Wickedly cruel Irvine
rapist Metin Reza Gurel may have thought he'd found a way to overturn his 2008
convictions when officials conceded after his trial that the prosecutor and the
lead Irvine police detective on the case had shielded their sexual affair from
defense lawyers.
That salacious news
originated in September 2008 from Orange County District Attorney Tony
Rackauckas, who said he was “regretful” to learn that Deputy DA Suzy M. Snyder
violated office ethics by secretly engaging “in a sexual relationship with a
testifying police witness.”
Because the government
has a duty to disclose to the defense exculpatory evidence–including
information that might impeach a witness, Rackauckas immediately notified
Gurel's defense team, James Crawford and Leonard Klaif.
Not lost on the defense
was the fact that they'd suspected that the police detective had encouraged the
embellishment of the victim's testimony in order to secure convictions. A
flurry of legal moves followed. Synder never returned to her office at Harbor
Court in Newport Beach. Gruel, 44-year-old Turkish citizen, may have thought
he'd soon see freedom again.
]
Late last month, justices
at a Santa Ana-based California Court of Appeal considered the ethics breach,
but nonetheless concluded that the DA's case against Gurel was so strong that a
jury would not have “reasonably” arrived at a different verdict had it known of
the DA-cop romance.
Gurel–who
received a
six-year sentence in early 2008 for engaging in forced oral copulation,
criminal threats (he threatened to puncture the victim's vagina with a
heated screwdriver) and the use of a deadly weapon–remains locked in
prison.
Go HERE to read the
original article about Gurel's rape trial.
–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.