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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Anatomy of a Snitch Scandal How Orange County Prosecutors Covered Up Rampant Misuse of Jailhouse Informants Prosecutorial misconduct and the misuse of jailhouse informants are persistent problems in the criminal justice system. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since 1989 there have been 923 exonerations tied to official misconduct by prosecutors, police, or other government officials, 89 of them in cases involving the use of jailhouse snitches. Over the last two years, a scandal involving both has engulfed Orange County, California, exposing systemic violation of defendants’ constitutional rights and calling into question the legality of the prosecution of a number of violent felony cases. What makes the Orange County situation particularly troubling is its eerie similarity to another such scandal that unfolded just miles to the north, in Los Angeles County, starting in the late 1970s, and culminated in an exhaustive grand jury report that detailed widespread misuse and abuse of criminal informants and revealed questionable prosecutorial tactics, potentially in more than 200 cases. Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the nation’s leading expert on the use of snitches, said the fact that Orange County officials engaged in unconstitutional behavior similar to what made headlines years earlier in Los Angeles County reveals the “entrenched” nature of the practice of using snitches in questionable ways. “We see it from the outside as a scandal that should not be repeated. But apparently Orange County officials didn’t see it that way,” she said. “They saw it as business as usual.” The case of Luis Francisco Vega illustrates just how routine the corruption became in Orange County — and how devastating its consequences can be. The Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana, California on Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. The Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana, Calif., on Jan. 25, 2016. Photo: Jeff Gritchen/The OC Register/Zumapress On a February evening in 2009, three teenage friends were hanging out next to a parked car on a residential street in Santa Ana, California, when an SUV pulled up next to them. A group of Latino men sat inside the SUV. One of them, sitting just behind the driver, got out of the vehicle and approached the three friends. “Where are you from?” he asked, a coded inquiry into their gang affiliation. “Nowhere,” one of the teenagers replied, according to an account he later gave police. The man then raised his right arm, pointed a gun at the teenagers, and fired. At least five shots rang out. One of the friends bolted and was hit in the forearm; a second, sitting inside the parked car, was hit multiple times, including in the torso and thigh; a third escaped injury. All three survived. As the SUV pulled away with the shooter inside, the teens said they heard a passenger yell a single word: “Delhi” — the name of a Santa Ana street gang. Speaking to police afterward, none of the teenagers could identify the gunman — they did not recognize him, nor could they provide a physical description. Yet in an interview with Santa Ana Police Detective Andy Alvarez of the department’s gang homicide unit, two of the shooting victims said they could identify one of the passengers in the SUV. He was a 14-year-old kid named Luis Francisco Vega — a former fellow student at nearby Saddleback High School. According to the teens, Vega had “jumped” one of them and beat him up a couple of months prior to the shooting. Notably, Alvarez was told, during that attack Vega had shouted the word “Delhi.” There were plenty of reasons for police to be skeptical. For starters, the victims had a hostile relationship with Vega, giving them a motive to implicate him. Plus the notion that both teens could have recognized a person seated on the far side of the car — in a matter of seconds, while being shot at — seemed farfetched. Neither could describe their attacker, who stood just feet away, nor could they agree on the kind of gun he used, or even the make or color of the SUV. Indeed, while each said Vega was seated on the right side of the car, one witness put him in the front passenger seat while the other said he was in the rear of the vehicle. Then there was the fact that the Santa Ana Police Department, which took pains to document the actions and affiliations of local gang members, possessed no records linking Vega to any gang — let alone Delhi. Alvarez couldn’t prove that Vega was even in Santa Ana at the time of the shooting. Vega’s lawyer argued that he was more than 120 miles from the scene, in Riverside County, where he had been living with an aunt since mid-January. Still, that “Delhi” was allegedly yelled in the earlier incident was apparently too coincidental for Alvarez. The detective went out to Riverside County to question Vega in early March 2009. In the course of a 40-minute interview, the 14-year-old insisted he was not a gang member and had