Can you imagine this SCUM BAG CRIMINAL DA allowed a MURDERER SNITCH (MAN GETTING SOMETHING IN HIS FAVOR TO STAB A MAN ON HIS SIDE IN THE BACK) TO GET A DEAL IF HE RATS OUT SOME MORE SHIT BAGS LIKE HIMSELF (MURDERER SNITCH).  Our tax dollars at work letting one scum off softly to catch another scum all while being scum yourself! wow, you are a piece of work!

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s Office is Dirty and Corrupt from the TOP DOWN, the good one’s that work there have to fear their own boss! PURE EVIL SCUM SOCIOPATH TODD SPITZER

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today, based upon a thorough investigation focused on custodial informant activity from 2007 through 2016, that the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department operated a custodial informant program that systematically violated criminal defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law.

Specifically, the department found reasonable cause to believe that Orange County prosecutors and Sheriff deputies violated the Sixth Amendment by using jailhouse informants to elicit incriminating statements from people who had been arrested, after those individuals had been charged with a crime. The department also found that Orange County prosecutors violated the Fourteenth Amendment by failing to disclose exculpatory evidence about those custodial informants to criminal defendants. The department believes that OCDA and OCSD stopped using informants as agents of law enforcement to obtain statements from charged defendants in the Orange County Jail in 2016.

The Justice Department provided a comprehensive, written report of its investigative findings to the Orange County District Attorney and Sheriff. The report explicitly acknowledges the reforms that the District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department have implemented already, and identifies the additional remedial measures that the department believes are necessary to fully address its findings.

“All persons who are accused of a crime are guaranteed basic constitutional protections that are intended to ensure fairness in criminal proceedings and due process of law,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. “Prosecutors and law enforcement officers have an obligation to uphold these rights in their fight against crime and in their pursuit of justice, including in the way that they use custodial informants against criminal defendants. The failure to protect these basic constitutional guarantees not only deprives individual defendants of their rights, it undermines the public’s confidence in the fundamental fairness of criminal justice systems across the county.”

The evidence uncovered by the department reveals that custodial informants in the Orange County Jail system acted as agents of law enforcement to elicit incriminating statements from defendants represented by counsel, and that for years Orange County Sheriff deputies maintained and concealed systems to track, manage, and reward those custodial informants. The evidence also reveals that Orange County prosecutors failed to seek out and disclose exculpatory information regarding custodial informants to defense counsel.

The department opened this investigation in 2016. The department reviewed thousands of pages of documents, conducted numerous site visits and interviewed dozens of witnesses, including Orange County prosecutors. The department also monitored developments in criminal cases, including those that culminated recently. Orange County officials cooperated throughout the investigation.

The Special Litigation Section of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., conducted the investigation pursuant to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which prohibits state and local governments from engaging in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives individuals of rights protected by the Constitution or federal law. The statute allows the department to remedy such misconduct through civil litigation.

Click Here to read more about this corrupt criminal District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s Office by the ACLU

• IN (JUSTICE) in ORANGE COUNTY A Case for Change and Accountability ACLU REPORT or Here from GoodShepherdMedia.net

• IN (JUSTICE) in ORANGE COUNTY A Case for Change and Accountability ACLU CASE STUDY SUMMARY or Here from GoodShepherdMedia.net

OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s racial remarks during a death penalty decision meeting has now become the focus of an investigation by the county’s law enforcement watchdog.

The probe by Orange County’s Office of Independent Review (OIR) centers on statements about Black men dating White women that Spitzer has acknowledged making when deciding whether to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant, Jamon Rayon Buggs, as well as complaints about the DA’s office’s handling of its victim’s rights obligations under Marsy’s Law.

“We are investigating these allegations,” said Sergio Perez, who as OIR director is tasked under county law with investigating law enforcement misconduct, in an interview with Voice of OC this week.

“The allegations are quite serious because they get to the heart…of the criminal justice system’s commitment to treat everybody fairly, regardless of who they are,” he added.

“And whenever there’s a question about that kind of treatment, then we run the danger of a crisis in confidence in the criminal justice system. We want to be sure decisions are being made for the right reasons in the right ways,” added Perez.

“The goal is to ensure people have an objective and transparent accounting of what took place.”

Spitzer – who led the charge years ago to expand the watchdog office’s jurisdiction to the DA’s office when he was a county supervisor – is promising to cooperate.

“I am the one who originally insisted on expanding the Office of Independent’s oversight to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Of course we will fully cooperate with any investigation,” Spitzer said in a statement to Voice of OC.

“There is absolutely zero truth to the allegations,” he added.

Spitzer has acknowledged that at an Oct. 1 meeting on whether to seek the death penalty against Buggs, he asked prosecutors about the race of the defendant’s former girlfriends and said he had “seen Black men date White women in certain circles in order to have others around them be more accepting.”

Spitzer contends that was entirely appropriate for him to bring up Black men dating White women when discussing whether to seek the death penalty, because he “simply was exploring [the defendant’s] ability to identify, properly or not, the race of the female victim in that moment before he executed two victims.”

Yet several prosecutors in the room appear to have seen it differently.

According to a memo written by then-prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh – who’s now running for judge – he and two other prosecutors from the meeting agreed that Spitzer’s remarks had to be turned over to the judge in Buggs’ case.

Baytieh wrote the prosecutors agreed that the comments had to be disclosed to the judge under the state’s Racial Justice Act, which requires disclosure of potential racial bias.

Baytieh also had a different account from Spitzer about what the DA said. In Baytieh’s account, Spitzer said “he knows many black people who get themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations by only dating ‘white women.’ ”

In his memo, Baytieh – who oversaw special prosecutions at the DA’s office as a senior assistant DA – pushed back, according to his memo.

“I then specifically stated that we should not under any circumstances give any weight or even discuss the race of the victims when we are deciding about the appropriate punishment to seek because, among other legal and ethical reasons, doing so implicates the recently signed Racial Justice Act,” Baytieh wrote.

The DA responded with an alleged story about a Black man he once knew, according to the memo.

“DA Spitzer then stated that while he was a student in college, he knew as a matter of fact that one of his fellow black students who lived in the same location as DA Spitzer only dated ‘white women,’ and that DA Spitzer knew for sure that this black student did so on purpose to get himself out of his bad circumstances and situations.”

The lead detective in the Buggs case has also taken issue with Spitzer’s handling of the issue, writting a letter to the judge saying Spitzer ruined the death penalty case by making inappropriate racial remarks and then trying to cover it up.

Newport Beach Detective Court Depweg wrote to the judge that he had been told by multiple current and former DA officials that Spitzer “made an unsolicited, derogatory, and racist comment about Black men/persons” at an Oct. 1 meeting on whether to seek the death penalty against Buggs.

Spitzer denies the cover-up allegations.

Perez said his investigation would hear out all sides.

“We aren’t conducting an investigation with a foregone conclusion,” Perez said.

