Scott Dekraai armed himself with three handguns, drove to
the beauty salon in Seal Beach, California, where his ex-wife worked and opened
fire. The two-minute rampage in October 2011 left eight people dead and one
injured.
Within an hour, Dekraai was pulled over by police and
confessed. Numerous witnesses, including a survivor, could testify that he was
the shooter. There was no reason to think that convicting him would be
difficult.
Nonetheless, Dekraai’s attorney contends, prosecutors
decided they wanted some insurance—so they planted an informant in the cell
next to him at the Orange County Jail. “Inmate F” struck up a friendship with
Dekraai and began asking questions, reported the ABA Journal.
This planting of an informant next to a suspect was not an
isolated incident, according to Dekraai’s public defender, Scott Sanders. After
a year of investigation, Sanders filed a 505-page motion alleging that the DA’s
office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had a long-standing practice
of planting undercover informants next to high-value defendants represented by
counsel. In addition, the DA’s office routinely failed to hand over
discoverable evidence and, when asked about it, deputies and prosecutors
repeatedly lied, Sanders claims.
If true, such practices would be a violation of civil
rights.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1964’s Massiah v.
United States that police officers who use undercover informants to
interrogate someone represented by counsel violate the accused’s Sixth
Amendment right to an attorney. And failing to turn over exculpatory
information on this practice is a violation of the defendant’s 14th Amendment
due process rights under 1963’s Brady v. Maryland.
Sanders’ allegations were explosive, triggering a year of
hearings that led to an even bigger revelation: For more than 25 years, the
sheriff’s department has maintained a database called Tred for tracking jail
movements, but had almost never disclosed its information. That means
prosecutors who knew about Tred records could have violated Brady dozens,
hundreds or even thousands of times—and two decades of convictions could be
called into question.
The revelations were so damning that Orange County Superior
Court Judge Thomas Goethals disqualified the DA’s entire 250-lawyer office from
prosecuting Dekraai. “It is arguable whether or not the evidence currently
before this court … reaches the standard of ‘outrageous governmental
misconduct,’ ” Goethals wrote in March 2015. “What cannot be debated is the
fact that serious, ongoing discovery violations continue to occur in this
case.”
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