Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was launching a civil rights investigation into the Orange County District Attorney's office and the Orange County Sheriff's Department over their unethical, illegal, embarrassing snitch scandal, which has set murderers free, gotten innocent people jailed and have exposed OCDA Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens as bumbling fools at best and possible criminals at worst.
“The investigation will focus on allegations that the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department systematically used jailhouse informants to elicit incriminating statements from specific inmates who had been charged and were represented by counsel, in violation of the Sixth Amendment,” reads the feds' press release. “Additionally, the investigation will seek to determine whether the district attorney’s office committed systematic violations of defendants’ 14th Amendment due process rights under Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 Supreme Court case, by failing to disclose promises of leniency that would have substantially undermined the credibility of the informants’ trial testimony.”
There will be A LOT of media coverage over this, both local and national and maybe even international. But let's take the time right now to thank the three Scotts who made this day possible: Orange County Public Defender Scott Sanders, our own R. Scott Moxley, and Orange County's worst mass murderer, Scott Dekraai.
It was Dekraai, who confessed to the horrific murder of eight people in Seal Beach shortly after doing the crime, whom Rackauckas sicced snitches on in a show of arrogance that's now threatening his reign. It was Sanders, in his role defending Dekraai, who discovered the long history of jailhouse snitches used by sheriff's deputies to bolster prosecutor cases. And it was Moxley—you know, the guy who took down felonious ex-sheriff Mike Carona by himself some years back—who started reporting on the snitch scandal way before anyone else, whose own digging this year alone into OCDA incompetence has led to the overturning of at least three murder cases, and whom did all this despite working for an infernal rag that requires him to do Best Of blurbs every summer.
More—much more—to come. In the meanwhile: Sanders, you deserve a promotion; Mox, you deserve a raise. And Dekraai? Leave it to OC's justice system to make a cretin like you into an unlikely linchpin toward the truth.
