later fired Baytieh<\/a> as evidence mounted that he had hid evidence of illegally using informants.<\/p>\nRosenthal said that in the seven years since Spitzer took office, the Conviction Integrity Unit has had little to show for its efforts.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Spitzer has had a long time to show this is a priority and there hasn\u2019t been evidence of that,\u201d Rosenthal said.<\/p>\n
Some criminal justice experts say prosecutors are too close to the cases to be objective and the job should be done by an independent party.<\/p>\n
Defense attorney David Swanson said prosecutors might hesitate to get convictions overturned in cases where the defendant might actually appear guilty, even though he or she didn\u2019t get a fair trial.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Let\u2019s create this incredible problem for ourselves,\u2019 \u201d Swanson said.<\/p>\n
Outside scrutiny needed<\/p>\n
Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor and leading expert on the use of informants in the United States, said the situation demands external oversight.<\/p>\n
\u201cLaw enforcement and prosecutors have strong incentives to suppress information and many powerful tools at their disposal with which to do so. As a result, we can\u2019t count on law enforcement or the ordinary criminal process to expose and correct informant misuse,\u201d Natapoff said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of what we know comes from external scrutiny, such as media investigations, innocence projects, lawsuits and tragedies,\u201d she said. \u201cExternal oversight might appear expensive in the short term, but the obvious threat to the criminal system\u2019s integrity is even more costly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erwin Chemerinsky, a leading scholar on constitutional law and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe DA\u2019s office shouldn\u2019t be the ones investigating whether the DA\u2019s office got convictions that were tainted,\u201d Chemerinsky said.\u00a0 \u201cThere are a significant number of murder cases tainted by this serious prosecutorial misconduct. But it is stunning that they never have been subjected to an independent review.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel Medwed, a professor at Northeastern School of Law in Boston, applauded Spitzer for his willingness to review the old cases, but said the prosecutors doing the investigation may have worked under the old administration or were mentored by those who did.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s still a connection that makes it slightly harder to be objective,\u201d Medwed said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard psychologically to review your own office\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018We don\u2019t have the money\u2019<\/p>\n
Then who should do it? And with what money?<\/p>\n
Attorneys who represented the defendants aren\u2019t going to dig through those old files for free. And most of those convicted prisoners are penniless.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat lawyer is going to go on their own without getting paid, diving into something that will take hundreds of hours,\u201d Swanson said. \u201cWhat lawyer has the time to do that?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Orange County Public Defender\u2019s Office, where Sanders worked, did not respond when asked if it would look at all the old cases for more cheating.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public defender does not have enough money to do current cases, much less dig up buried ones,\u201d Swanson said.<\/p>\n
Mike Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center in San Diego, said federal funding for wrongful conviction reviews has become more difficult to obtain under the Trump administration and that some remaining grants have new strings attached, such as cooperation with ICE. Some of the federal funding is administered through the state, but \u201ceveryone is showing up with their hands out,\u201d Semanchik said. \u201cThe challenge for us is we have limited resources.\u201d<\/p>\n
He noted that such reviews are labor intensive, with some cases taking a decade to resolve.<\/p>\n
Semanchik estimated it would take at least $500,000 just to get the ball rolling on the Orange County cases.<\/p>\n
He suggested the county Board of Supervisors provide the funding as a service to the criminal justice system, particularly since it was county employees who caused the problem.<\/p>\n
Attorney Annee Della Donna, founder of Innocence OC, another nonprofit that reviews convictions, also said the county should pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe (county) is the reason they were wrongly convicted. (They) should bear the expense,\u201d Della Donna said.<\/p>\n
County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiente said the district attorney can \u2014 and should \u2014 handle the review.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is reprehensible when those entrusted to protect the public themselves engage in criminal behavior that violates the rights of individuals,\u201d Sarmiento said. \u201cI\u2019m confident and expect the district attorney is using his prosecutorial powers to prioritize these cases and investigate his predecessors and powerful people instead of solely using his resources to target low-level offenders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Supervisor Don Wagner noted that county resources are limited and departments recently had to make cuts to hit this year\u2019s $10.5 billion budget, about half of which is the general fund.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn\u2019t any appetite to say, \u2018Let\u2019s look at all of the cases to see if you would find something,\u2019 \u201d Wagner said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the money to indulge that fantasy in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chemerinsky, former dean of UC Irvine law school, responded that the county could find the funds if it wanted to.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe county has the money; the question is, does it want to spend it on this?\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re just telling you it\u2019s not a priority.\u201d<\/p>\n
Medwed said the moral cost of not doing an independent review may be high.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoney is a legitimate concern in any government office, but there\u2019s a larger issue at stake about the integrity of convictions in Orange County. That is something difficult to quantify in terms of dollars and cents,\u201d he said. \u201cBut securing faith in convictions during that era is priceless.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenthal said the state Attorney General\u2019s Office should undertake the review, although the office has a sketchy track record when it comes to investigating Orange County\u2019s snitch scandal. The state office launched a probe in 2015 under then Attorney General Kamala Harris and quietly dropped it without taking action four years later under Xavier Becerra.<\/p>\n
The state office did not answer an email seeking comment.<\/p>\n
Sanders, who now is in private practice, said he doesn\u2019t have the financial resources on his own to conduct such an exhaustive review.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo those in power who mock the notion of spending money to right these wrongs, I can say with complete certainty that if your son or daughter was imprisoned after being prosecuted by Ebrahim Baytieh, you would be screaming from the rooftops for a county-funded reexamination of his cases,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The discovery that prosecutors under previous District Attorney Tony Rackaukas secretly cheated by illegally using jailhouse informants to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,723,168429,56393,734,1071,100,611,24836,2034,136],"class_list":["post-421760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-crime","tag-informants","tag-investigative-reporting","tag-law-enforcement","tag-local-government","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-socal-watchdog","tag-todd-spitzer","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}