A hearing began this week to determine whether Orange County prosecutors continue to hide evidence of misconduct in the wake of a long-running informant scandal that has tainted criminal cases and marred the county justice system’s reputation over the past decade.
The judge presiding over the proceedings questioned whether Orange County law enforcement has reformed its ways in the wake of widespread misconduct allegations that were investigated and confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein said that he had read assistant public defender Scott Sanders’ 424-page “tome” detailing the allegations and concluded that the effort to withhold evidence in the case “looks like a conspiracy,” although he quickly walked back his use of the term and said “it seems like there was some type of plan involved” to refuse to turn over evidence to the defense team.
The judge also questioned whether the Orange County District Attorney’s Office had made meaningful enough reforms in the wake of the informant scandal and the subsequent DOJ investigation. He asked a senior prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney’s office to report back with specifics about what “remedial actions” had been taken.
The hearing resumed Tuesday morning, and is scheduled to restart again next Monday.
Backstory on a scandal
The hearing is being held in the context of a decades-old murder case that was ordered retried in 2022 after Sanders said he discovered that the top prosecutor in the case, Ebrahim Baytieh, now a Superior Court judge, had failed to turn over evidence that could have helped his client’s defense.
Sanders has…
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