LOS ANGELES _ An Orange County, Calif., judge on Friday threw out the possibility of a death sentence for the man who murdered eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011, ruling that law enforcement has repeatedly failed to turn over relevant evidence about the use of jailhouse informants.
The decision by Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals marked the latest stinging rebuke for the county's beleaguered law enforcement community over its handling of a jail snitch scandal.
For years, allegations that Orange County law enforcement officials repeatedly violated inmates' constitutional rights by recruiting a network of jailhouse informants have roiled the region's criminal justice system.
The scandal has led to retrials for several convicted killers, sparked waves of criticism aimed at Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and outgoing Sheriff Sandra Hutchens and already led Goethals to bar county prosecutors from trying the Seal Beach salon case.
Scott Dekraai, the former tugboat captain who carried out the massacre, pleaded guilty to the murders in 2014. But the penalty phase of his trial has been in limbo for years as evidence surfaced that sheriff's deputies housed a longtime informant near him in the hopes of extracting evidence that could lead to a death sentence.
That discovery set off a chain of events that led Goethals and an appellate court to rule that the Sheriff's Department was running a "sophisticated" jailhouse informant network in order to coax confessions out of people held in the county's jail system.
Since then, a number of high-profile murder convictions have been tossed on the basis that authorities violated the rights of defendants by using secret informants to gain incriminating information from them without their lawyers present or because prosecutors failed to disclose an informant's history of cooperating with law enforcement.
Dekraai's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, argued that the death penalty should be tossed out because authorities could not be trusted to turn over relevant evidence.
Earlier this year, the Orange County grand jury released a report that the jailhouse scandal was a "myth," finding that the misconduct was limited to a few "rogue deputies." Hutchens and Rackauckas said the report vindicated what they've been saying all along _ that there is no organized informant program. But defense attorneys panned the report as a "whitewash."
But the California attorney general's office and the U.S. Department of Justice are running separate investigations into the matter.
The Orange County district attorney's office was blocked from trying Dekraai's case in 2015, and the attorney general's office is now leading the prosecution. In evidentiary hearings that have dragged for years, Goethals repeatedly faulted Hutchens and her deputies for failing to provide logs regarding the use of informants.
Sheriff's officials repeatedly told the judge there were no more records to be found _ only for other material to be subsequently discovered.
"How does this happen?" Goethals asked the sheriff when she testified last month. "They were dead wrong."
"They possibly did not look hard enough," replied Hutchens, who acknowledged that informants had been placed near targeted inmates in the Orange County jail for years, with the aim of eliciting incriminating statements. She testified that some of her deputies may have flouted rules regarding jailhouse informants, but that such conduct was committed only "by a few."
In closing arguments last week, Sanders said the prosecution's repeated failure to turn over evidence that could be favorable to his client is more than enough reason to take capital punishment off the table.
"Removal of the death penalty is a reasonable response to outrageous conduct," he said.
Michael T. Murphy, the deputy attorney general handling the case, has tried to disconnect the jailhouse scandal from Dekraai's actions.
"This is not about what did the Sheriff's Department do right or wrong," Murphy said last week, adding that Goethals should focus on "what did this man do and what does he deserve?"
