustices uncovered in the federal government’s investigation. The announcements came at the last minute — a few days later, Trump took office and froze the department’s civil rights division, which was in charge of the investigation.

In a news release announcing the settlement, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke commended the DA’s reform efforts: “The District Attorney’s proactive efforts, together with today’s agreement, will not only protect the constitutional rights of individual defendants; they will also help restore the public’s confidence in the fundamental fairness of the criminal justice system in Orange County.”

Spitzer wrote in a statement: “I am incredibly proud of the work that we as a team have done over the last six years to implement the positive, sustained reforms necessary to prevent the sins of the past administration.”

The settlement stipulates that the DA will continue implementing reforms, including:

• Reviewing cases, through the Conviction Integrity Unit, where defendants’ constitutional rights may have been violated by the use of informants. 
• Carrying out a “comprehensive historical case review” of prior investigations to determine whether informants were misused and whether action is needed in those cases to remedy any constitutional violations. The review is supposed to encompass all jailhouse informant activity at O.C. jails based on DA and Sheriff’s records. 

Edds, the DA spokesperson, wrote in an email that the office is committed to a “comprehensive, coordinated review of past investigations and prosecutions that involved custodial informants.”

It’s unclear how many cases could be subject to the kind of historical review called for in the federal settlement, but Sanders, the assistant public defender, called the work “massive in scope.”

In an email to LAist following the settlement announcements, Orange County Public Defender Martin Schwarz emphasized the need for an historical case review.

“Only once those cases have been re-evaluated, and those individuals afforded the due process guaranteed to them by our constitution, can we ever truly move past this,” he wrote.

Why the defense still has questions

Sanders is skeptical whether the measures laid out in the settlement are enough to right the wrongs of the past.

For one thing, when the Department of Justice first released its findings on the snitch scandal three years ago, it recommended the county establish an independent body to review past prosecutions involving jailhouse informants. To date, that has not happened.

It's been years since efforts first began to unearth evidence that should have been disclosed to defendants — the snitch scandal broke in 2014; the Department of Justice began its investigation in 2016; and Spitzer took office, with new reforms, in 2019.

And yet, over the past year’s worth of hearings in the Sunset Beach murder case, Sanders, in court filings, said he uncovered 23 pieces of evidence related to the use of an informant that had never been turned over to the defense.

Sanders and Schwarz said it would take major funding to review all the cases in which official misconduct might have led to a wrongful conviction. Sanders said that funding would likely have to come from an outside source — the public defender’s budget, set by the county, is currently a little over half the DA’s budget.

“There’s a lot of work to be done and time is running,” Sanders said.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cannot impose dramatically different conditions for homelessness programs for now, according to an oral ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Rhode Island.

McElroy granted a preliminary injunction to a group of states, cities and nonprofits who said a last minute overhaul of how to spend $4 billion on homelessness programs was unlawful. She also agreed with their argument that it likely would push many people back onto the streets in the middle of winter, causing irreparable harm.

"Continuity of housing and stability for vulnerable populations is clearly in the public interest," said McElroy, ordering HUD to maintain its previous funding formula.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement the order "means that more than 170,000 people – families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities — have respite from the government's assault."

HUD has sought to dramatically slash funding for permanent housing and encourage more transitional housing that mandates work and treatment for addiction or mental illness. The overhaul — announced last month — also would allow the agency to deny money to local groups that don't comply with the Trump administration's agenda on things like DEI, the restriction of transgender rights and immigration enforcement.

"HUD will continue working to provide homelessness assistance funding to grantees nationwide," said HUD spokeswoman Kasey Lovett in a statement to NPR. "The Department remains committed to program reforms intended to assist our nation's most vulnerable citizens and will continue to do so in accordance with the law."

'Chaos seems to be the point'

McElroy expressed frustration with a series of HUD actions in recent weeks. Just hours before a Dec. 8 hearing, the agency withdrew its new funding notice, saying it would make changes to address critics' concerns. But on Friday, HUD's attorney said the new version would not be ready until the end of the day.

"The timing seems to be strategic," McElroy said, asserting there was no reason the document could not have been ready before the hearing. "The constant churn and chaos seems to be the point."

In defending the agency, attorney John Bailey said HUD was simply trying to change its policies to reflect President Donald Trump's executive orders, which he called "legal directives." The judge interjected repeatedly to explain that he was conflating things, noting Congress — not the president — makes laws.

'It's kind of shocking'

HUD's changes were announced in November with little notice and only weeks before local homeless service providers must apply for new funding.

