KABC-TV in Los Angeles this week featured the unlikely alliance between a mass shooter’s Orange County defense attorney and the husband of one of the victims.
The station’s Eileen Frere and Lisa Bartley interviewed Scott Sanders, the assistant public defender who represented Seal Beach salon killer Scott Dekraai, inside the home of Paul Wilson, who lost his wife Christy in Oct. 2011, tragedy that took eight lives.
The reason for the once impossible friendship between Sanders and Wilson, which OC Weekly first revealed in May, is clear.
Over a period of years, Wilson begrudgingly saw validity in the lawyer’s exposure of entrenched corruption at Tony Rackauckas’ district attorney’s office and Sandra Hutchens’ sheriff’s department.
Wilson asked the defining question of Dekraai’s trial: What kind of law enforcement officials feel the need to cheat in a slam-dunk death penalty case?
That remorseless corruption lead to the historic, 2015 removal of Rackauckas and his entire office from prosecution duties in Dekraai as well as a punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole, instead of the death penalty.
Free and Bartley also interviewed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on the status of his alleged, multi-year investigation into the sheriff’s department.
Hutchens is retiring, but the 75-year-old Rackauckas hopes voters will give him a sixth, four-year term in the Nov. 6 election.
Go HERE to watch the seven-minute KABC broadcast.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.