It’s one of the biggest yet most obscure scandals that has engulfed OC sheriff deputies and local prosecutors over the past decade – one that has been called out by federal investigators with the Department of Justice and has complicated a host of convictions in Orange County.
Using jailhouse informants to question people in jail without lawyers to get information and withholding that information from defense attorneys to secure convictions.
As many as nearly 100 convictions could be thrown into question.
One of the most high ranking OC officials at the center of the scandal is Ebrahim Baytieh, a current OC Superior Court Judge and former prosecutor who was fired from the DA’s office in 2022 by DA Todd Spitzer for failing to turn over evidence.
“This decision was as a result of allegations that a prosecutor failed under the prior administration to turn over information about an informant to the defense,” Spitzer said in a statement at the time.
[Read: Santana: Did OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer Fire a Top Prosecutor to Protect Himself?]
That same year, Baytieh went on to win election as a local Superior Court judge – never publicly answering questions about the controversy again.
Until this week.
On Monday, Baytieh for the first time answered questions under oath and in front of a San Diego Superior Court Judge for hours on his involvement in the scandal – maintaining that he handed over information to defense attorneys in a 2010 murder case as soon as he was made aware of it years later.
Monday’s court appearance and testimony stems from a motion filed by Asst. OC Public Defender Scott Sanders last fall accused Baytieh of withholding information obtained by jailhouse snitches from Paul Smith, a man he prosecuted for murder in 2010.
Smith is now facing a retrial prompting Baytieh’s testimony.
Baytieh said Monday that there was favorable information to Smith’s defense he became aware of in two instances – one in 2016 and another in 2019 – that was not turned over to Smith’s lawyers during the time of the trial.
He said he didn’t turn over the information during the trial because he didn’t have it at the time.
Baytieh also said he doesn’t believe the OC Sheriff’s department intentionally tried to hide evidence from Smith’s attorney.
“When that information came to my attention, I turned it over to the defense attorney,” Baytieh said. “We wouldn’t be here today if I had discovered them, if I had received them.”
Baytieh wrote letters to Smith’s defense lawyers in 2016 and 2019 detailing how he was promptly disclosing evidence he just learned about informants in the case.
On Monday, he told the judge he doesn’t believe the information would have impacted the outcome of the trial nor did it change his faith in the integrity of the conviction.
OC’s Jailhouse Snitch Scandal
Sander’s motion also alleges that Baytieh failed to properly oversee the jailhouse informant program – which could potentially spark new trials for nearly 100 convicted criminals.
[Read: Could Scores of Convicted Criminals in OC Get New Trials Due to Prosecutors Misconduct?]
It comes after a investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that produced a final report in 2022 publicly concluding the OC jailhouse informant program “systematically violated criminal Sixth Amendment right to counsel and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law.”
Federal investigators called out how Smith was treated in their report.
Smith was convicted in 2010 of murdering Robert Haugen, a marijuana dealer, and burning his body in 1988.
Much of the evidence from that case came from the sheriffs’ department and DA’s confidential informant program, which saw sheriffs’ deputies and prosecutors place professional snitches alongside suspects in the county jail to elicit information without their lawyers, a fact those defendants were never informed of during their trials.
Smith’s conviction was overturned in 2021 after Spitzer publicly acknowledged Baytieh failed to turn over informant evidence to the defense lawyers.
A year later Spitzer – in the midst of his own controversy – fired Baytieh – who he once called his ethical North Star – after hiring an independent law firm to conduct a probe into the issue.
Baytieh would go on to win an election for judge later that year, and currently sits on the bench of the OC Superior Court, avoiding questions about his firing and role in the informants scandal on the campaign trail.
On Monday, Baytieh said it has always been his practice to turn over evidence and information to the defense.
His biggest mistake, he testified, was having Arthur Palacios, an informant, testify against Smith because he didn’t need him.
In court Monday, Baytieh testified that he regretted utilizing jailhouse snitches.
“I don’t like informant never liked the informant but I knew that they were available as part of the tools that a prosecutor can use and at that time, I felt based on all the information that I had available to me that there was enough corroboration to what he told the police to make the information that he had admissible,” he said in court.
“If I had to do it all over again, I will not do that.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.