"Our agencies are just scrambling right now to try to respond," said Pam Johnson with Minnesota Community Action Partnership, whose members provide housing and other services for homeless people. "It also just reverses 40 years of bipartisan work on proven solutions to homelessness. So it's really, it's kind of shocking."

For decades, U.S. policy favored permanent housing with optional treatment for addiction or mental illness Years of research has found the strategy is effective at keeping people off the streets.

But many conservatives argue it's failed to stop record rates of homelessness.

"What is the root cause of homelessness? Mental illness, drug addiction, drug abuse," HUD Secretary Scottt Turner said recently on Fox Business Network. "During the Biden administration, it was just warehousing. It was a homeless industrial complex."

Turner and others who support the changes say the goal is to push people towards self-sufficiency.

But local advocates say mental health and substance abuse are not the main factors driving homelessness.

"It's poverty. Poverty, low income and significant lack of affordable housing," says Julie Embree, who heads the Toledo Lucas County Homelessness Board in Ohio.

Many in permanent housing have disabilities that make it hard to work full time, she said. Embree agrees with Trump administration goals like efficiency and saving money, but says pushing people back into homelessness, where they're more likely to land in jail, the courts or a hospital, is not cost-effective.

"One emergency room visit is just as expensive as a month of sustaining this [permanent housing] program," she said.

In Los Angeles, Stephanie Klasky-Gamer with LA Family Housing said there is a need for more transitional housing, but not at the expense of long-term housing. And the idea that programs could simply switch from one to the other is not only unrealistic, it's illegal.

"You cannot take a building that has a 75-year deed restriction and just — ding! — call it interim housing," she said.

Those challenging HUD say providers who own such properties – or states who've invested millions of dollars in permanent housing projects — face "significant financial jeopardy" if their funding is not renewed.

In addition to the legal challenges, members of Congress from both parties have questioned HUD's sudden shift on homelessness. Advocates have lobbied lawmakers to step in and, at the least, push for more time to prepare for such a massive overhaul.

President Donald Trump said the administration has reached agreements with nine more drugmakers to bring their U.S. drug prices more in line with what other wealthy countries pay.

Fourteen companies in total have now reached what the administration calls most-favored-nation pricing deals. The companies that took part in Friday's announcement were: Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi.

They agreed to charge the U.S. government no more for new drugs than the prices paid by other well-off countries. The agreements will allow state Medicaid programs to access lower prices from the nine companies. In a statement, the White House said the change will result "in billions of dollars in savings."

The drugmakers also agreed to invest at least $150 billion in manufacturing operations in the U.S. The president is seeking to increase domestic production of pharmaceuticals.

In addition, the companies agreed to make some of their most popular drugs available at lower prices to consumers who pay out of pocket through a government website called TrumpRx.com. The TrumpRx website is expected to launch in early 2026, and would take consumers to pharmaceutical companies' direct-to-consumer websites to fulfill orders.

For example, Merck will reduce the price of Januvia, a medication for Type 2 diabetes, from $330 to $100 for patients purchasing directly through TrumpRx, the White House said. Amgen will reduce the price of Repatha, a cholesterol-lowering drug, from $573 to $239 when purchased through TrumpRx.

In exchange for these concessions, the companies will be exempt from possible administration tariffs for three years.

The extent of savings for consumers under the agreements is unclear. Medicaid and its beneficiaries already pay some of the lowest prices for drugs. And people with health insurance could spend less on copays for their medicines than paying cash for them through the drugmakers.

Separately, Trump said during the press event that he would like to get health insurers to lower their prices, too.

"I'm going to call a meeting of the insurance companies," he said. "I'm going to see if they [will] get their price down, to put it very bluntly."

America's new top health diplomat is Bethany Kozma.

The job she took on this week — leading the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs — does not have a high profile. And Kozma herself is not a familiar name in the world of public health.

But it is a position with power — and Kozma has a record of public statements and activism on health issues, equating abortion with "murder" and campaigning against gender-affirming care.

The office sometimes is referred to as the "diplomatic voice" of HHS. As director, Kozma will have considerable influence over how the U.S. shapes health policy in other countries in the wake of the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts and withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

Kozma declined to be interviewed for this story. She doesn't appear to have a background in global health based on publicly available information online. The HHS website offers few details about her professional profile. In response to questions about her qualifications and vision for the role, HHS responded with this statement.

