Before letting police officers answer questions on the witness stand about possible crimes, prosecutors usually establish credibility by eliciting their work experience. Most cops impressively recall the day, month and year of every promotion, even in multidecade careers. But recently inside a Little Saigon-area courtroom, Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) deputy Cyril Foster appeared […]
Tony Rackauckas
OC Crime-Lab Boss Dodges Inquiry About Forensic-Science Flip-Flops in Murder Cases
Having come under fire for his Orange County Crime Lab rendering conflicting, pro-prosecution forensic-science testimony that separate murder trial juries unwittingly accepted, director Bruce Houlihan launched a two-prong strategy: deny any wrongdoing to a news reporter, then dodge questions from the attorney who discovered the scandal. But Houlihan’s unforced errors aren’t sitting well with Superior […]
ACLU: New OCDA Social Media Policy Still Unconstitutional
In a scathing letter last month, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California took the Orange County District Attorney’s office to task for scrubbing critical comments from its social media platforms. The civil liberties group argued that the offense, including blocking certain users, amounted to an unconstitutional suppression of free speech. A few days […]
OCDA Withdraws Two Gang Injunctions Filed in Placentia
For more than a decade, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas filed gang injunctions over swaths of Mexican OC with few troubles in court. Even after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deemed the OCDA’s gang injunction against Orange Varrio Cypress in Orange violated due process rights in a 2011 ruling, the agency pushed forward, […]
Cop-Protected Orange County Snitch Avoids Murder Beefs With Laughable Tales
Minutes before 10 on the morning of July 14, 2016, five heavily armed Anaheim Police Department (APD) officers wearing ballistic vests took positions outside a one-bedroom, one-bath, 740-square-foot, $200,000 condo in Whittier. Officers waited cautiously for the emergence of Bryan Jason Goldstein, a 32-year-old associate of Southern California white-supremacist gangsters. To gain a judge’s approval […]
OCDA Adopts New Social Media Policy After ACLU’s Scolding Letter
UPDATE, MAR. 1, 4:00 P.M.: The Orange County District Attorney’s office adopted a new social media policy today following the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California’s letter last month accusing the agency of first amendment violations for deleting critical comments and blocking users. The civil liberties group gave the OCDA a Mar. 7 deadline to […]
Massive Orange County Snitch Scandal Document Dump Wrecks Federal Case
Inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse on Feb. 23, the 4-year-old jailhouse-informant scandal created by the deceitful duo of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens took another casualty: the U.S. Attorney’s office inside the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the trauma isn’t worthy of sympathy. Sadly, the Santa Ana DOJ branch is […]
Despite OC Sheriff’s Suppression Efforts, New Evidence of ‘Repugnant’ Corruption Emerges
Attention, Hollywood. Where in just one story could you find deranged, Nazi-loving gangsters; horny sheriff’s deputies; Dennis Rodman; reality-TV characters; senseless murder; malfunctioning, covert GPS equipment; sexting; government-sponsored heroin use; illegal interrogations; the Mexican Mafia; white supremacists’ interracial baby-making; two-faced confidential-informant criminals; McMansions; destroyed key government records; booby pics; a Motel 6; cops texting […]
Orange County Sheriff’s Snitch Scandal Corruption Wrecks 18th Felony Case
Yesterday marked the 18th time that Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) snitch scandal corruption has forced prosecutors to abandon a major murder case rather than risk going to trial where additional embarrassing revelations of unethical law enforcement activities would certainly have been revealed. For years, sheriff’s deputies and Tony Rackauckas’ district attorney’s office worked to […]
OC Sheriff Tries to Settle Snitch-Scandal Score in Federal Court
Until recently, the United States Attorneys office—a division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which is supposedly conducting an independent probe of Tony Rackauckas’ district attorney’s office and Sandra Hutchens’ sheriff’s department in the Orange County jailhouse-informant scandal—had been performing a sly trick. They’d blocked jurors at the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse from hearing […]
Murder Cases Show Orange County DA Favors White Lives Over Brown
