A retired Orange County sheriff’s lieutenant Tuesday brushed off any connections he had with a Sunset Beach murder case that has led to an evidentiary hearing regarding allegations of illegal use of jailhouse snitches, insisting he was unaware of what happened in the trial and the informant scandal that followed.
Retired Lt. Roger Guevara continued testifying in the San Diego evidentiary hearing regarding allegations of misuse of jailhouse informants in the case against Paul Gentile Smith, 64, who is charged with killing 29-year-old Robert Haugen in Sunset Beach on Oct. 24, 1988.
Smith’s attorney, Scott Sanders of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, is trying to lay the groundwork for dismissal of the case or some other sanction related to allegations of outrageous governmental conduct. On June 10, now-Orange County Superior Court Judge Ebrahim Baytieh, who was Smith’s original prosecutor, will testify in the hearing being held before San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein.
Smith’s case was reassigned to Goldstein because of the claims against Baytieh, who was fired by Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, citing a failure by Baytieh to turn over evidence to the defense in Smith’s first trial, which resulted in a conviction in 2010 for murder and special circumstance allegations of torture and robbery. After the conviction, Smith pleaded guilty to soliciting an attack on the lead investigator in the case, sheriff’s investigator Raymond Wert, but those charges were later dismissed by prosecutors after they agreed to a retrial of Smith’s murder case in 2021.
The evidence in question was a report of an interview investigators had with jailhouse informant Jeffrey Platt, who detailed how he questioned Smith about his case, despite Smith being represented by an attorney, which is what attorneys consider a Massiah violation.
Guevara said Tuesday he did not even learn of Smith’s conviction in 2010 until he was subpoenaed to testify in the evidentiary hearing.
Guevara said he understood that informants were not allowed to question other defendants who were represented by an attorney, but he just didn’t know that it was known as a Massiah violation.
“You just didn’t know the case name, Massiah,” Sanders asked him.
“I thought I had a clear understanding of it,” Guevara said of what was allowed when using informants.
“You understood in 2009 law enforcement is not allowed to encourage in-custody defendants to question other defendants about charged crimes?” Sanders asked.
“Yes,” Guevara replied.
“But you had information in this case that Jeff Platt wanted to question a charged defendant about his case,” Sanders asked.
“I knew he wanted to work as an informant on this case … but I had no idea what would come of it,” Guevara said.
He said he passed along the request to Wert.
“I knew it went on to Wert, but I had no idea how he would proceed with it,” Guevara said. “I didn’t have a case to hand over (to prosecutors or defense attorneys). The case was already Wert’s.”
Goldstein asked Guevara, “You believe all you needed to do was turn it over to the case agent?”
“I didn’t know anything about the case,” Guevara replied. “I couldn’t question him further. Once he gave me that information, my job was to find out who the case agent was so he could make sense of it.”
Guevara acknowledged he had the ability to document the request and add it to what deputies called Tred records, which kept an accounting of the movements of inmates in the jail.
“You chose not to,” Sanders asked.
“Yes,” Guevara responded.
Guevara, who retired in 2019, said he mostly worked with Platt as an informant on Operation Stormfront, a federal and state crackdown on white supremacists.
Guevara’s memory of tagging along with now-retired investigator Bill Beeman to question Smith’s girlfriend, Tina Smith, was hazy.
Sanders read questions Guevara asked Tina Smith during the session, but he couldn’t remember doing that.
“I didn’t have any curiosity (about the Smith case) because it wasn’t my case,” Guevara said.
Guevara appeared to question Tina Smith about another person involved in the solicitation to kill Wert, but Guevara said he couldn’t recall asking her about it.
“I stepped out, I missed part of the conversation, so I wanted to get back in tune with it,” he said of the reason he asked a few questions.
“You were talking about Jeff Platt,” Sanders asked.
“Definitely not,” he responded.
When Sanders asked Goldstein about admitting various news clippings about the informant scandal into the record to undermine the credibility of witnesses saying they weren’t aware of it, the judge said it was unnecessary because sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Padilla had already testified that reading local news stories was part of the job in the unit that assigned inmate housing locations.
Guevara said he did not follow the informant scandal that grew out of the prosecution of Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in county history. The scandal led to the death penalty being taken off the table for the defendant and the recusal of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the case.
Under questioning from Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt, Guevara said in 2009-10 he was mostly focused on Operation Stormfront.
“Were you keeping up with those cases?” Hunt asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Did you have time for that?” Hunt asked.
“No,” he said.
He could not say exactly why he was along for the Tina Smith questioning. Guevara said it was “good policy” for investigators to bring a partner along for questioning of a witness, “particularly if it was a woman.”
A partner can help with “trying to read (a witness), trying to get body language, all sorts of things,” Guevara said.
He downplayed his jumping into the questioning.
“When I was talking to her … it was just to make her comfortable,” Guevara said. “You interject to keep things calm and level.”