Prosecutors said a murder defendant can still receive a fair trial and his case should not be thrown out even if he claims he was the victim of governmental misconduct.
The contention, revealed Friday in a court filing, was challenged by Paul Gentile Smith’s attorney.
Next week, a San Diego County Superior Court judge will consider a request from Smith, 63, of Seal Beach, for an evidentiary hearing into allegations that his rights were violated in his first trial for the 1988 fatal stabbing of Robert Haugen, 29, in Sunset Beach.
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office sought to avoid such a hearing, conceding that the defendant did not get a fair trial in 2010, and agreeing to a retrial. Now Smith’s attorney, Scott Sanders of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, is pushing to have the charges dropped.
The case was reassigned to San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein last year.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt argued in a brief filed last week that Goldstein “should deny the request for an evidentiary hearing because, as a matter of law, even if the court presumed, arguendo, that all of defendant’s allegations of misconduct were accurate descriptions of what occurred – the appropriate remedy would be a new trial and the exclusion of any evidence from informants. The People have already agreed to these remedies and the defendant can receive a fair retrial.”
Sanders also represented Scott Dekraai when he forced a recusal of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from prosecuting his client in a murder case that unraveled a jailhouse informant scandal.
Dekraai, who had been facing the death penalty in a 2011 mass shooting, ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Sanders cited the Dekraai case and prosecutors’ denials regarding the informant allegations, in his response to Hunt.
“Ten years ago this month we filed a motion to dismiss in the Dekraai case alleging a hidden jailhouse informant operation that systematically violated constitutional rights. The D.A.’s office responded by attacking the allegations as unreliable speculation and unfair personal attacks,” he said. “The trial court, Court of Appeal and the Department of Justice agreed we got it right. Yet here we are today facing a nearly identical response after filing a detailed motion laying out the most egregious misconduct of the entire scandal.”
Sanders filed a motion in September alleging that Smith’s first prosecutor, Ebrahim Baytieh – now an Orange County Superior Court judge – violated Smith’s rights in the way he used informants to win a conviction.
Baytieh was fired by District Attorney Todd Spitzer shortly after prosecutors conceded the retrial for Smith and cited Baytieh’s alleged failure to share evidence about his use of informants.
Hunt conceded that interviews of two informants were not turned over to defense attorneys before Smith’s first trial, but, he added, prosecutors “do not concede this was purposeful or that there was a conspiracy to violate defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights.”
He added that the “vast majority of defendant’s motion doesn’t even involve this case, but rather appears to be a personal attack on the integrity of the previous trial prosecutor generally. Nevertheless, even if any nondisclosure of information regarding informants before the first trial was purposeful, it would not prejudice defendant in the retrial as no evidence regarding any informant will be presented by the people in the retrial.”
After Smith’s conviction for killing Haugen, he pleaded guilty to soliciting an attack on Orange County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Raymond Wert for his work on the case, but prosecutors moved to dismiss those charges in August 2022.
Baytieh also came under fire in a Department of Justice report sparked by the informant scandal in Dekraai’s case. Sanders alleges that prosecutors and sheriff’s investigators illegally used jailhouse snitches to gather incriminating statements used to convict Smith and others.
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.
– City News Service
