These editorial pages often express frustration at the inability or unwillingness of the criminal-justice system to police itself. That system – police agencies, prosecutors, courts and jails – often imposes stiff punishments on citizens who engage in wrongdoing. But when its own officials misbehave, let’s just say the wheels of justice turn very slowly when they turn at all.
The latest reminder involves the Orange County snitch scandal – a nearly decade-old embarrassment that has landed in the news again because county and state officials didn’t do much to hold anyone accountable.
Now an Orange County public defender filed a 424-page court motion alleging former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now a judge, “led a criminal conspiracy to withhold evidence in a murder trial, covering up the misdeed for more than a decade and impacting nearly 100 other cases,” as the Register reported. The filing accuses him of misleading investigators about “his use of a secret network of jailhouse informants.”
The scandal first emerged nearly a decade ago, when a public defender claimed prosecutors and the sheriff’s office illegally used jailhouse informants to secretly gather information on defendants. Federal investigators ultimately concluded it violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel and due process under U.S. Constitution.
Initially, top officials denied wrongdoing, with former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas shamefully referring to it as a “media witch hunt.” The state attorney general’s office under Kamala Harris spent four years “investigating” and then quietly ended its work without any charges or findings.
Even new District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who highlighted the scandal in his campaign and fired Baytieh, produced a languid report. Finally, the feds in 2022 concluded “the informant controversy continues to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the Orange County criminal legal system” and that, “Neither agency has implemented sufficient remedial measures to identify criminal cases impacted by unlawful informant activities or prevent future constitutional violations.”
When the legal system violates people’s rights, it leads to terrible outcomes – undermining scores of convictions and eroding trust in the fairness of the system. We’d call for another investigation, but what’s the point?
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