Scandals over local prosecutors' misuse of jailhouse informants have plagued the California criminal justice system for decades, with famous eruptions in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties. The latest is in Orange County, where Sanders has watched and battled the problem over 24 years as public defender. "There are daily due process violations," he said. "In jail, they violate our clients' Sixth Amendment rights daily. The confinement program follows no law."
Sanders may be getting traction with his claims. In August, Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals ruled that a "significant amount" of recently uncovered informant evidence was withheld by authorities from public defenders as they represented mass murderer Scott Evans Dekraai before and after his 2014 guilty plea in the 2011 Seal Beach mass shooting that resulted in eight deaths.
When the recordings came to light, Goethals removed the Orange County district attorney's office from the case for improperly withholding evidence from the defense. The judge assigned Attorney General Kamala Harris' office to take over the prosecution, a move Harris has appealed, stalling the penalty phase of the case.
Sanders is seeking the material for use in another current murder case and hopes to use its concealment to sustain claims of outrageous government misconduct to save Dekraai from the death penalty.
"There is dishonesty; it is massive," Sanders said in court of the sheriff's department's handling of the recordings and other potentially exculpatory evidence.
Sanders said the investigation into jailers' and prosecutors' misconduct could extend to hundreds of cases extending back for years. He persists in his efforts to expand the probe and take it beyond local authorities. "Last year, 36 former prosecutors and scholars asked the feds to intervene," he said, referring to a long letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch outlining abuses in Orange County and signed by prominent experts including Boston College law professor Robert M. Bloom, the author of "Ratting: The Use and Abuse of Informants in the American Justice System," to former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti. "No action yet," Sanders said of the letter's impact.
The big picture is even worse, Sanders said. "Realistically, it's terribly bad here, but it is difficult to believe similar things aren't happening beneath the surface in other jurisdictions." His urgent efforts at reform are a tribute to the public defender system, he said. "A private lawyer can't do this," he said of the time and effort his office has put into uncovering wrongdoing. "You have to have a strong public defender's office to make it happen. We have been digging deeply for years."
— John Roemer
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