He was accused of lying and cheating in court. He was just named ‘Judge of the Year'

Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.

The group, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. The statement said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”

Some questioned whether the award was appropriate.

“It’s disgusting,” said Scott Sanders, the former public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” in which Baytieh was a major player. “If you’re going to have a group that’s dedicated to constitutional rights, it is not a good look to make your ‘Judge of the Year’ a guy who has been found to violate constitutional rights.”

What’s come to be known as the O.C. snitch scandal refers to the systematic use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants without their lawyers present, and then hide that evidence from defendants — both of which are illegal. The misconduct took place under former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer, the current DA, has vowed to never let such misconduct happen again. But he has been left to deal with the fallout, including past wrongful convictions that continue to come to light.

Baytieh, who held a top position in Rackauckas’s office, repeatedly denied the allegations of misconduct.

Nevertheless, a federal civil rights investigation ultimately concluded that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."

Baytieh’s prominent role in those violations has come into focus in recent years, most recently when the District Attorney’s Office was forced to drop murder charges in a decades-old case that Baytieh had initially prosecuted. The judge in that case concluded that Baytieh and his prosecution team had withheld evidence, and then lied on the stand about it in 2024. The judge called the prosecution’s behavior "reprehensible."

Orange County Asst. Public Defender Scott Sanders questions former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now an O.C. Superior Court judge, about the use of jailhouse informants in a San Diego courtoom on June 10, 2024.

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Previously, Baytieh had been fired by Spitzer after an internal investigation found Baytieh had illegally withheld evidence in the same murder case. Baytieh would go 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.

LAist reached out to Baytieh for this story but has not received a response. Paul Meyer, a defense attorney who has represented Baytieh in recent years, declined to comment.

One-man protest from an unlikely critic

As high school students and their parents arrived at Calvary Church in Santa Ana last Thursday for the mock trial awards ceremony, Paul Wilson walked through the parking lot, handing out copies of a six-page letter, penned by Sanders, the former public defender, highlighting Baytieh’s unethical behavior and urging the Constitutional Rights Foundation not to honor the judge.

The event went on as planned.

Wilson and Sanders have become unlikely allies in a quest to root out past misconduct by O.C. law enforcement and seek justice for defendants who didn't get a fair trial.

More than a decade ago, Sanders and Wilson were on opposite sides of the courtroom. Sanders was defending Scott Dekraai, the man accused of killing Wilson’s wife, Christy, and seven others in the county’s worst mass shooting in modern history, at a salon in Seal Beach.

Dekraai was arrested in what appeared to be a slam dunk legal case. But then, while preparing for trial, Sanders discovered a secret law enforcement program that offered money and perks to jailed informants to surreptitiously question defendants, including Dekraai. Questioning a defendant without giving them the opportunity to have a lawyer present runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors were also hiding evidence about informants from defendants, another constitutional violation.

As a result of Sanders’s discovery, the Dekraai case dragged on for years. In a humiliating defeat, the DA’s office was removed from prosecuting the case because of the misconduct. And in a blow to the victims’ families, a judge ruled that the death penalty would be off the table.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed, during which Baytieh, then a top prosecutor, denied having any knowledge of the misconduct.

Paul Wilson hands copies of a letter detailing Judge Baytieh's role in the snitch scandal to attendees of an awards ceremony sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County.

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After the ordeal, Wilson began crusading to reform O.C. law enforcement. “We haven’t gotten the justice we deserve,” Wilson said of himself and other victims’ family members.

That’s what led him to make copies of Sanders’s denouncement of Baytieh’s “Judge of the Year” award, and to bring them to the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s celebratory event last week, he told LAist.

“ I felt a great need to go down and let some of these students that Baytieh has been mentoring … know who this guy was and what he's all about and what he continues to be,” Wilson said.

“For years and years, those guys operated behind this shield that nobody was going to catch them,” Wilson said of Baytieh and other former O.C. prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies who were found by judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to have participated in the misconduct.

Wilson told LAist he passed out about 45 copies of Sanders’s letter before someone from the Constitutional Rights Foundation asked him to leave.

Read the letter:

Pending justice

Sanders retired last year from the O.C. Public Defender’s office after 32 years. Before he left, around 60 convictions tainted by the misuse of informants had been lessened or overturned. In one, a 69-year-old man was freed from prison after the DA's Office admitted that prosecutors withheld evidence decades ago that mitigated his guilt. The man had already spent 41 years in prison.

Sanders said there’s much more work to do — in court filings, he has detailed dozens of convictions that he argues should be revisited because of law enforcement misconduct.

Baytieh prosecuted many of those cases.

“Every one of his cases should be torn apart,” Sanders said.