A San Diego County Superior Court judge overseeing an evidentiary hearing alleging governmental misconduct in a Sunset Beach murder case will hearing closing arguments Friday on whether the defendant can still get a fair trial from Orange County prosecutors.
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, argued in court papers that the case must be dismissed due to what he argued was a conspiracy to conceal the illegal use of jailhouse informants to incriminate Smith on the murder and an attempt to kill the lead investigator in the case.
“Numerous reports, recordings, and transcripts related to witnesses Jeffrey Platt and Paul Martin were systematically concealed from defendant in response to well-founded concerns about the impact those disclosures would have on the prosecutions case, including the concern that lawful disclosure would have revealed a Sixth Amendment violation and prevented the testimony of informant Arthur Palacios,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders accused Baytieh of deciding to hide the evidence with help from former Orange County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Ray Wert, former Sgt. Donald Voght and former sheriff’s investigator Bill Beeman.
The four “intended to keep hidden forever both what they concealed and their knowledge about how the concealment had been accomplished, and have remained steadfast in their commitment to that objective since 2009,” Sanders said.
Sanders also argued that during the hearing, which began in April, they “testified untruthfully… about their participation in the concealment and deception, as well as about their recollection of key events.”
Sanders referred in his court papers to the case he made uncovering the informant scandal as the attorney for Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in the county’s history. In that case, Sanders got the Orange County District Attorney’s Office booted from the prosecution and ultimately won the dismissal of the death penalty as an option for state prosecutors who took over the case.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt conceded in his final brief in the case that there was what prosecutors called a Massiah violation in which a defendant represented by counsel was illegally questioned by informants. But, he said, dismissal of the case was unwarranted.
“The appropriate remedy is to grant the defendant a new trial and to exclude the informant evidence in the new trial,” Hunt wrote. “The victim’s family and society deserve justice and the defendant can and will receive a fair retrial.”
Hunt argued that the case can be made against Smith without any evidence about what he told informants while in custody.
“Defendant brutally tortured and murdered victim Robert Haugen before lighting his body on fire in 1988,” Hunt said. “Nearly 20 years after the murder, after he had tortured and lit his own girlfriend on fire, DNA tied defendant to the murder.”