“It’s our job to collect the facts and to report those facts to the people of Orange County. And that’s what we intend to do,” he continued.

Spitzer has also been accused by the mother of one of Buggs’ victims of violating Marsy’s Law by not informing her ahead of telling the court he would no longer seek the death penalty – allegations Spitzer has disputed.

Perez said he’s interested in speaking with any witnesses who have more information about the issues he’s probing.

“We are interested in hearing from people with firsthand experience with regards to the allegations,” he said.

“And we hope people feel confident in stepping forward to the OIR as an independent, objective body that will whenever possible maintain the confidentiality of those individuals while also ensuring that the people of Orange County get that verifiable, objective, independent account of what took place.”

Perez, who was appointed to the watchdog role in May 2020, wrote a public investigation report last summer that called out “troubling cultural currents” in use of force training and policy at the OC Sheriff’s Department while also crediting the department for being transparent and cooperative with the probe – “with few exceptions.”

Perez’ report found that the department’s culture may be fueling deputy misconduct, harsh treatment toward people already in custody or in mental health crises, and a lack of internal probes into unauthorized use of force.

The watchdog agency used to only have jurisdiction over the Sheriff’s Department.

But back in 2015 when he was a county supervisor preparing to run for DA, Todd Spitzer successfully led the charge to expand OIR’s jurisdiction to include the District Attorney’s office.

Now, as DA, he’s the focus of an investigation by that very agency.

Perez says he looks forward to Spitzer’s cooperation in the probe’s fact-finding efforts.

“I hope and expect that the District Attorney will be constructive and cooperative in his engagement with our investigation,” he said.

“Oversight is really important in times like this, when folks have serious doubt about the way their government is conducting its business.”

Nick Gerda covers county government for Voice of OC. You can contact him at ngerda@voiceofoc.org.

•••

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Who Aided OC Sheriff in the Secret Monitoring of Attorney Client Phone Calls?

Illegal playlist (Illustration by Jouvon Michael Kingsby)For decades, the local population routinely accepted the word of Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) deputies as gospel. Reports of gruesome deputy beatings of inmates, sleeping on the job, using public equipment such as helicopters for personal use and federal corruption convictions of the agency’s top three officers didn’t permanently scar their reputations, perhaps because they were spun as isolated, freak events. But by February 2015, OCSD managers found themselves in a public-relations crisis that was winning embarrassing national headlines.

Evidence proved deputies and their supervisors systematically cheated the criminal-justice system for decades by aiding prosecutors in winning trials with underhanded tactics. They’d run unconstitutional scams using jailhouse informants to trick pretrial inmates into talking about their cases despite their right to remain silent. With juries kept in the dark, deputies hid or destroyed records of these plots. They’d even committed perjury as the coup de grâce in their slimy endeavors. Once caught in lies after swearing to tell the whole truth, deputies incredibly claimed they thought they had the right to pick and choose which questions to answer honestly on the witness stand.

It’s in that environment that seemingly unrelated events occurred in early 2015—which I’ll highlight after some necessary background. Reston, Virginia-based Global Tel*Link Corp. (GTL), OCSD’s handpicked monopoly for the lucrative jailhouse-phone system, upgraded its surveillance capabilities in January. In March, Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals, disgusted by deputies’ lies in a death-penalty case, blasted their perjury and historically booted then-District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, as well as his entire staff, because he believed prosecutors were more concerned about winning than insisting on ethical law-enforcement operations. 

In between those two events was hidden, until recently, the key moment to OCSD’s latest scandal. Freshman Sheriff Don Barnes didn’t want his era at the helm of the agency and its billion-dollar annual budget marred by scandals on par with the missteps of Sandra Hutchens, his predecessor and warped mentor. According to sources, Barnes hoped his fresh face, golly-gee quotes and towering, cowboy physique might allow him a fresh start. But it was impossible that some of Hutchens’ myriad of scandals, which Barnes dutifully participated in as second in command, wouldn’t spill over to the next top cop, which is precisely what happened with the GTL mess. 

A fluke January 2018 discovery in a separately wild, questionable, ongoing attempted-murder prosecution in People v. Josh Waring revealed that tainted sheriff’s deputies and Costa Mesa cops had been recording, downloading and listening to calls the pretrial defendant made to his attorney, Joel Garson. As with using jail snitches as government agents to question OCSD targets before their trials, it’s illegal to violate attorney-client communications. Even graduates of community-college Policing 101 understand that fundamental Sixth Amendment principle. 

But as the informant scandal underscored, too many OCSD deputies think neither the law nor common decency constrict their conduct. Fueling this duplicity is the belief they are shrouded in official secrecy and if, by chance, ugly facts escape containment, then local prosecutors will ignore transgressions. Newly elected, reform-claiming DA Todd Spitzer adopted Rackauckas’ policy of protecting dirty deputies. For example, in at least 145 cases, his deputy DAs have blocked defense-attorney access to records of moral turpitude committed by badged OCSD employees. That move helps maintain the fiction that deputies’ testimony and arrest reports are unquestionably righteous. 

Because of the Waring revelations, GTL and OCSD panicked for differing reasons. One was concerned about its corporate credibility, its desire to keep 82 percent of the U.S. jail phone-call market and how to protect $1.2 billion in annual revenues. The other was Hutchens’ desire to avoid another controversy during her final year in power. Both spent half a year concocting seemingly plausible spins to downplay the violations of attorney-client communications. When the public began to hear about this cheating in August 2018, they were told the phone-call surveillance had been because of a benign technical glitch and that deputy access to the conversations hadn’t benefited law-enforcement cases. 

Undermining those assertions have been glaring inconsistencies, flip-flops and common sense. Who was to blame? At first, a technical glitch was at fault. Then, it was “human error” by a nameless, mysterious employee, who—if this person exists—is being hidden from defense attorney questioning. Later, the glitch line returned. And finally, it was suggested client county departments had screwed up, according to GTL emails. But you’ll see by the end of this column it was all poppycock. 

In late July 2018, Darren Wallace, GTL’s executive vice president for operations, sent Hutchens a letter that allegedly summarized the parties’ private discussions. Wallace wrote that the company “had recently discovered” the abuse of privileged attorney-client calls because of a “technical error.” He also claimed the mess had been fixed. 

A month later, in Waring testimony, Wallace pointed to a “human error” as the cause. He also stated he’d written the letter to the sheriff on his 11th day on this particular GTL assignment and noted it was his first official act. But in truth, he wasn’t the author. The man who wrote the basic contents of the letter to OCSD had been George McNitt, GTL’s Fort Worth-based vice president of technical services. 

Why conceal that fact? Because admission of McNitt’s authorship role would have belied the claim that GTL had “recently discovered” the supposedly new problem in Orange County. He’d crafted the letter three years and four months earlier to the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, according to records reviewed by the Weekly. A prosecutor there had discovered that hundreds of attorney-inmate calls had been accessed by deputies and, honorably, complained. 

