Sheriff Admits Improper ​“Activity” in Orange County, California Snitch Scandal

Orange County, California Sheriff Sandra Hutchens appeared before Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals (pictured) on July 5 to explain her department’s 4-1/2-year failure to comply with court orders directing the department to produce documents related to a multi-decade practice in the county of misusing prison informants to illegally obtain incriminating statements from accused defendants.

In May 2015, Judge Goethals barred the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office from participating in the sentencing of Scott Dekraai—who has pleaded guilty to eight killings in a Seal Beach salon in 2011—for withholding evidence about the informant program and lying about its existence. Hutchens—who was appointed sheriff in 2008 following the conviction of the prior sheriff on corruption charges—denied that her office had systemically housed informants with targeted defendants, calling the description of the office’s practice “a matter of semantics.” “There is no program, per se,” she said. “There is activity.”

Deflecting responsibility for the illegal questioning of defendants by informants and the destruction of logs describing the informant program, Hutchens said “There may have been a few deputies who took their duties to different levels than were authorized.” She explained her department’s failure to turn over documents whose production had been ordered by the court by saying of her subordinates, “They possibly did not look hard enough.”

Hutchens testimony came a week after Sheriff’s Deputy Jonathan Larson testified that officers in the Sheriff’s Department’s Special Handling Unit had been tasked with developing snitches and intentionally placing them near pretrial prisoners to obtain confessions. Larson said he had “assumed” the practice was allowable because it was “approved by our sergeants and lieutenants.” Larson also testified that he was certain he had made entries in the Special Handling Unit’s log during a four-month period in 2011 that is now missing from the record.

Lieutenant Mike McHenry had previously testified that perhaps all of the deputies in the unit simply forgot to make entries during that period.

Orange County was one of the 6 most prolific producers of death sentences in the U.S. from 2010 to 2015, a period included in Judge Goethals’ investigation into misconduct by the Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office. The sentencing of Dekraai, which brought the informant scandal to light, is now being handled by the California Attorney General’s Office, which intends to continue pursuing the death penalty.

Bethany Webb, whose sister, Laura Webb-Elody, was allegedly killed by Dekraai, wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times opposing the death penalty in the case. “Over and over again, the authorities have tried to bring families closure through the death penalty, but have succeeded only in keeping old wounds open,” she wrote. “Through these painful years, it’s become clear that personal and political ambition have so corrupted the death penalty process that it does not serve us, nor does it serve the interests of justice.”