An Orange County Superior Court judge Friday denied a request by a defense attorney at the center of the so-called “snitch scandal” allegations to have evidence preserved for the appeal of a convicted double killer in Costa Mesa.
Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders wanted evidence preserved that his former client, Daniel Patrick Wozniak, might need for an appeal to the state Supreme Court on his death sentence last year.
Sanders argued that due to ongoing evidentiary issues in the case of his other client, Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in the county’s history, the Sheriff’s Department cannot be trusted to preserve evidence Wozniak might need.
Sanders also argued that Senior Deputy District Matt Murphy, who prosecuted Wozniak, cannot be trusted either because he falsely claimed he did not promise leniency to a so-called informant in another capital case he prosecuted a decade ago.
Murphy argued that the inmate, Daniel Elias, was not an informant but rather a “percipient witness” because he was solicited by Skylar Deleon to kill a witness. Also, the inmate in question, was not promised a deal before he testified, Murphy argued.
Murphy denied Sanders’ allegations and called them “unethical” in Friday’s hearing.
Orange County Superior Court Judge John Conley denied Sanders’ motion, saying the attorney did not have legal standing because he was no longer Wozniak’s lawyer. Conley also found that he lacked jurisdiction for the requested order.
Murphy wanted Conley to strike all of the allegations about the Deleon case in Sanders’ motion because he said that any ruling to approve the preservation of evidence would provide “tacit” approval of Sanders’ allegations.
Conley declined to strike the allegations, but said in his ruling that Murphy had done nothing wrong in the Deleon case.
“In Deleon, Mr. Murphy told the jury he had offered Mr. Elias no consideration for his testimony,” Conley wrote in his ruling.
“And there was no evidence presented that he did. As this court sees it, there is no evidence of misconduct on the part of Mr. Murphy to either the Deleon or Wozniak trials.”
Deleon was sentenced to death in April 2009 for the murders of Thomas and Jackie Hawks in Newport Beach in 2004.
Wozniak was sentenced to death in September for the 2010 murders of 26- year-old Samuel Eliezer Herr and 23-year-old Julie Kibuishi.
Conley also concluded that Sanders’ request would have meant authorities would have to dig through “hundreds of thousands of documents, some going back 36 years, long before the Wozniak case, and some documents going back to before Mr. Wozniak was even born.”
Conley said the “workload” would be “enormous.”
“The legal basis for such an order is slim to none, as Wozniak’s trial did not involve informants or information from them,” Conley said.
The common thread in the Dekraai and Wozniak cases was jailhouse informant Fernando Perez, who pumped both inmates for information so he could get help reducing his sentence down the line on a gun possession charge.
The difference was Murphy declined to use any of Perez’s information because Wozniak had already confessed to the killings.
It is illegal for informants to question defendants who are already charged, but it is OK if they “overhear” information and turn it over to authorities.
Sanders characterized Conley’s ruling as “shocking” after the hearing.
“It is shocking that in 2017 an Orange County judge would refuse to order the sheriff’s department to preserve evidence related to a capital case,” Sanders said.
“Unfortunately, it is not shocking that Judge Conley absolved a prosecutor of all wrongdoing even when the prosecutor himself admitted it would take months of hearings to make that determination.”
–City News Service