Both the 2018 Wallace-signed letter and the 2015 McNitt-signed letter argue the same point: breaking the attorney-client privilege had been unintentional, whether in California or Florida or anywhere else they’ve botched affairs. 

But recall early 2015. GTL installed its new phone system in January. Two months later, OCSD officials felt the blistering rebuke of a judge. Wedged between those two events were bombshell February moves behind the scenes that indicate the phone monitoring might not have been innocent after all. 

On Feb. 23 of that year, someone oddly made calls from two OC jail facilities to the IT Department of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office (OCPD). Even more puzzling, Larry Coleman, an on-site technician who handled GTL issues for OCSD, accessed one of those bizarre calls.

Had Coleman confirmed deputies could monitor pretrial inmate calls to public defenders without detection? 

Adil M. Khan, a Los Angeles-based lawyer for GTL, this month labeled such questions “conspiracy theories.” Khan says we should trust the company’s current wobbly accounting. He hopes Superior Court Judge Gregg L. Prickett, a former prosecutor, will block public defenders Sara Ross and Scott Sanders from asking GTL employees future questions or obtaining more GTL documents. Otherwise, the government contractor would be put in an “unfair” situation, he says.

Yet, it’s fascinating that just hours after Coleman’s 2015 call to the OCPD’s IT Department, sheriff’s Special Handling Deputy Blake Blaney began unethically accessing inmate calls to OCPD lawyers—and the company did nothing to stop it, court records indicate. 

According to Sanders, “It appears circumstantially strong that Coleman actually gave the Special Handling Unit the ‘all clear’ sign to access privileged calls.”

R. SCOTT MOXLEY

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

CITED FROM https://www.ocweekly.com/ocsd-global-tel-gtl-jail-phone/

Orange County District Attorney’s office vast years of corruption under more than just Todd Spitzer dating years back.

everything above cited from https://www.change.org/p/us-attorney-federal-investigation-of-orange-county-district-attorney

CHAPTER ONE

For bored cops seeking action, there’s probably no easier place to score than the Southern California motels where petty drug dealers rendezvous with users. At 12:45 p.m. on Feb. 15, 2016, that sweet spot for Deputy Nicholas Petropulos of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) was the parking lot at the Extended Stay of America in Yorba Linda near the 91 freeway. Though a fellow officer assigned to investigate events of that afternoon would later falsify an official record to help justify Petropulos’ deadly presence, the deputy had received no call for help.

First as a cop in Brea, and then, beginning in 2012, with the OCSD, Petropulos knew that Extended Stay, located a few miles from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, was his proverbial shooting-fish-in-a-barrel site. During his career, he’d conducted approximately 100 investigations there, usually involving minor transactions and yielding an average of 20 arrests per year.

On that February afternoon, Petropulos returned to his favorite hunting ground and, sure enough, observed what he considered highly suspicious activity: Two people talking to each other in the parking lot. Brandon Lee Witt was sitting in the driver’s seat of a gold, four-door Toyota Avalon, while Manuel Drought stood nearby. Neither man screamed, ran or brandished a weapon. But Petropulos’ suspicion intensified when the men made what he considered another eyebrow-raising move: They dared to look at him as he slowly drove his patrol vehicle by while staring at them.

In the end, that reasoning wasn’t necessary to explore what horrific crimes could be under way, as Petropulos had found his legal hook for escalation. Witt’s car didn’t show a front license plate, a California Vehicle Code infraction. The deputy drove out of view, stopped and waited. When nothing more happened, he returned to the scene. “I decided to investigate,” he eventually explained under oath.

After parking the OCSD cruiser at an angle that allowed his patrol video-recording system (PVS) to catch the upcoming encounter’s audio, but thwarted it from capturing meaningful video, Petropulos approached Witt, who’d remained in his car. The deputy asked, “What’s going on, man?”

Witt replied, “I’m in the middle of moving.”

“Do you have anything in the car illegal?”

“No.”

“Anything I need to worry about?”

“Not at all.”

“Is this your car?”

“Yeah. . . . Did I do anything wrong?”

“You had no front plate on the car when I looked at it earlier.”

“It’s right here.”

Having been previously victimized by a person impersonating an officer, Witt was frightened to obey commands to exit the car. He asked the deputy, “Can I verify your identity?” And, “Can I at least call your sergeant?”

Petropulos wasn’t happy with the questions. “You’re lucky I haven’t ripped you right out.”

Voicing concern that Witt might be using his right hand to reach for a weapon, the deputy began grabbing him.

“Hey, there’s no need to touch me like that,” Witt said.

“Dude, I swear to God,” Petropulos replied.

“Look, stop,” Witt said. “Why are you assaulting me?”

Claiming he wasn’t getting full compliance with his commands, the deputy launched a series of lethal threats, saying, “I’m going to shoot you!”

Witt pleaded, “No.”

“I’m going to fucking shoot you,” said Petropulos, who would unholster his department-issued Glock handgun.

“I’m scared,” said Witt. “I’m scared.”

The banter continued with Witt alarmed by the deputy’s aggression and the deputy frustrated that his suspect allegedly wouldn’t keep his right hand in plain sight.

“You’re going to get shot, motherfucker!” Petropulos declared.

“No, please don’t!” Witt cried. “Please!”

Neither the deputy nor Brian Callagy, a fellow cop who arrived as backup, saw the suspect holding a knife or a gun or even the appearance of a weapon anywhere inside the car. If anyone should have been in fear for his life, it was the 39-year-old Witt, who’d consumed methamphetamines that day. Unarmed and surrounded by two deputies, he posed no immediate threat.

Petropulos said, “Fuck it,” placed the Glock at point-blank range on Witt’s left shoulder and fired.

There was a moan, and then nothing. According to an autopsy, the 40 mm bullet ripped through the victim’s arm, chest, ribs, heart, diaphragm and liver. Witt’s right foot had hit the gas in reaction, causing the Toyota to race over a curb and crash into a concrete drainage ditch. Though still-spinning tires produced smoke, there was no movement inside the vehicle. Bleeding profusely and unconscious, a dying Witt was left unattended for a period of time because, the deputy claims, he still believed Witt might reach for a gun.

In the aftermath, Petropulos—who makes more than $255,000 annually in public funds—told a tale at odds with the audio recording and probability. According to the deputy, a seated and miraculously strong Witt used his left hand to “pull parts of my shoulder and upper body through the window of the vehicle” while his right hand extended in the opposite direction searching for that nonexistent gun.

Petropulos hoped that people would believe Witt tried to drive away with him hanging halfway out the Toyota’s window. He also declared himself the victim of a felony assault by an “aggressive” suspect. He noted he’d suffered a light bruise and scratch on his right arm. It was enough to make him “fear for my life,” the deputy said.

Employment of that well-worn catchphrase, whether genuine or not, often acts as a legal prophylactic for police seeking immunity from courthouse accountability, but additional chapters in the Witt saga were yet to be written.

