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New allegations emerge in Orange County informant scandal
VOLUME 11,
AQMD issues order of abatement to Castaic landfill operators
By Paul Anderson, City News Service
A
defense attorney who uncovered the Orange County jail-informant scandal that upended the death penalty case against the worst mass killer in county history filed a new round of allegations Thursday accusing a former prosecutor, who is now a Superior Court judge, of spearheading the illegal use of jailhouse snitches that he claims could taint nearly 100 cases. In a 409-page motion filed in the murder retrial of Paul Gentile Smith, 63, who is accused of killing 29-year-old Robert Haugen in Sunset Beach on Oct. 24, 1988, Orange County Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders raises new allegations about the past use of informants in the county. Smith’s prior conviction was thrown out two years ago on the eve of an evidentiary hearing into alleged misconduct by a sheriff’s investigator. In August of last year, prosecutors moved to dismiss charges Smith had previously pleaded guilty to for allegedly soliciting an attack on Orange County sheriff’s Sgt. Raymond Wert for his work on the murder case. Orange County Superior Court Judge Ebrahim Baytieh, who prosecuted Smith, was fired by District Attorney Todd Spitzer in February of last year, months after allegations of misconduct in Smith’s case led Spitzer’s office to capitulate to a retrial for the defendant. Baytieh also came under fire last year in a Department of Justice report sparked by the informant scandal in the case of Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in county history. Baytieh was faulted for not disclosing information about an informant used
in Smith’s case to defense attorneys in his first trial. Sheriff’s investigators subsequently said they would invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if they were called to testify in an evidentiary hearing in the case — further contributing to prosecutors’ decision to capitulate to a retrial for Smith. Sanders, who is representing Smith in his retrial, also represented Dekraai, who killed eight people, including his ex-wife, at a Seal Beach hair salon in 2011. Sanders won a motion to recuse the District Attorney’s Office from prosecuting Dekraai, alleging misconduct in the use of jailhouse informants. After an extensive series of evidentiary hearings over the informant scandal, the death penalty was taken off the table for Dekraai, who ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Sanders is now seeking a similar evidentiary hearing in the Smith case, arguing that charges against the defendant should be thrown out. As in the Dekraai case, Sanders alleges that prosecutors and sheriff’s investigators illegally used jailhouse informants to pump Smith for incriminating information that was used to convict him. Informants can be used in some cases to legally gather incriminating information, but not after defendants are represented by an attorney, as was the case with Smith. Sanders also alleges that investigators withheld evidence of the use of informants from Smith’s defense team in his 2010 trial. “The wrongdoing has
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By City News Service
The Chiquita Canyon Landfill. | Photo courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
difficult decision to concede a new trial to Paul Gentile Smith who was convicted of a murder in 2010 in which he is accused of brutally mutilating his victim and setting him on fire,” Spitzer said at the time. “He had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This decision was as a result of allegations that a prosecutor failed under the prior administration to turn over information about an informant to the defense.” Sheriff’s spokeswoman Carrie Braun said the department does not comment on pending litigation. Sanders argued in the motion that then-inmates Jeffrey Platt and Paul Martin were “undisclosed informants, who had been secretly assigned to Smith’s dayroom along with See OC scandal Page 28
See Castaic landfill Page 27
Paul Gentile Smith. | Photo courtesy of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department
been carried out through individual acts, as well as those committed in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy led by (Baytieh), and which included (Wert), former Sgt. Donald Voght, and former investigator Bill Beeman,” Sanders wrote in the motion filed Thursday. Also accused of participating in the alleged conspiracy were sheriff’s Sgts. Anton Pereyra, Michael Padilla, Michael Carrillo and Capt. Joseph Sandoval. Baytieh’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s office responded to a request for comment by pointing to a statement it issued in Feb. 9, 2022, when Baytieh was fired that claimed Spitzer would not tolerate a “win at all costs” approach to prosecutions. “On August 5, 2021, I was forced to make the
T
he operators of a landfill near Castaic have been ordered to investigate the cause of a chemical reaction creating odors that have become a nuisance in neighboring communities and how to reduce or eliminate the odors. A hearing board with the South Coast Air Quality Management District met on Wednesday to discuss the complaints received from members of the community near the Chiquita Canyon Landfill. The AQMD has received more than 2,000 complaints and issued more than 60 notices of violations to the landfill operators in recent months about the odors coming from the 639-acre landfill. The AQMD hearing board issued an order of abatement at the meeting to further address the issue. It requires the facility to investigate the cause of the reaction which is creating elevated levels of dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, and to take steps to reduce the impact to the community until a way to eliminate the odor is discovered. In the order of abatement, the landfill operators are expected to conduct odor surveillance at least twice daily, maximize the use of landfill gas flares, submit a monthly written report on landfill operations, organize a committee of experts to investigate the cause of the odor and chemical reactions, and expand the gas well system. Additionally, the order requires the landfill operators to inspect the landfill cover each operating day, maintain trash odor mitigation efforts, and maintain and update an odor mitigation section on its website weekly. Gas removal systems are ineffective in removing or treating DMS, the AQMD has reported. West Connections, the owner and operator of the landfill, says it is testing other ways to stop the chemical reactions and release of the gas, according to reports in the Daily News. The odors were causing a nuisance to a “considerable