A San Diego County Superior Court judge overseeing an evidentiary hearing alleging governmental misconduct in a Sunset Beach murder case opened a nearly 15-year-old search warrant Friday that the defendant’s attorney said contradicts testimony from an Orange County Superior Court judge, who prosecuted the case.
The case against Paul Gentile Smith in the 1988 killing of 29-year-old Robert Haugen was reassigned to San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein because the claims of governmental misconduct involve Orange County Superior Court Judge Ebrahim Baytieh when he prosecuted Smith.
Smith’s attorney, Scott Sanders of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, filed a motion this week requesting the search warrant be unsealed, saying the evidence and testimony in the hearing shows “conduct so deceptive and unrelenting that it deprives this court of any reasonable faith in a fair re-trial.”
The search warrant Goldstein unsealed showed that one of the sheriff’s investigators on the case wrote a summary of allegations that Smith and his girlfriend, Tina Smith, were involved in a conspiracy to kill one of the investigators and that Baytieh signed off on the warrant.
The Dec. 7, 2009, search warrant indicates Baytieh was briefed on the involvement of at least two jailhouse informants, contradicting his testimony he was only aware of one informant being used in the case.
Previously, Sanders had presented evidence that he argued showed the involvement of undisclosed informants, Jeffrey Platt and Paul Martin, that was not turned over as legally required to the defense prior to the trial.
The warrant to search three residences and a vehicle was authored by former sheriff’s Sgt. Don Voght. It describes how Platt and another informant, Arthur Palacios, who testified against Smith, were used to build the case of the alleged conspiracy to kill Wert, Sanders said.
Sanders has alleged that since Smith was already represented by counsel the use of the informants was what attorneys refer to as a Massiah violation.
Baytieh “has repeatedly denied having any knowledge that Platt worked as an informant on this case,” Sanders said in his motion.
Sanders, who also represented the worst mass killer in the county’s history, Scott Dekraai, who was spared the death penalty as the informant scandal surfaced, said the evidence from the search warrant could represent “the most egregious misconduct, not only in this case, but in the decade-long history of Orange County’s jailhouse informant scandal.”
Voght is expected to take the stand again next month in the hearing with closing arguments expected in October.