New Orange County DA willing to undergo federal probation to end ‘snitch’ investigation

Newly elected Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to end its civil rights investigation into the county’s improper use of jailhouse informants and begin negotiations to place his office under probation.

Spitzer said Monday he has reached out to DOJ administrators to begin settlement talks on the necessary reforms to put the “snitch scandal” to rest.

Spitzer, a former county supervisor who was elected in November, said he is willing to admit to the conclusions of one Superior Court judge and an appellate court panel that prosecutors and police systemically used jailhouse informants to improperly coax confessions out of inmates and withheld evidence. Using informants is not illegal, except when a defendant has a lawyer and has been officially charged.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division launched its investigation into the District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department in December 2016. Spitzer said federal investigators in recent weeks have inundated his attorneys with requests for hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.

“I want the DOJ to stop their requests for document production, which is overwhelming my office, and let’s cut to the heart of the matter and negotiate a settlement,” Spitzer said. “Right now, the Department of Justice is on a fishing expedition.”

The Justice Department declined comment on Monday. The Sheriff’s Department, also under investigation by the California Attorney General’s Office, said Monday it is cooperating with the federal probe. Spitzer’s request to the federal DOJ was first reported in Voice of OC, an online news outlet.

Spitzer won his seat in November largely on the grounds that 20-year incumbent Tony Rackauckas was unfit for office and had allowed such improprieties as the snitch scandal, which resulted in the county’s worst mass killer escaping the death penalty. Scott Dekraai, who killed eight people in a shooting rampage at a Seal Beach salon in 2011, instead received multiple terms of life in prison.

At least six other murder or attempted murder cases unraveled because of informant-related abuses.

Reform-minded legal scholars, who called for the DOJ  investigation, said Monday they are concerned that by halting the probe, past mistakes will remain buried and the improperly convicted will remain imprisoned.

“It would be very troubling to not uncover past abuses,”  said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “A consent decree (settlement) is always desirable if the terms are right. … If we cut off the inquiry, it’s not a desirable solution.”

Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, who first discovered the snitch operation in 2013, said nothing is more important than finding defendants whose constitutional rights were violated.

“The willingness of the OCDA to do anything, as long as it won’t have to turn over what the DOJ has requested, is just one reason why the evidence must be turned over,”  Sanders said.

“The new district attorney should have entered office ready to embrace his responsibility to right past wrongs caused by the concealment of evidence, a subject he seemed poised to take on based upon his public statements the past three years,” he said. “The prior OCDA had no shortage of resources when it came to hiding evidence about informants.”

Spitzer said he is willing to review individual cases for inmates who believe their rights were violated by the misuse of informants or the withholding of evidence. But he doesn’t have the resources to fish for cases.

“I do not understand why the DOJ wants to bury me in paperwork. … If they are trying to achieve that Orange County does not do this practice further, i can achieve that,” he said. “The investigation needs a goal.”