By Tony Saavedra and Kelly Puente
The Orange County Register
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Five days after a judge reopened an investigation into Orange County’s use of jailhouse informants, the sheriff’s department received permission from county supervisors to shred potentially incriminating records, documents show.
It is unclear if any informant records were destroyed as a result of the unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 16, 2014. It’s also unclear if supervisors knew specifically what they were voting on; informant information was only a small part of an 83-page request that covered “the retention and disposition” of sheriff’s records.
Lt. Mark Stichter, spokesman for the sheriff’s department, said Thursday that his agency doesn’t have evidence of record shredding and denied that the department was trying to cover up anything.
“We have no information that informant records were destroyed and we clearly are not destroying records.”
Other records, which recently became evidence in court -- jail activity logs written by deputies -- show that deputies did shred some documents from 2008 through 2013 and that they routinely worked with informants.
The department’s 2014 request to destroy documents is noted in a legal brief filed this week by Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, who represents admitted Seal Beach mass murderer Scott Dekraai and who has unearthed the illegal use of jailhouse informants by local prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies.
Over the past two years, a half-dozen local convictions have been dismissed or renegotiated after judges ruled that prosecutors broke rules to get convictions. And last month, the Dept. of Justice launched a investigation of county prosecutors and deputies, looking at the potentially systemic misuse of jailhouse informants and withholding evidence.
Sanders believes the request to destroy documents was made specifically to cover up the department’s misuse of informants. If true, such record destruction could be a criminal offense.
In 2014, at the time of the board vote, Sanders had filed multiple legal papers demanding the release of informant documents, bolstered by a court order to surrender such records.
In the new court papers, Sanders accuses the sheriff’s department of repeatedly moving to limit his access to records and stressed that nearly six consecutive months of special handling log records were destroyed.
Sanders wrote that the department engaged in a “rapid destruction of damaging information that could embarrass the agency and undermine convictions.”
“They clearly wanted to destroy informant records and there is no legitimate reason for doing this.”
State Sen. John Moorlach, who was an Orange County Supervisor at the time of the 2014 vote, said the department’s request didn’t raise any questions and was considered to be non-controversial.
“You don’t read the details on something like that,” Moorlach said. While he didn’t remember the vote, he said the informant issue had not yet heated up.
Two years later, as local prosecutors’ tactics to gain convictions became a national controversy, county supervisors admonished the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office against destroying any records pertaining to informants.
All parties in the Dekraai case are scheduled to appear in court today. The judge in the case, Thomas Goethals, has grown frustrated with the lengthy wait to see all the documents related to informants, and recently threatened Sheriff Sandra Hutchens with a contempt citation if her department doesn’t produce documents he requested in 2013.
During a hearing last month sheriff’s lawyers dropped thousands of pages of records on the judge, and asked that they be kept confidential. Goethals, frustrated at what he viewed as a delay tactic, ordered the lawyers to write a specific reason why each page should be kept under seal.
Prosecutors are expected to hand off the Dekraai penalty case, which will determine whether he gets the death sentence, to the state Attorney General’s Office on today. State prosecutors have not indicated whether they will seek the death penalty or settle for life in prison, as requested by many of the relatives of Dekraai’s victims.