An Orange County Superior Court judge has ordered prosecutors to explain a decision to block Kelly Thomas' mother from her right to inspect law enforcement files about the gruesome Fullerton police killing of her son in July.
Court records obtained by the Weekly show that Judge Linda S. Marks told District Attorney Tony Rackauckas that he has until January 12 to file a written explanation for thwarting Cathy Thomas' statutory, special access to the records because she is a crime victim.
The DA and Brian N. Gurwitz, Thomas' private lawyer and a former high-ranking Rackauckas adviser, will argue their cases at a scheduled Feb. 17 court hearing in Santa Ana.
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Gurwitz says Rackauckas, the man who is prosecuting two Fullerton cops–Jay Cicinelli and Manuel Ramos–for unnecessarily killing the 36-year-old homeless man, doesn't understand his legal duty to the victim's family.
(The two accused cops, who've pleaded not guilty, face a March 28 preliminary hearing.)
Rackauckas
claims that he is sensitive to the Thomas family but says that if he
releases the files to anyone under the public records act, then he must
release them to anyone to asks for them.
Dirty, morally-corrupt cops in Republican-dominated Orange County have long believed they are immune from public accountability for the crimes they commit.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.