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Judge blocks email destruction by OC Sheriff Don Barnes, fearing evidence will be erased

by in News

An Orange County Superior Court judge on Friday temporarily halted Sheriff Don Barnes’ plan to automatically erase department emails more than two years old starting April 1.

The order by Judge Gregg Prickett also blocks sheriff’s employees from erasing any emails dealing with the illegal recording of attorney-client phone calls in Orange County jails and emails sought by the defense in a felony burglary case.

A full hearing was set for March 29.

Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, representing burglary defendant Justin Weisz, asked for the restraining order for fear that Barnes’ plan would encourage deputies to immediately begin erasing emails, including those involving the phone debacle that surfaced last August. Sanders was joined Friday in his request by Deputy Public Defender Sara Ross.

“We have a history of these officers not preserving evidence,” Ross told the judge.

Annie Loo, deputy county counsel representing the Sheriff’s Department, countered that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by deputies and that department policy already calls for documents sought by the public and attorneys to be preserved.

“To have officers maligned without any evidence is frustrating,” Loo said.

Sheriff’s officials explained that county policy requires emails more than two years old to be erased, which the sheriff did until 2016, when the email system was upgraded. The department is now going back to following policy, officials said.

Center stage in the debate was the recording by the sheriff’s phone vendor of attorney-client calls made from the jail, which lasted three years and ended in June. The numbers of calls have shifted over the past few months, but the vendor, GTL of Reston, Virginia, says 4,356 conversations between inmates and attorneys were recorded for various reasons. One of the main reasons given is that the lawyers’ phone numbers were mistakenly left off a “do-not-record” list. Other attorneys didn’t know about the list and failed to put their numbers on it.

Another 29,456 unanswered calls were recorded, said GTL spokesman James Lee.

Prickett appointed a special master to sort through about 1,079 of the calls. He said affected defense attorneys will soon be notified.

Meanwhile, Sanders said the sheriff’s March 12 email announcement came at a suspicious time, in the midst of the phone controversy and after the enactment of a new state law requiring the disclosure of certain police personnel records.

“There is abundant reason for concern that members of the (jail special handling/custodial intelligence) unit, and other members of the OCSD … if left to their own decision-making power and devices, would hide or destroy evidence,” Sanders wrote in his request.