CHAPTER TWO

Chicago police were on the lookout in October 2014 for an auto burglary suspect when they spotted 17-year-old Laquan McDonald acting bizarrely on the street while holding a 3-inch knife.

McDonald, who was high on PCP, disobeyed commands to drop the knife. But nine of the 10 cops on the scene saw no reason to gun him down.

Officer Jason Van Dyke, however, wasn’t in any mood for de-escalation. He waited all of six seconds after exiting his patrol vehicle to shoot McDonald in the back, driving him to the pavement. With the suspect still down, the cop emptied the rest of his magazine, firing 15 more bullets from his 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. An autopsy determined McDonald had been shot in his chest, neck, head, both arms, right leg and back.

The follow-up investigation by the Chicago Police Department ruled the homicide “justified” after rewriting history. The department accepted Van Dyke’s story that McDonald had pointed the knife blade and “lunged” at him. That tale bolstered the cop’s report that he’d been scared and feared for his life.

Months later, police weren’t able to keep wraps on all the videos of the shooting, footage that contradicted Van Dyke’s version of events. The knife in McDonald’s hand had been folded when found at the scene, and he’d never lunged. There was also evidence that cops destroyed valuable dash-cam videos and “intentionally damaged” audio recordings of the killing.

Disgusted by the incident, community groups hosted numerous emotional street protests. The City Council gave McDonald’s family a $5 million settlement and hoped there would be no further embarrassing revelations of police corruption tied to the case that a civil trial might uncover. Van Dyke’s prosecutor told a jury that none of the shots was necessary. The panel convicted Van Dyke for murder and 16 counts of battery for each fired bullet. During a January sentencing hearing, he received a prison punishment of six years and nine months.

But there’s a fascinating twist: Not everybody agreed on who’d been victimized. Embedded among cop ranks were people in denial. A cop-union official told a reporter the jury was “duped” and had “stabbed” police “in the back.” Another said, “The Chicago Police Department is standing with an officer we think acted as an officer.”

It’s not just in Chicago where police routinely protect their own scoundrels with lies, doctored evidence and media campaigns.

CHAPTER THREE

“Each deputy must be entrusted with well-reasoned discretion in determining the appropriate use of force in each incident,” OCSD policy states. “The use of force to accomplish unlawful objectives is prohibited. The Department will not tolerate excessive and/or punitive force.”

Those statements are noble theories—not reality. Excessive force is often celebrated in the department run by Sheriff Donald Barnes. Beating someone unconscious or taking a life can be a precursor to career advancement and bigger salaries.

Deputy Michael Devitt bolstered his résumé about 30 minutes before sunrise on Aug. 19, 2018, when he approached a passed-out man who was slumped over in the driver’s seat of a black Jeep. Mohamed Sayem had been out drinking the night before and decided to sleep off his insobriety in the parking lot of a pool hall and bar. Devitt’s verbal efforts didn’t wake Sayem, so the deputy opened the car door, removed the key from the ignition and began shaking the suspect, who was clearly inebriated. Asked for identification, a mumbling Sayem handed the officer his Bic lighter.

To be fair, there’s no doubt Devitt and his colleague on the scene, Eric Ota, had a duty to investigate the situation. But after telling Sayem to stay in the Jeep, Devitt began grabbing the suspect, who recoiled and said there was no reason for the aggression. “Don’t touch me like that,” Sayem said.

The deputy then yanked the wobbly suspect out of the vehicle, punched him in the stomach and violently slammed his fist into the man’s face six times. The third blow knocked Sayem unconscious. Ota then helped Devitt throw Sayem face-down to the pavement before handcuffing the man. Sayem regained consciousness and asked if they were going to shoot him.

“[I’d] like to,” said Ota.

Four minutes later, with the sun on the verge of rising, OCSD Sergeant Christopher Hibbs arrived and Devitt explained events. He said he’d grabbed an uncooperative Sayem and yanked him out of the Jeep “to control him.” He’d “punched him probably four times on the right side of his face” because Sayem was “basically standing over me now, and he is way taller than I am,” according to an audio recording.

He added that the suspect tried to “bear hug” him, though dash-cam video shows Sayem’s right hand clutching the steering wheel until he was punched unconscious.

Two other deputies arrived, Blake Blaney and Brant Lewis, and all five officers huddled around the hood of Devitt’s patrol vehicle. The topic of their conversation? Recent beatings of suspects. At one point, Blaney said, “That was a good fight!”

Lewis boasted, “I got in another good one last week.”

Moments later, the deputies realized that Hibbs’ body mic was still on. Lewis walked over to his superior officer and turned it off; the chatting resumed.

For a deputy trying to talk his way out of an excessive-force case, Hibbs was the ideal boss. In September 2007, near the Anaheim-Stanton border, he’d grown angry with Ignacio Lares, a suspect who refused to give his real name. Though Lares was handcuffed and secured in the back of a patrol car without leg room, Hibbs twice fired his Taser weapon. To justify his violence, he claimed he’d felt physically threatened and in danger. But prosecutors believed it was a classic case of excessive force and charged him after securing damning testimony from five other officers—Trent Hoffman, Robert Long, Bryan Thomas, Rob Gunzel and James Wicks—who’d witnessed the tasing. OCSD management, including then-Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, and the deputies’ union protested the Hibbs case as unfair.

At the Fullerton trial, which I covered, each of the law-enforcement witnesses diverted from their grand-jury testimony by claiming severe memory loss. Dozens and dozens of times, they testified, “I don’t recall” or, “I don’t remember.” An elderly, male-dominated jury then voted 11 to 1 for acquittal. In fact, three of the jurors told me afterward that Hibbs should have shot Lares. Disgusted prosecutors said they’d witnessed the police “code of silence” in action.

A bit more than a decade later, Hibbs heard Devitt’s first oral explanation for the attack on Sayem. In a newer version written when all the deputies had huddled at the scene and had turned off their mics, he embellished the danger he faced with acts that are not recorded on dash-cam video. Now, Sayem supposedly grabbed his utility vest and refused to let go, the implication being that the suspect was trying to grab a weapon. “I believed Sayem was going to continue to try to physically assault me,” he wrote to justify the beating.

Memory loss had aided Hibbs in his own excessive-force case. With Devitt’s altered tale on his desk, perhaps he thought he’d extend the same courtesy he’d received. He ignored the discrepancies and signed the official report as legitimate.

CHAPTER FOUR

It’s standard practice for deputies to conduct surveillance on a property long before a planned raid. But that’s not what happened at 6:30 on an April 2003 morning in North Orange County. About a dozen gun-pointing OCSD gang and narcotics deputies broke down the front door of Roberto “Pino” Peralez’s tiny 88-year-old home. If they’d followed procedure, they would have known the 69-year-old heroin addict had already left to comply with a court-ordered daily dose of methadone at a Stanton community clinic.