nothing to do with the shooting. But it didn’t matter; even if Vega was not the shooter, he was still good for an attempted murder charge, which could send him to prison for life. Vega was arrested, brought back to Orange County, and locked up on a $1 million bond. In the meantime, the cops kept looking for the shooter. Two weeks after Vega’s interview, while the teenager sat in jail, Alvarez’s supervisor, Cpl. David Rondou, sat down with an older youth, 17-year-old Alvaro Sanchez. Sanchez said he’d been “kicking it” with members of the Delhi gang for a couple of months — and admitted that he’d been present on the night of the shooting. That night, he said, he was sitting in the back of the SUV, a stolen Jeep Liberty, when the crew came upon the three teens. Sanchez said he got out of the car because he thought the crews were going to fight. But he claimed he wasn’t the shooter — and refused to provide the names of his companions that night. Sanchez was also charged with attempted murder. Despite the relatively weak evidence against Vega, following a preliminary hearing in October 2009, an Orange County judge gave the state the go-ahead to try him for attempted murder. “Orange County law enforcement ruined my child’s life.” Less than two weeks later, a jailhouse informant named Juan Calderon came forward with important information. Sanchez had admitted to him that he was guilty of the shooting, Calderon told Santa Ana police and a prosecutor with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, and Vega had nothing to do with the crime. Calderon’s claims, if confirmed, would exonerate Vega and thus were required by law to be turned over to his defense attorney. But the prosecutor assigned to Vega’s case, Deputy District Attorney Steven Schriver, declined to do so. Calderon was an informant in a separate case the district attorney’s office was handling; the prosecutor on that case did not want to tip his hand as to Calderon’s activities because to do so might put the inmate at risk for retaliation. Schriver said he didn’t want to release the information unless Calderon was placed in protective custody, but admitted he failed to take any steps to make sure that occurred. It wasn’t until December 2010, nearly two years after Luis Vega was arrested, that Schriver finally dismissed the charges against him. Orange County prosecutors never took Alvaro Sanchez to trial, instead pleading him out for 16 years on the attempted murder charge. Nor was it acknowledged that the state had held on to the information provided by Calderon for months, knowingly keeping an innocent kid locked up and separated from his school, family, and friends. Vega’s case might be just another example of the dysfunction that plagues the nation’s prisons and jails. But there is growing evidence to show that he was one of many criminal defendants affected by prosecutors’ malfeasance — part of a much bigger, unfolding scandal pointing to systemic misconduct inside Orange Country, involving not just the DA’s office, but also the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and various local police departments. To date, more than a dozen felony cases involving murder or violent attack have unraveled as a result of the scandal, with charges dismissed or reduced or new trials granted. Prosecutors routinely failed to disclose evidence favorable to defendants — so-called Brady material, named for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland — including thousands of pages of notes related to various jailhouse informants. There is also evidence that the OCSD, which runs the county’s jails, employed jailhouse snitches in illegal schemes to compel other detainees to confess their crimes. In Vega’s case, for example, not only did the government delay disclosing the information from Calderon, but it also was holding information from a different jailhouse snitch, Oscar Moriel, which it never disclosed to Vega’s attorney. Specifically, Moriel had documented a detailed conversation with Alvaro Sanchez wherein the Delhi gang member explained how the Santa Ana shooting went down and confessed that he was one of two shooters. Sanchez expressed bewilderment that Vega had been charged in connection with the crime, according to notes taken by Moriel, saying, “It’s kind of fucked up because this guy [Luis Vega] get’s popped for this case while the three other people who were actually there … were still out there.” If this fact didn’t seem to trouble the DA’s office, it was devastating for Vega and his family. Vega’s mother, Maria Ruiz, said that what happened to her son has been emotionally shattering and “broke” their family. “This has been really hard on him. I am still at this point trying to get him to speak about it,” she wrote in an email to The Intercept last fall. “It was really hard on our family.” “I never knew how corrupted Orange County was [until] now,” she added. “Orange County law enforcement ruined my child’s life.” SANTA ANA, CA - MARCH 18: Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders questions a jailhouse informant during a motion