Defense Matters

Southern California will acutely feel the policy changes. In the past, DOJ investigations helped identify and address unconstitutional patterns and practices by local law enforcement. Los Angeles has faced repeated federal scrutiny over use-of-force incidents and biased policing. Without DOJ engagement, pending reforms risk stalling, and future abuses may prove harder to uncover.

In Orange County, the DOJ adopted the findings of Attorney Scott Sanders, which he first presented in a 505-page motion to dismiss the death penalty. This occurred in the multiple-murder case, People v. Dekraai. As a result of that motion and hearings that spanned three years, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office was removed from the case and the judge later prohibited the prosecution from seeking the death penalty as a punishment for “outrageous governmental misconduct. The motion and litigation focused on the decades-long constitutional violations related to the use of jailhouse informants. Sanders’ discoveries have already affected 59 cases.  In a 2022 Los Angeles Times article, Sanders discussed the DOJ’s six-year civil-rights investigation that was initiated in response to his discoveries. Significantly, the report confirmed systemic constitutional violations by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the District Attorney’s Office during Tony Rackauckas’ tenure as the top DA:

“This report’s findings represent a critically important development for the county’s justice system. We have been alleging since 2014 the same civil-rights violations analyzed by the Department of Justice, and now we finally have a governmental agency that describes why we were right and lays out just how bad the conduct has been by both agencies.”