SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KABC) — California prosecutors have dropped their years-long research into the Orange County jailhouse informant scandal without providing any clarification to the public, victims, or the two organizations under scrutiny.
Eyewitness News caught up with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra at a press conference Thursday in Los Angeles on an unrelated subject matter. Becerra could no longer speak about the closure of his employer’s research apart from affirming what his deputy attorney fashionable stated in the courtroom is accurate. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Darren Shaffer admitted, “the investigation is closed,” while pressed using Orange County Superior Court Judge James Rogan.
“You can take that response via our deputy if so as an accurate representation of where we’re, but he answered best because he was requested by way of a choice,” Becerra advised Eyewitness News. That explanation doesn’t take a seat well with Paul Wilson, whose wife Christy turned into among 8 people murdered by way of Scott Dekraai in a Seal Beach salon massacre back in 2011. Dekraai’s lengthy and tortured criminal case uncovered the secret and regular instances of illegal use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants in violation of their constitutional rights.
“I find it pretty humorous that the Attorney General continues to apply words like ‘accountability,’ ‘nobody’s above the law,'” Wilson tells Eyewitness News. “Those phrases resonate with me because all of the above practices relate to what’s going on in Orange County with our district attorney and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the snitch scandal, and he is the usage all of the one’s huge, impressive phrases. However, this is now not being used in Orange County.”
Wilson desired to invite Becerra for answers at the news convention. However, he changed into no longer internal because he isn’t always a credentialed member of the media. “We deserve justice. We didn’t get it in Orange County, and so we searched for it from him, and he additionally let us down,” Wilson stated. “It’s cowardly and pathetic.” Orange County Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders first uncovered misconduct by using deputies and prosecutors while defending mass murderer Scott Dekraai. Sanders says the scandal has caused the unraveling of at least 18 felony cases. At least one admitted assassin, Isaac Palacios, turned out to be let out.
“What you want is a device that operates fairly, and if you do not preserve regulation enforcement and prosecutors responsible when they make mistakes, the message is going out to the ones human beings that you could do something you need,” Sanders tells Eyewitness News. Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals is known as out two deputies by using the call in a 2015 ruling pronouncing they “deliberately lied or willfully withheld cloth proof” within the Dekraai case.
“This changed into obvious perjury — the judge inside the case referred to it more than once,” Sanders said. “So, hiding in the back of the notion that it’s difficult to prove — it would not be tough to prove for some other citizen. If another citizen did what those parents did, they could be in custody, serving time in a local jail or prison. Instead, these deputies are going to head away and experience their retirement fully paid without a single trouble, without a single mark on their record.”
