A network of paid jailhouse snitches that has perverted justice for decades is so entrenched with Orange County, California’s law enforcers that only a judge’s edict and an independent monitor can end it, a lawsuit filed Wednesday argues.
The claim hits civil court more than three years after legal maneuvering in a locally-notorious mass shooting case uncovered the alleged scheme. Scott Dekraai killed eight people in a beauty salon in Seal Beach in 2011. He was convicted in 2014. But after his public defender determined that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had put one of its veteran jailhouse informants on Dekraai in lockup — a clearly illegal interrogation since the admitted killer already had a lawyer — the judge froze the penalty stage of the trial for three years and ordered investigations into the program.
Officials initially insisted there was no program. But at one hearing, trial judge Thomas Goethals read aloud from a series of internal memos describing the “missions” deputies had assigned to informants and blasted the public servants for stonewalling. Goethals’ drive to unravel how exactly the program had affected Dekraai’s case delayed sentencing and closure for three years and took the death penalty off the table.
The revelations from Dekraai’s sentencing showed an extensive network of informants deployed systematically across a wide category of cases. “Some went as far as telling defendants they had been ‘greenlit’—meaning that the prisoner was on a hit list to be assaulted or even executed on sight, a fate they could only avoid by confessing to their involvement in the crime,” the suit says. “In some cases, the choice was clear: confess or die.”
Wednesday’s suit calls on a higher judicial power to intervene to end the program Sheriff Sandra Hutchens and District Attorney Tony Rackauckas inherited from predecessors and maintained.
Goethals and other criminal court judges affected by the unconstitutional interrogations can only plumb them to the extent their connection to a given trial allows. Officials have stonewalled the inquiries those judges have mandated, in some brazen ways. At one point, deputies who had denied in court that any program existed were presented with records from the “Special Handling Unit” that they had contributed to. At another, new documents emerged after sheriff’s office employees repeatedly told Goethals there was no more information on hand, with Sheriff Sandra Hutchens explaining to the judge that “they possibly did not look hard enough.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Southern California, which filed the case on behalf of plaintiffs including a relative of one of Dekraai’s victims and the local organization People for the Ethical Operation of Prosecutors and Law Enforcement (PEOPLE), are hoping for a permanent injunction to end the network and catalog its history, with an independent special monitor in place to ensure law enforcement compliance.
There are many constitutional problems with the years-long program. Jailhouse informants are not per-se illegal, but at least three qualities of the Orange County program make it “black-letter illegal,” ACLU Smart Justice campaign attorney Somil Trivedi said.
“If the system approaches defendants before they have counsel then you’re not violating the right to counsel. If the information is voluntarily given and not coerced, then you don’t violate their due process. And if everything about that interaction including the history of the informant is turned over to the defense, so the defense can then challenge that information on cross, then it’s on the up and up,” Trivedi said. “But the Orange County Sheriff and District Attorney failed on all three points.”
While the Dekraai case is at the center of the revelations, the records uncovered to date show the illegal conduct affected more than a dozen cases and likely touched many, many more, Trivedi said.
“There are 18 cases since late 2014 whose outcomes have been changed in light of informant-related taint. But there are many cases still going, and we just know from the evidence that it was a widespread practice,” he said.
Some of the cases known to be affected by the practice typify the U.S. justice system’s patterns of abuse. Cops were struggling to solve a 2009 gang shooting in Santa Ana until one of the OCSD snitches reported that one suspect had suddenly confessed. The informant also told prosecutors that another person in custody as a suspect, teenager Luis Vega, had nothing to do with it — but the county never turned that information over to Vega’s attorney, and the kid was left in jail for nearly two years before his case was dismissed.
Goethals has pushed as hard as his remit in the Dekraai case allows. But the suit Wednesday looks to bring resolution across the tens of thousands of documents uncovered in that and other cases known to be tainted by improper use of informants, a process which would involve exhaustive cross-checking of the records officials have denied exist.
“Court orders in individual cases can only go so far. This kind of litigation where we seek an absolute full-stop halt to the program via injunction, that would apply to the program as a whole not just individual cases,” Trivedi said.”And I’ll say that the county, the DA’s office, could create a review unit tomorrow but they have shown no willingness to do it. And at this point I’m not sure we’d trust the results. We’d need independent verification.”