New courthouse revelations show the illegal, secret monitoring by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) of jailhouse phone calls between pre-trial inmates and their defense lawyers has been more rampant than previously admitted.
Scandal-scarred Sheriff Sandra Hutchens in recent months reluctantly admitted her agency improperly recorded 1,079 calls.
But today, officials conceded the number of recorded calls was more than 4,000 between Jan. 2015 and June 2018, and that OCSD deputies allegedly–it’s always a good idea to suspect this agency’s initial spins–supposedly only accessed calls 347 times, despite initially claiming they’d done so only 87 times.
Judge Gregg Prickett said he expects an explanation for the shifting numbers by Nov. 28 in advance of a scheduled hearing two days later.
As we’ve learned from the ongoing celebrity case of People v. Josh Waring, law enforcement officials secretly listen to discussions between defendants and their legal counsel, and then supply that intelligence to prosecutors on the sly.
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas lost this week’s election, in large part, because he supported chronic OCSD cheating that benefitted his agency’s prosecutions.
Incoming DA Todd Spitzer, a current member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors and a longtime Rackauckas nemesis, told the Weekly today he will not tolerate prosecutorial misconduct.
Hutchens, as she is prone to do, tonight blamed others for her corruption. In this instance, she wants the public to believe Global Tel Link Corporation, the company that supplies jailhouse phone service, is exclusively responsible for the unethical monitoring of attorney-client calls.
She has yet to explain why her deputies listened to hundreds of privileged calls and never stopped the misconduct in more than three years.
The sheriff, who for years refused to obey court orders to surrender embarrassing records in a death penalty case, concocted additional lame spin tonight, suggesting that anyone who questions the agency’s responsibility in this latest fiasco is just pushing “an anti-law enforcement narrative.”
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.
Judge Greg Prickett should NOT be sitting on this case. He was pasrt and parcel in the corruption scandal of the ocsd and ocda
Let me get this straight: Mr Moxley reports truthful facts from a court hearing that happen to be unflattering for the Sheriff’s Dept and Ms Hutchens accuses him of pushing an “anti-law enforcement narrative”?? Sounds like someone is taking a page from the Donald J Trump playbook. If you screw up and you get bad press, just dismiss it as “fake news.” I’m glad shes on her way out. Hopefully the new Sheriff will be a decent person with integrity that we can trust.
IMO, Hutchens will never be held accountable …. she was voted into office as OC Sheriff by the OC Board of Supervisors soon after the beating death of John Derek Chamberlain, another crime where most of the true facts have been denied to the public. It is tragic that corruption crimes in Orange County, California have continued for many years, without any type of accountability in a court of law. No doubt that lawsuits against Global Tel Link Corporation will take liability away from the OC Sheriff, OC District Attorney and OC Board of Supervisors….. these types of “enterprises” are part of the normal business practices in Orange County, California.