A California judge disqualified Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and his entire office from prosecuting a death penalty case after finding that prosecutors and police had engaged in misconduct.
Evidence in the case of Scott Dekraii showed that, after Mr. Dekraii had asked for a lawyer, Orange County Sheriff's Department deputies deliberately placed him near a repeat jailhouse informant who had been instructed to elicit a confession from him.
This practice is illegal because the Constitution bars police from attempting to obtain a confession from a defendant after he has invoked his right to counsel. Jailhouse informants can be used only when defendants voluntarily make statements to cellmates, not when they are orchestrated and recorded by jailhouse officials, which makes the interaction effectively a police interrogation by proxy.
Further investigation revealed that this illegal use of informants has been standard practice in Orange County for decades -- so standard it has been meticulously tracked in a massive database called TRED. The sheriff's department and prosecutors have gone to great lengths, including testifying falsely in court, to keep TRED's very existence a secret. As the judge wrote in his order: "[A] wealth of potentially relevant discovery material--an entire computerized data base built and maintained by the Orange County Sheriff over the course of many years which is a repository for information related directly to the very issues that this court was examining as a result of the defendant's motion--remained secret, despite numerous specific discovery orders issued by this court..."
California Prosecutors Barred from Death Penalty Case for Misconduct | Equal Justice Initiative
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