hearing in the trial of Scott Dekraai, who is accused of killing eight people in a Seal Beach beauty salon, on March 18, 2014 in Santa Ana, California. The hearing is underway to address the public defender's allegations of a widespread, unconstitutional jailhouse informant program that he feels affects the case of his defendant. (Photo by Mark Boster-Pool/Getty Images) Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders questions a jailhouse informant on March 18, 2014, in Santa Ana, Calif. Photo: Mark Boster-Pool/Getty Images The details of Vega’s case would never have come to light if it weren’t for a public defender named Scott Sanders. At the end of 2011, Sanders was at work on two high-profile death penalty cases. One was against Daniel Wozniak, accused of killing two people (and dismembering one of them). The second was against Scott Dekraai, responsible for Orange County’s worst-ever mass shooting. As Sanders prepared for Dekraai’s trial, he sought access to files held by prosecutors, including records on a jailhouse informant named Fernando Perez, to whom Dekraai had apparently confessed details about his crime. As it turned out, Perez had also collected a confession from Sanders’s other client, Wozniak. It was an interesting coincidence, Sanders thought, that both of his clients had divulged incriminating information to the same man. Prosecutors fought Sanders’s request for the Perez records, but eventually Judge Thomas Goethals ordered the state to produce them. Upon receiving the file, Sanders and his team were stunned to receive a trove of information — approximately 5,000 pages of discovery materials connected to nine cases in which Perez worked as a snitch for the government. As Sanders pored over the documents, he discovered that Perez had been used as an informant in a number of prominent gang-related cases. The same was true of another inmate whose name appeared in the records — the prolific Oscar Moriel. Both men were also members of the Mexican Mafia gang. Most damning were notes from Moriel to his government handlers that suggested Orange County sheriff’s deputies had worked with the jail to orchestrate contact between Moriel and other detainees for the purpose of producing inculpating statements. The arrangement, if true, would run afoul of a decadesold Supreme Court ruling, Massiah v. The United States, which prohibits government agents, including informants, from questioning or coercing statements from defendants who have already been charged and are represented by counsel. As Sanders looked more closely at the records, he began to wonder: Had law enforcement agents used the same tactics to get Dekraai or Wozniak talking? Sanders also noticed that the amount of material prosecutors disclosed to defense attorneys varied wildly from case to case. In one case involving Perez, just four pages of records related to the snitch had been turned over; in another, some 200 pages had been released. The same was true for cases involving Moriel. “That was a stunner for me,” Sanders told The Intercept. The situation strongly suggested that some Orange County prosecutors had deliberately withheld critical information from defense attorneys that could have potentially helped their clients — either by calling into question the tactics that led to confessions or by suggesting that the two informants, each facing serious charges of his own, were working as snitches for personal benefit. That in turn would undermine their credibility, along with the information they claimed to have obtained. Or, as in the case of Luis Vega, the withheld information could demonstrate that a defendant was innocent. No one argued that Sanders’s client Dekraai was innocent, however. In October 2011, in the midst of a custody battle with his ex-wife, Dekraai walked into the salon where she worked in Seal Beach, California, and opened fire, hitting eight people, seven of whom died. Dekraai then killed an eighth person sitting in a parked car outside the salon. He was quickly captured and arrested. Two days later, Tony Rackauckas, the elected Orange County district attorney, announced that his office would seek the death penalty. Exactly what Dekraai said to Perez has not been made public. But, according to court testimony, in more than 100 hours of recordings that prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies made of the two men talking between their cells, Perez probed for details of Dekraai’s crime. He questioned Dekraai’s state of mind and even asked about what he’d told his lawyers about his case. Dekraai had actually confessed his crime to police just hours after his arrest — though he initially pleaded not guilty in court. Why local officials, including prosecutors, would feel the need to employ a snitch in what would almost certainly be a slam-dunk death case in conservative, law-and-order Orange County is particularly confounding. To Sanders, it points directly to a “win-at-all-costs mentality” that has pervaded the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. 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