Determined to become one of Southern California’s prominent criminal-justice voices, L. Song Richardson waited mere days into her term as the new dean of UC Irvine’s School of Law to conduct a Jan. 13 “teach-in & training” honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by, as her event poster declared, “mobilizing for justice in an unjust […]
Bad ID of OC Weekly Reporter Causes DA Meltdown at Serial Killer Press Conference
What if a California prosecutorial office were so incompetent it couldn’t handle a simple courthouse press conference? Those of you who’ve followed Tony Rackauckas’ Orange County district attorney’s office (OCDA) know the question isn’t rhetorical given its management’s continual, remorseless ethical scandals that have harmed innocent citizens and handed outrageous perks to violent criminals. Earlier […]
Orange County DA Makes Sweetheart Deal Returning Serial Killer to the Streets
Inside a surreal Orange County courtroom today, 37-year-old serial killer Oscar Moriel turned to prosecutor James Laird, smiled and quietly mouthed, “Thank you.” Laird replied with a reciprocal, warm happy face to the man who admits he murdered at least six people (he’s not sure; it could be “a lot more,” he testified in 2014) and tried […]
California Governor Promotes OC Jailhouse Snitch Scandal Judge
California Governor Jerry Brown today announced his promotion of Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals to the California Court of Appeal. The courthouse rumor mill had long anticipated the honor for Goethals, a 65-year-old Newport Beach resident whose integrity and commitment to judicial transparency shown most notably while he presided over People v. Scott […]
Did OC Deputies Destroy Exculpatory Infrared Helicopter Video in Attempted Murder Case?
Southern California police pursuits make live dramas for TV broadcasts starring unpaid criminal suspects racing down neighborhood streets, running red lights, ignoring stop signs and weaving through crowded highway traffic in Indianapolis 500 fashion. Late on a November 2015 evening, Jimmy Hoang Truong became the featured performer of such a show as the chased driver […]
Orange County Murder Case Trips on Allegation Cops Drugged Suspect With Heroin
Prosecutors and the County Counsel’s office have spent two years trying to keep the public from learning that Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) deputies allegedly enticed a confidential informant to supply potent illegal narcotics to a fugitive murder suspect so they could apprehend and interrogate him while he was semi-comatose. Though this latest OCSD mess […]
Will Judge Grant New Trial in Orange County Murder Case Plagued By Chronic DA Corruption?
Two bombshell revelations occurred on March 9 at an Orange County Starbucks on Beach Boulevard, where defense investigator Nicole Busse met a juror who two months earlier helped to convict 28-year-old Eric Ortiz in a controversial murder case. Juror 173 revealed that some of her colleagues on the panel of citizens argued “not to worry” […]
Accusing Prosecutor of Cheating To Win Bizarre Murder Case, Lawyer Seeks New Trial
The lawyer for a burglar convicted of murder after causing a bizarre Orange County traffic fatality is asking a superior court judge to either grant a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct or lower the jury’s finding to manslaughter based on the evidence. In advance of a scheduled Oct. 27 sentencing hearing, Deputy Public Defender Sara […]
Supervisor Todd Spitzer Courts DA Tony Rackauckas’ Staff in 2018 Election Bid
Saying it’s time to end the 18-year, controversy-prone era of Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, 2018 election challenger Todd Spitzer issued a Wednesday letter assuring DA staffers he respects their public service and will restore honest management of the agency if he wins. “Under [Rackauckas’] leadership, the office has been mired in scandal after […]
Public Defender Scott Sanders Explains How He Solved OC’s Snitch Scandal
As he walked briskly along a downtown Santa Ana sidewalk for our first meeting on a toasty, cloudless February 2014 afternoon, criminal defense attorney Scott Sanders’ brain generated waves of internal questions: What do I know about Moxley? What does it mean that over the years he’d authored the most favorable and most critical […]
Public Defender Scott Sanders Explains How He Solved OC’s Snitch Scandal
As he walked briskly along a downtown Santa Ana sidewalk for our first meeting on a toasty, cloudless February 2014 afternoon, criminal defense attorney Scott Sanders’ brain generated waves of internal questions: What do I know about Moxley? What does it mean that over the years he’d authored the most favorable and most critical news […]