Pissed that he’d missed his target, Deputy Joe Balicki raced to the clinic in an unmarked vehicle and found Peralez driving his decades-old burgundy GMC Safari van toward him. The addict was on his way home, unaware of the raid.

But drug use had taken its toll. Peralez was a fragile figure at 5-foot-7 with bad eyes and bad hearing, according to his daughter.

Balicki jumped in front of the slow-moving, dilapidated van and pointed a 9 mm Sig Sauer handgun at Peralez. Seconds later, three bullets pierced the windshield and destroyed the unarmed man’s heart. He died instantly.

An exhilarated (some thought cocky) Balicki told fellow officers that he’d felt his life had been in danger. He then drove to a nearby McDonald’s for breakfast and to wait for the OCSD public-relations unit to spin its magic. It worked, at least in the Los Angeles Times, which published the headline “Driver, 69, Shot Dead as He Tries to Ram Deputies.”

This killer was never held accountable in either criminal or civil court. In fact, Balicki took delight in ending Peralez’s life. To celebrate his feat, the sniper-trained deputy placed a trophy of sorts on his OCSD desk: an enlarged photograph of the three tight bullet holes in the victim’s windshield.

CHAPTER FIVE

The unexpected, unnecessary death of Witt, a Garden Grove native, left his relatives in shock. The 6-foot-1, 165-pound Witt—who’d struggled with drug addiction, according to his Vietnamese American ex-girlfriend—loved to travel with friends and family. At a church memorial service, his relatively short life was celebrated.

Gary Witt and Kathy Craig, Witt’s separated parents, hired Scott D. Hughes of Newport Beach and Dale K. Galipo of Woodland Hills to represent them in a federal wrongful-death lawsuit against OCSD and Petropulos. Hughes and Galipo reported that deputies had punched and kicked Witt’s face and head after pulling his dying body from the crashed Toyota.

“Witt never attempted to punch, kick or verbally threaten anyone,” the attorneys told U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney in their March 2017 complaint. “He was unarmed and posed no imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to either Petropulos or any other person [throughout the incident]. . . . There was no objectively reasonable justification for [the deputy] to resort to the tactics that he did.”

Lawyers privately retained at taxpayer expense by the County of Orange on behalf of the defendants spent months trying to kill the lawsuit before it could reach a jury. They claimed the parents didn’t technically qualify for the right to sue. They sought immunity from accountability for Petropulos because he is a cop. They argued it had been a righteous killing, and therefore, a jury had no facts to consider opposite of their stance. They battled against the plaintiffs’ right to call a police expert who would testify the deputy’s conduct had been unprofessional. They even demanded that a future jury never learn that Witt had been unarmed.

When Carney rejected their points as meritless, the county’s Board of Supervisors appealed to the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But they lost there, too. In May, a jury determined that Petropulos used excessive force, violated Witt’s constitutional rights and acted with “malice” in the killing. They awarded the parents $3.4 million.

CHAPTER SIX

When it comes to the daily protection of deputies caught in ethical messes, the job falls to Orange County’s County Counsel (OCCC). For example, in OCSD’s notorious jailhouse-informant scandal, the OCCC helped deputies disobey judicially demanded records that assisted in illustrating how they ran unconstitutional scams, hid or destroyed embarrassing evidence, and repeatedly committed perjury. At the height of the scandal in mid-2017, Catherine Irons, a then-retired lieutenant, testified that OCCC and OCSD secretly agreed to withhold key informant records.

In the Sayem case, the OCCC assigned Kayla Watson the task of shielding Devitt, Ota and Hibbs from accountability. Watson told Judge Kevin Haskins and Sayem defense attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, a lie at a pretrial hearing in December; she claimed that Hibbs had written only one report on the case and that the defense had already received it.

After an in-camera session between only Haskins, Watson and OCSD sergeant Anthony Patella, the judge emerged and announced he saw nothing the defense was entitled to receive. A surprised Sanders asked if he’d seen any use-of-force documents. Haskins said the sheriff’s department had surrendered no such evidence.

About a week later, Watson reappeared in court. She conceded Hibbs had written a six-page use-of-force report and that she had known of its existence, but that the sheriff’s department didn’t want it released, even though the defense was entitled to see it. Sanders saw multiple reasons why the document had been hidden; it shows that Hibbs omitted Devitt’s first unhelpful explanation for the beating, and it also documented he’d obtained and reviewed Ota’s dash cam to reach his conclusions.

But that’s a huge problem for Watson and OCSD. They had failed to surrender Ota’s dash-cam video. When confronted by Sanders, Watson said there is no Ota footage. Haskins then forced Hibbs to sign a declaration backing up that assertion. The sergeant claimed he’d erroneously written he’d watched the video when he hadn’t because it doesn’t exist.

The Ota audio from the dash cam is, as department officials surely know, crucial. It would cover an 11-minute gap at the scene when Devitt revised his story while surrounded by the other four deputies. “Hibbs helped Devitt to conceal the truth about his assault on [Sayem],” said Sanders, who plans to press for more honest disclosures at a hearing this month. “The charge of felony resisting an officer against my client should have been dismissed long ago.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The brutal September 2015 restaurant/bar murder of college student Shayan Mazroei by Craig Tanber shocked Laguna Niguel, where homicides are rare. The killing also set off a series of scandals. Did Tanber, once a member of the white-supremacist, criminal street gang Public Enemy Number One Death Squad (PEN1), commit a hate crime, as the victim’s family believes? Causing public protests, prosecutors declined to pursue that angle, but they found themselves in a nightmare as they watched OCSD deputies botch another simple case with stunning unprofessionalism.

When asked how he’d helped capture Tanber at a Garden Grove motel after days on the run, deputy Victor Valdez oddly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a grand jury hearing. Valdez had given $300 during the manhunt to his confidential informant, Adriean Vasquez, the mother of Tanber’s son, and asked her to lure the wanted man to her motel room for an ambush. Vasquez is the daughter of Gina Peterson, who has ties to The Real Housewives of Orange County and once dated Dennis Rodman, the unofficial U.S. ambassador to North Korea and a legendary basketball player. 

Under oath, Valdez refused to say whether he’d conducted an illegal operation against Tanber on the grounds that his answer might incriminate him. Deputy Public Defender Alisha Montoro, who represents the accused killer, believes the evidence shows Valdez had a—politely put—romantic history with Vasquez and ordered her to buy heroin and inject a massive dose into Tanber’s arm as a way to subdue him in her motel room that was surrounded by surveillance conducted by OCSD’s North Gang Enforcement Team (NGET), a cowboy crew that enjoyed calling itself the “Jumpout Boys.” (These boys liked to chat amongst themselves about blowjobs, pornography, fornication and partying with female informants while on duty, according to court records.) Once officers had the handcuffed fugitive in their patrol vehicle, they launched an unconstitutional recorded interrogation despite him being exceptionally high. 

That pretrial murder case is still playing out inside Orange County’s Central Courtroom, but prosecutorial inspections into the conduct of Valdez, who’d erased his phone upon learning he was under investigation, and his partner, Phil Avalos, uncovered not only their cozy, personal relationships with Vasquez, who said OCSD gave her heroin as a snitch reward in addition to cash for squealing on her narcotics-trafficking pals, but also other highly suspicious activities.

This week, Montoro tried to ask Valdez, who is currently assigned to patrol Mission Viejo, questions about his conduct in Tanber, but he again invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege. She then turned to Avalos, who’d become Vasquez’s “handler” after Valdez left the unit that focuses on Stanton area gangs such as Crow Village. Avalos conceded on the witness stand that he’d sent Vasquez—a heroin addict who called him “hon” and supplied him with breast pics—advance notice that undercover agents were snooping around her motel, looking to make drug arrests. He had to admit that fact because Montoro found proof in text messages. Avalos, who wears the best poker face I’ve ever seen, insisted he had been “joking.”

But this 17-year deputy and onetime high-school resources cop, falsified official crime reports on at least four occasions. In each case, he claimed he’d placed confiscated weapons, drug paraphernalia, methamphetamine or cocaine into the department’s evidence locker when he hadn’t. There’s no dispute. Asked by Montoro if he falsified reports, Avalos answered, “Correct.”

“I did not know I lost it until it was brought to my attention,” he testified. “It is by accident [I’d failed to book that evidence].”

Pressed by Montoro, the deputy admitted it is “possible” he placed the missing evidence with the wrong defendants, but he wouldn’t know how to discover who he might have smeared. 

During an June 5 hearing, Vasquez testified that deputy Valdez demanded she give him photographs of her vagina and that once, with Avalos standing watch outside the patrol vehicle, he angrily told her he wanted to “face fuck her.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

After the OCSD deputies’ chicanery or uses of force when facing imaginary threats, they suffered the following fates: Petropulos won “deputy of the year” honors; Barnes awarded Devitt a coveted assignment craved by his 2,000 sworn colleagues and, in recent weeks, promoted report-falsifier Avalos to sergeant; Hibbs also landed a pay raise and sergeant’s job; Valdez kept his job and Balicki rose high through the ranks. He now works as a commander on Barnes’ executive staff, the one lamely asserting that anyone who questions the department’s lack of ethics is “anti-law enforcement.”

R. SCOTT MOXLEY

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

cited from https://www.ocweekly.com/don-barnes-orange-county-sheriff/

A wave of lawsuits from Orange County prosecutors against their own boss over his handling of workplace harassment issues continues to mount.

This week, three more prosecutors stepped forward, with one adding fuel to previous claims by another prosecutor that DA Todd Spitzer used racially-charged language that complicates criminal prosecutions.

To date, eight lawsuits have been filed by DA prosecutors – represented by two different attorneys, one of whom is a former prosecutor himself – alleging Spitzer enabled his friend Gary LoGalbo to harass female subordinates at the DA’s Office.

Two separate prosecutors allege in those lawsuits that Spitzer made racially inappropriate remarks.

Spitzer has denied the allegations, saying his racial comments were appropriate and that he acted immediately to protect LoGalbo’s victims.

Yet prosecutors told county HR investigators that Spitzer initially tried to retaliate against a victim who had come forward, and the HR investigator found Spitzer to be “not credible” in his denial.

This week, three more of LoGalbo’s alleged victims filed lawsuits saying Spitzer promoted LoGalbo – who had been the best man at Spitzer’s wedding – into powerful DA positions three times in one year despite warnings from his executives.

In one of those suits, a high-ranking 20-year DA prosecutor says LoGalbo and Spitzer both made “racially harassing” comments when handling cases.

“Mr. LoGalbo made statements to Plaintiff that cases should be assigned based on the race of the defense attorney, prosecutor, and defendant,” states the lawsuit by the prosecutor, who is identified as “Jane Roe Three” and served as a high-ranking leader on the DA’s Special Prosecutions Unit.

“Mr. Spitzer also accused Plaintiff of being afraid to prosecute a defendant simply because of the defendant’s race,” the new lawsuit adds.

[Click here to read the three new lawsuits: Jane Roe One, Jane Roe Two, Jane Roe Three.]

In response, Spitzer’s office provided a statement defending his handling of the LoGalbo harassment allegations, but not addressing the new racial comment claim.

“The allegations of harassment were sustained against Gary LoGalbo,” said the statement from Spitzer’s spokeswoman, Kimberly Edds.

“The allegations that District Attorney Spitzer protected LoGalbo in any way or retaliated against anyone who reported harassment was completely unfounded by the outside investigator,” she added.

“In fact he did everything he could do to not only support the victims of LoGalbo and encourage any and all victims of harassment to come forward.”

The outside investigator, however, did not clear Spitzer of attempting to retaliate against one of LoGalbo’s harassment victims, noting testimony from DA staff who said they refused to go along with Spitzer’s wishes.

The allegations add to a string of allegations of racial bias by Spitzer – including remarks he made during in a death penalty meeting that drew red flags from proscutors in the room.

In mid-February, documents emerged showing Spitzer ignited a firestorm of concern from prosecutors and a lead detective after he made racial remarks about Black men dating White women when deciding whether to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant.

Voice of OC was the first news agency to report on the concerns and the memos at the center of it.

Spitzer ultiamtely acknowledged that at the Oct. 1 death penalty meeting, he asked prosecutors about the race of the defendant’s former girlfriends and said he had “seen Black men date White women in certain circles in order to have others around them be more accepting.”

In a scathing letter to the judge, the lead detective in the Buggs case wrote Spitzer ruined the death penalty case by making the racial remarks and then trying to cover them up by removing all the existing prosecutors from the case and dropping the death penalty effort.

Newport Beach Detective Court Depweg wrote to the judge that he had been told by multiple current and former DA officials that Spitzer “made an unsolicited, derogatory, and racist comment about Black men/persons” at the Oct. 1 meeting.

As for LoGalbo’s alleged harassment, a county HR investigation confirmed he preyed on multiple female subordinates at the DA’s office.

That county probe found Spitzer was “not credible” when denying he had attempted to retaliate against the first female prosecutor who had come forward about LoGalbo.

The ongoing storm of lawsuits allege Spitzer’s actions enabled sexual harassment by promoting the best man from his wedding into a senior position overseeing the DA’s branch court staff, despite knowing LoGalbo was a “pervert” in his personal life.

Spitzer has called those statements “untrue” in a text message to Voice of OC, but wouldn’t elaborate in response to further questions.

The new lawsuits note a second county HR investigation found Spitzer violated workplace policies by sending the original harassment investigation – which contained details that can identify the victims – to every employee in his office, and by trashing one of the victims in an interview with Voice of OC.

“The investigator concluded that Mr. Spitzer ‘flagrantly’ violated County [equal employment opportunity] and Abusive Conduct policies and acted with ‘malice’ towards Plaintiff and the other victims of Mr. LoGalbo, which created a hostile and offensive work environment, and ‘caused unjustified embarrassment and indignity to [Plaintiff],’ ” states the new lawsuits.

“Mr. Spitzer, himself, admitted the release of the report will create a ‘chilling effect’ on future victims of harassment within the OCDA,” the suits adds.

While the county’s independent investigator confirmed in two separate probes that women were subjected to harassment by men at the top of the DA’s office, the county Board of Supervisors has failed to take action, the lawsuit states.

“The Board has not taken a single corrective or preventative action towards Mr. Spitzer, their former colleague,” states the new lawsuits.

“The Board’s inaction has sent a clear message to Plaintiff, to County employees, and to all citizens of Orange County that harassment, discrimination, and retaliation when engaged in by politically well-connected men will be tolerated by the current members of the Board of Supervisors,” they continue.

“The Board’s inaction also has real work consequences to the employees in the OCDA. Some managers within OCDA, who now believe there are no consequences for their workplace behavior, have felt emboldened to publicly accuse Mr. LoGalbo’s victims of lying about their experiences, despite the clear findings of a third-party investigator.”

The five county supervisors either declined to comment or did not respond – citing the pending litigation – while Supervisor Katrina Foley added that she is “deeply concerned” about the new allegations.

Spitzer has touted his influence with county supervisors when talking with DA staff, according to the new lawsuits.

“He recently told OCDA employees that because of his prior tenure on the Board, he has a close personal relationship with, and ‘access’ to, all current Board members, intimating he can influence how they vote and how they govern,” the new lawsuits state.

Days before Spitzer was elected DA in 2018, one of his supervisor colleagues publicly warned him that they have a host of disparaging information about each other they could use against each other if they wanted.

Pointing to what he alleged was an effort by Spitzer to extort a county contractor for campaign money, Supervisor Andrew Do cautioned Spitzer that more of that type of information could come to light if he upsets his colleagues again.

“Now, I knew that information. I could have called out the maybe alleged hypocrisy, if not extortionary tactics performed on the dais right here. But I didn’t,” Do said at an October 2018 supervisors’ meeting, after expressing frustration at Spitzer for distributing a memo to reporters that upset Do.

“I just wanted to make sure that people don’t think that just because we don’t say things up here, that we don’t have information that we can use every day, in every meeting, to smear each other. Okay?” Do added.

The new lawsuits by DA prosecutors also allege Spitzer’s No. 2 executive at the DA’s office Shawn Nelson – who is running for judge – minimized LoGalbo’s harassment in order to protect Spitzer.

“Shawn Nelson, Mr. Spitzer’s second-in-command, declared to managers, in front of Mr. Spitzer, that ‘Gary doesn’t have any real victims,’ ” states one of the new lawsuits.

“Mr. Nelson also referred to Mr. LoGalbo’s female victims as ‘chicken’ for not coming forward earlier, even though everyone knew of Mr. Spitzer’s close relationship with Mr. LoGalbo.”

Nelson, who was a supervisor with Spitzer and Do until he was termed out in 2018, is considered the frontrunner in the judge seat he’s running for in the June election, having raised over $200,000 for the race and running with a “Chief Assistant District Attorney” job title on the ballot.

Nelson didn’t respond to a message for comment.

He is the only judicial candidate endorsed so far by the Orange County Republican Party.

Nick Gerda covers county government for Voice of OC. You can contact him at ngerda@voiceofoc.org.

BY NICK GERDA source

Inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse on Feb. 23, the 4-year-old jailhouse-informant scandal created by the deceitful duo of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens took another casualty: the U.S. Attorney’s office inside the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the trauma isn’t worthy of sympathy. Sadly, the Santa Ana DOJ branch is responsible for enlarging a festering criminal-justice cesspool.

Just two working days before the suspicious case of USA v. Joseph Martin Govey was scheduled for trial, federal prosecutor Bradley Marrett handed U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney 20,000 supposedly top-secret pages of documents related to the snitch scandal that Govey inadvertently helped to expose.

On the verge of being either obnoxious or ignorant, Marrett laughably wanted the judge to drop everything, miraculously speed-read the pages, then keep the relivent evidence secret from Timothy Scott, Govey’s San Diego-based defense lawyer. Thanks to the DOJ’s foot-dragging, Scott faced a similar herculean task, finally receiving in recent weeks 75,462 pages of documents he’d been seeking for several months.

An unamused Carney labeled the government’s moves a trial-eve “document dump” and said he was “just dumbfounded” and “absolutely baffled” by federal prosecutors entangling themselves in Rackauckas/Hutchens corruption.

“You hit me with [20,000 pages] yesterday afternoon,” Carney told Marrett. “I have to make a decision of that magnitude, over 20,000 pages of documents before a trial starts [in two days]. And you file it under seal and Mr. Scott and Mr. Govey don’t even get to see the motion . . .  How realistic or practical is that?”

The judge was particularly perturbed by federal prosecutors’ assertion that his decision about whether to release documents in a rush at the government’s making could risk the lives of snitches as he balanced the defendant’s right to a fair trial.

As a result, Carney dismissed all charges, including drug- and counterfeit-possession counts, against Govey, who was freed after spending seven months in custody. He also pondered why federal prosecutors would interfere with their own agency’s investigation of rampant Orange County Sheriff’s Department corruption.

“I think it was all plastered over OC Weekly,” the judge said.

For snitch-scandal deniers, this latest courthouse shocker will require additional fact-omitting mental gymnastics. As improbable as it may seem, Govey—a onetime member of the Public Enemy Number One Death Squad (PEN1) gang—symbolizes it’s not just the street criminals who sidestep ethical lines and legal prohibitions. Twice now, overzealous government officials have seen their cases against him crumble.

In September 2014, Rackauckas’ office decided to drop charges of solicitation of murder, attempted murder and street terrorism rather than comply with a judge’s order to surrender long-buried sheriff’s department TRED records. There’s a reason Hutchens’ agency fought so hard for years to keep them hidden. The TREDs contain proof of deputies’ illegal tactics, including falsifying reports, destroying exculpatory evidence, committing perjury and, in violation of a monumental U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massiah, using jailhouse informants to question charged, pretrial defendants about their cases without their lawyers present. We later learned officers used snitches Jason Fenstermacher and Alexander Frosio for such schemes against Govey. For example, a TRED entry shows deputies ordered Frosio to “produce information” and pretend there’d been no government enticement, or risk physical assault while incarcerated.

That case smelled from the outset. A Huntington Beach Police Department informant sold Govey illegal narcotics, then alerted a SWAT team to move in on him and his passenger, Shirley Williams. Within a year, authorities got another informant to declare the defendant wanted Deputy District Attorney Jim Mendelson murdered.

Govey, who says cops have “a vendetta” against him, remained free for nearly two years when, in June 2017, sheriff’s deputies claim they accidentally raided his Anaheim home near Disneyland and found 37 grams of methamphetamine. He said the drugs were for personal use, but Rackauckas bolstered the severity of the case by accusing him of intending to peddle the meth. After about six weeks, an epiphany struck the DA. He could maximize Govey’s punishment exposure by closing his state case, nudging the U.S. Attorney’s office to take over and watching his target get a whopping 10-year federal prison sentence.

To appreciate the significance of that aim, consider Orange County law enforcement’s treatment of Bryan Jason Goldstein. Six months before Govey’s arrest, the Newport Beach Police Department and sheriff’s deputies found Goldstein at a Beach Boulevard shopping plaza in possession of 55 grams of meth—18 more grams than Govey—plus 2 grams of heroin, five Xanax pills, marijuana, 76 plastic baggies, a narcotics pipe and scales. Goldstein also tried to run over officers, according to police records. Despite a record of 16 prior felonies, including weapons charges, he received a sweetheart deal, resulting in only several months in the local lockup.

Why the disparity?

Goldstein is a veteran snitch for cops.

Govey is a longtime target of snitches and cops.

“What I don’t understand is why did the feds take this case?” asked Carney. “Why would you compriomise a federal investigation into the OC sheriff’s department? Why would you drag the federal government into this informant scandal?”

But the government’s plan to take down Govey didn’t go as expected. When the matter landed in his court, Carney expressed bafflement. The 2003 President George W. Bush appointee said he’d never seen such a small amount of dope prosecuted in this manner. He’d also previously rejected attempts to keep Govey’s connection to the snitch scandal out of the federal case, wondering aloud in open court if law-enforcement “retaliation” was a factor a future jury should consider.

Before dismissing the case with prejudice at the Feb. 23 hearing, the judge scolded federal prosecutors. The last-minute massive document dump had not only unfairly hampered Scott’s defense preparation, but it also represented an intentional trampling of the defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial, he said.

“I believe Mr. Govey’s 6th Amendment rights to a speedy trial, compulsory process and confrontation have been been denied by the government’s failure to timely disclose material documents that Mr. Govey needs to expose percipient witnesses’ bias against him and to attack their character for truthfulness,” Carney said.

The mess is larger than one case. With the latest Govey dismissal, government cheating involving informants now sits at 18 cases. The California Attorney General’s office, which is supposed to police law-enforcement corruption, shortchanged Scott Sanders, the assistant public defender who discovered the scandal in People v. Scott Dekraai, which was presided over by Judge Thomas M. Goethals. Though the office claimed it possessed 25,000 snitch records, it handed Sanders almost none, hindering his ability to find additional wrongdoing.

“It is astounding what has emerged from Joseph Govey’s case,” Sanders told the Weekly. “It fundamentally changes our understanding of the scope of this scandal. We had four years of informant litigation in Dekraai, a death-penalty case, and the Attorney General gave us just 11 pages at a moment right before Judge Goethals dismissed the death penalty. In a simple meth case, prosecutors gave Govey 75,000 pages out of what they now say is more than 10 times that amount.”

Why should anyone care about that hidden cache?

“Informants are the most dangerous witnesses in terms of perpetuating wrongful convictions, and these records are being withheld,” he added. “We have a broken system.”

R. SCOTT MOXLEY

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

cited from https://www.ocweekly.com/perturbed-federal-judge-cormac-j-carney-dismisses-suspicious-drug-case/

Claim alleges Todd Spitzer knew of his friend’s bad behavior but promoted him to one of the highest positions in the office

By TONY SAAVEDRA | tsaavedra@scng.com | Orange County Register

A fourth sexual harassment claim has been filed against a retired high-level prosecutor in Orange County, alleging that District Attorney Todd Spitzer witnessed the misbehavior but protected and even promoted the offender.

The newest claim, filed Tuesday, against Spitzer and former Senior Assistant District Attorney Gary Logalbo — Spitzer’s former roommate and best man at his wedding decades ago — typically is a precursor to a lawsuit. Attorney Matt Murphy, a former prosecutor, is representing the four claimants, all deputy district attorneys. Murphy spends much of the latest document blasting Spitzer for promoting to management his so-called best friend — known among veteran female employees as “Scary Gary.”

The claim says Spitzer’s tough talk against harassment in the workplace doesn’t apply to those closest to him and alleges he tried to retaliate against one of the four Jane Does who filed claims.

‘Denials’ and ‘victim blaming’

The accusations have been met with an “angry tone, denials and overt victim blaming” by Spitzer, said the claim.

“The reason people were so deeply reticent to complain of this behavior was not fear of Mr. Logalbo, but because they feared, and continue to fear, the well-documented wrath of Todd Spitzer,” said the document, which like the first three seeks unspecified damages.

Kimberly Edds, a spokeswoman for Spitzer, responded that the claim mischaracterizes the district attorney.

“We are incredibly disturbed by the allegations being made by several women in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. No one should have to suffer in silence and these women will be protected,” Edds wrote in a prepared statement Wednesday. “As soon as allegations of misconduct and inappropriate behavior came to our attention, we handled them immediately and lawfully. This fact is indisputable. … We do not need lawsuits to tell us to do the right thing. The right thing is already being done.”

Spitzer added that no official complaints were made against Logalbo — nor were any in his employment file — until November.

Logalbo was first promoted to management in 2019 and then to senior assistant district attorney in early November. Shortly afterward, the allegations against him began to surface, Spitzer has said. Logalbo resigned abruptly on Dec. 11. Spitzer has acknowledged his personal relationship with Logalbo, but denies he is his “best friend.”

Teen intern harassed?

The claim mentions another unnamed, extra-help prosecutor — a former volunteer in Spitzer’s 2018 election campaign — who allegedly harassed a 16-year-old intern. Jane Doe 4 witnessed the harassment and reported it to management, but Spitzer interceded on behalf of the prosecutor, the claim says. The alleged harasser was later “released from OCDA employment” after failing a second background check, Murphy wrote.

“Two men, each with personal relationships to the district attorney, acted with impunity when it came to the pervasive sexual harassment of at least four adult women and one teenage girl,” the document said.

The system worked

Edds responded that the system worked and the extra-help lawyer was let go.

As far as Logalbo, Jane Doe 4 describes one incident in which she was discussing a child annoyance case with him when he said, “Talking about all this sex stuff makes me horny.”

The document alleges that Chief Assistant District Attorney Shawn Nelson and Spitzer witnessed Logalbo’s misconduct but did nothing. Spitzer even raised Logalbo to the highest management post in the office, despite protests from supervisors aware of his antics, the claim said.

Before he left, Logalbo was allowed to conduct a promotion interview of one of the claimants, Jane Doe 2. She didn’t get the job.

Murphy, in the claim, also accused Spitzer of sidestepping government procedure and leaking the first three claims to the media in an effort to “control the narrative.” Edds, however, said the claims are public documents that must be released upon request. They were filed with the county and therefore public, Spitzer said.