Judge in O.C. jailhouse informant case plans to give documents to defense

For years, mass murderer Scott Dekraai’s defense attorney has accused the Orange County Sheriff’s Department of operating an elaborate jailhouse informant program that regularly flouted defendants’ rights.

When jailers testified during extensive hearings before Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals about their dealings with snitches, the jailers’ recollections proved sketchy. Nor could they think of documents that might refresh their memories.

Then came the revelation that jailers kept secret jailhouse computer logs. It contributed to Goethals’ decision in March 2015 to throw the district attorney’s office off the Dekraai case on the grounds that authorities had failed to turn over key information.

This year came still another batch of previously undisclosed records — a log of 1,157 pages compiled from 2008 to 2013 by the “Special Handling” jailers who dealt with informants.

At a hearing Friday, Goethals said he plans to give 250 to 300 pages of the Special Handling Log to the defense, with redactions he has made himself with an eye on the safety of inmates and jail staff.

Goethals said that some of the material in the Special Handling log is “grossly impeaching” to the jailers’ sworn testimony, while other material is “silly verging on embarrassing” to the Sheriff’s Department, which has repeatedly failed to comply with his discovery orders since 2013.

The Sheriff’s Department “has lost the high moral ground here, since we’ve been waiting three and a half years,” the judge said.

The judge also ordered that the Sheriff’s Department not destroy any “successor document or database” to the log, which mysteriously ceased to exist in 2013, around the time the judge ordered authorities to produce documents in the case.

Goethals told Elizabeth Pejeau, the attorney representing Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, that he was skeptical of the department’s apparent inability to explain what took the place of the log.

“How could it be immediately terminated without any sort of replacement?” Goethals said. “It’s time for compliance on that issue. If there’s something else out there, it should have been provided a long time ago, years ago.”

Dekraai has pleaded guilty to murdering eight people in a Seal Beach salon in 2011, but the informant controversy has indefinitely delayed the penalty phase of his case, which will determine whether he receives the death penalty or life in prison.

The California attorney general’s office is appealing the judge’s ruling to throw the D.A.’s office off the case. An appeals court is expected to rule on the matter within the next three months.

On Friday, Dekraai’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, said his client was the victim of a “conspiracy of silence” among authorities, and asked the judge to demand answers about what he called the “Important Information Log” he believed followed the Special Handling log.

“They should be told to bring the log…. There’s no reason to wait any longer,” Sanders said. “Why are they sitting here pretending like they can’t get answers?”

Pejeau said the Sheriff’s Department was working “diligently” to get to the bottom of it, and an “exhaustive search” for records was underway.

“If the Orange County sheriff were sincerely trying to unravel this mystery, I can’t think of any reason why we can’t get to the bottom of it,” Goethals said, adding: “It seems as if the sheriff believes that she can have documents and she can decide whether or not she can turn them over. That’s not the sheriff’s job. That’s the court’s job.”

Goethals ordered the parties to return for another hearing on Nov. 10.

christopher.goffard@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATchrisgoffard