By Kelly Puente
The Orange County Register
SANTA ANA, Calif. — The defense attorney for convicted killer Daniel Wozniak has subpoenaed the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, seeking any secret records that jail deputies might have kept on the case.
A jury has recommended the death penalty for Wozniak, who is scheduled to be sentenced May 20 for killing two acquaintances to finance his wedding.
Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders has continued to challenge the death penalty verdict. In a motion filed April 15, Sanders questioned whether deputies may have kept notes about Wozniak that were not disclosed to the defense in previous requests.
Sanders filed the request after information surfaced in a different murder case that a former deputy in the jail’s special-handling unit had kept four years’ worth of notes.
Elizabeth Pejeau, deputy county counsel, called Sanders’ latest motion a “fishing expedition.”
In a response to the subpoena, the County Council’s Office, which represents the Sheriff’s Department, said the department has begun a “comprehensive search” for any notes or other documents written by deputies.
Sanders and Pejeau are expected to argue their positions on Friday before Superior Court Judge John Conley.
An Orange County jury convicted Wozniak, a 31-year-old Costa Mesa theater actor, on double murder charges in December and the next month recommended the death penalty. Sanders contends that jailers improperly used a jailhouse informant in the case, but Conley found no evidence of misconduct in Wozniak’s case.
The request for deputy records is the latest turn in Orange County’s snitch controversy.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals in February granted a retrial for Henry Rodriguez, who is serving a life sentence for his role in the 1998 shooting death of a pregnant Fullerton woman.
Goethals in his ruling said prosecutors failed to turn over records that showed a key witness in Rodriguez’s 2006 trial was a seasoned jailhouse snitch who previously gathered evidence for law enforcement agencies in several cases. The District Attorney’s Office is appealing the ruling.
The day before he was set to testify in a hearing for Rodriguez this year, Robert Szewczyk, a former deputy in the special-handling unit, turned over about four years’ worth of notes he had kept in the course of his duties at the jail.
While Goethals determined that the notes were not relevant in the Rodriguez case, the judge said he was surprised to see “documents like this suddenly wash ashore.”
“A cynic might say how many other such records are there floating around out there,” Goethals said in the hearing.
Copyright 2016 The Orange County Register