"The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) advances the Trump administration's agenda and priorities by bringing common sense, transparency and gold-standard science to global partners. Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, OGA is committed to strengthening the United States' position as the global gold-standard for public health and ensuring Americans are protected at home and abroad."

Who is Bethany Kozma?

Kozma began her career in public service during the George W. Bush administration, working at the White House Homeland Security Council. During the Obama years, she re-entered public life as an activist.

In a 2016 commentary for The Daily Signal, a conservative news website founded by the Heritage Foundation, she argued against the Obama administration's guidance that public schools should allow children to use the bathroom that comports with their identity.

"This radical agenda of subjective 'gender fluidity' and unrestricted shower and bathroom access actually endangers all," she stated, noting that "predators" could abuse the policy.

In 2017, she joined the Trump administration as senior adviser for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in the United States Agency for International Development, eventually being promoted to deputy chief of staff. In videos obtained and released by ProPublica, Kozma recalls calling the U.S. a "pro-life" country in a closed-door U.N. meeting about women's rights in 2018, when access to abortion still was protected nationally by Roe v. Wade.

In August 2020, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and four other Democratic senators issued a letter labeling Kozma and several other political appointees at USAID as "prejudiced" and called for them to be removed from their posts. Kozma has "spoken extensively and derisively of trans people and trans issues," the senators wrote.

During the Biden administration, she also was involved in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's "blueprint" for a new Republican administration. She played a prominent role in Project 2025 training videos, obtained and published by ProPublica.

In one nearly 50-minute training video focused on left-wing language, she called for a Republican administration to "eradicate 'climate change' references from absolutely everywhere," and said that concerns over climate change are efforts at "population control." She also called gender-affirming care "absolutely infuriating" and said "the idea that gender is fluid is evil." Overall, she argued that changing language around these policies should be a priority for political appointees.

Kozma joined the second Trump administration as a chief adviser at the HHS Office of Global Affairs. In September, she spoke at a U.N. event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the declaration that denying women's rights is a human rights violation.

"While many may celebrate so-called successes gained for women over the last 30 years, one must ask what defines true success for women?" she began, adding that "biological reality is rooted in scientific truth and is confirmed by the universal truths that we are endowed by our creator who made us 'male and female.'"

Those views can be divisive but have garnered some support for Kozma's promotion.

"Bethany is an excellent pick for global affairs at HHS," says Roger Servino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. "She was an early champion of protecting children from gender ideology back when the medical establishment was able to silence voices of reason and dissent and she is perfectly placed to help push back on global health bodies trying to impose left wing pseudoscience on the American people and the world."

What will her goals be at the Office of Global Affairs?

Kozma is taking over as director of the HHS Office of Global Affairs at a time of drastic change for global health.

In previous administrations, a main focus of the office was dealing with the World Health Organization. Typically, the director, who usually has a background in public health, is involved in negotiations on sharing data for pathogen surveillance or developing vaccine policy, for example.

After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from WHO, the administration has started a new strategy: striking deals with individual countries to give health aid in exchange for their meeting certain policy prescriptions. Kozma has been involved in some of those negotiations, but the details aren't quite finalized.

Some reproductive rights advocates believe Kozma will use her new position to insert anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policies into these agreements.

"[Kozma] is vehemently anti-trans, anti-LGBTQI+, anti-abortion," says Keifer Buckingham, managing director at the Council on Global Equality, a coalition of advocacy organizations that focuses on LGBTQ issues. "For those of us who want to ensure that the provision of U.S. foreign assistance and health doesn't discriminate against people based on who they are, [Kozma's appointment] raises a lot of red flags."

One particular worry is about the Helms Amendment, a U.S. policy that prohibits foreign aid being used to fund abortion services.

"There's been speculation that there's an intention by the U.S. government to expand the Helms Amendment beyond abortion to include LGBTQ's as well," says Musoba Kitui, director of Ipas Africa Alliance, a non-profit that works to provide access to abortion and contraception. He's concerned that health groups that serve those populations could lose funding. That speculation is backed up by reporting from The Daily Signal that the administration is planning to prohibit U.S. aid funding for "gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives."

Given LGBTQ people are often at higher risk for diseases like HIV, such policies could make these communities even more vulnerable, says Kitui.

"We could see more marginalization, inequality, spikes of infection," he says. While many African governments signing these deals understand those dynamics, Kitui says they may still agree to more restrictive conditions as aid cuts have "starved health systems to a point of desperation."

Have information you want to share about ongoing changes at federal health and development agencies? Reach out to Jonathan Lambert via encrypted communications on Signal: @jonlambert.12