Entire Orange County Prosecutor’s Office Disqualified for
Misconduct
By Derek Gilna
An isolated
incident or just the tip of the iceberg?
Many of you in custody already know the answer. The ENTIRE legal staff of the Orange County,
California Prosecutor’s Office (250 attorneys) has been disqualified by a
federal judge in that state for prosecutorial misconduct, including the
systematic concealment of exculpatory evidence and the use of coached, perjured
testimony of confidential informants and jailhouse snitches. Judge Thomas
Goethals took the extraordinary action after reviewing facts in the case of
Scott Dekraai in Santa Ana , California
An
investigation showed that, coached by prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies,,
jailhouse snitches fabricated the confessions implicating dozens of prisoners. Additionally, prosecutors and deputies
constructed an entire computerized data base that remained secret regarding
this jailhouse informant system, and concealed its existence despite numerous
specific discovery order issued by the Court.
What does
this mean to your case? My experience
shows that state and local law enforcement are much more prone to this kind of
affirmative concealment than federal authorities, but this is not always the
case, especially where state and federal authorities work together on an
investigation. There is one case in Texas
However,
there have also been dozens of cases that I have reviewed where the entire body
of evidence in the case, including many raw investigative materials that might
have assisted defense lawyers on the district court level, was either not
requested by defense counsel, or not produced. (The Brady case requires ALL
of this material to be produced, whether requested or not.)
The problem
of course is proof, and that is always going to be the sticking point. In instances where true prosecutorial or law
enforcement misconduct has occurred, some investigation and digging is
necessary. To convince a court, it is
not enough to have a mere suspicion; you must have some hard evidence, either
in the form of affidavits, or some other proof to show that you are innocent of
the charges of which you were convicted. Whoever you hire to handle your case
must also know where to dig, for facts not only on your case, but other related
cases in the same jurisdiction, because bad apples come by the basketful, not
one at a time. There are experienced
prisoner-rights counsels in these jurisdictions, many of whom have worked with
Prison Legal News, handling cases at reasonable costs. Do you have such a case?
Derek Gilna, 113 McHenry Rd. #173
dgilna1948@yahoo.com
