Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/sandra-hutchens/)
OC’s first female Sheriff was hired in 2008 to revamp a department battered by the federal indictment of former Sheriff Mike Carona. While she is credited with stabilizing the agency, the culture issues she identified when she first arrived remained throughout her tenure.
For years, Orange County has had a backlog of evidence from alleged sexual assaults, collected from victims yet not tested to identify the possible attacker.
Sheriff Don Barnes’ spokeswoman declined to say why county supervisors and the district attorney weren’t told of the scale of the issue sooner.
Former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas quietly decided last year to not have prosecutors tell defense attorneys about 10 sheriff deputies suspected of lying about or concealing records about jail informants.
The state-mandated forum brought out more than two dozen public speakers who supported and opposed the Sheriff’s Department’s involvement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Barnes, who has so far received 57 percent of votes to 43 percent for his opponent, Duke Nguyen, declared victory Wednesday afternoon. The Registrar of Voters still has 418,600 votes to count.
The election comes after years of controversy and scandal for the retiring Sheriff, Sandra Hutchens.
Republican Undersheriff Donald Barnes and Los Angeles District Attorney Investigator Duke Nguyen, a Democrat, are vying to replace retiring Sheriff Sandra Hutchens on Nov. 6, in a contest that will test whether years of scandal and controversies have affected how voters view the embattled department.
Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders says Sheriff’s Department personnel and Global Tel Link, the county’s jail phone contractor, knew about improper recordings of attorney-client jail calls but conspired to cover it up. He also points to discrepancies in data turned over by Global Tel Link that suggest far more than 1,079 attorney-client phone calls were improperly recorded.
Global Tel Link, the county contractor that recorded more than 1,000 inmate phone calls specifically designated as “do not record,” did the same thing two years ago in Florida’s Pinellas and Charlotte counties, company executives said Thursday.