Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer. Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer Tuesday slammed his competitor for Orange County District Attorney — incumbent Tony Rackauckas — for remarks he made on the so-called snitch scandal while the two were seeking the endorsement of a Republican organization this past weekend.
Rackauckas downplayed allegations of violations of constitutional rights of Orange County Jail inmates through an informant program. The scandal grew out of attempts to use alleged boasting by Scott Dekraai — the county’s worst mass killer — about his bloody massacre at a Seal Beach beauty salon.
Thomas Goethals, the Orange County Superior Court judge who presided over Dekraai’s case and was recently appointed to the Fourth District Court of Appeals, sentenced Dekraai, who pleaded guilty, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, removing the death penalty as a punishment for prosecutors because of his finding Dekraai could not get a fair trial.
Spitzer, who won the endorsement from the California Impact Republican organization, labeled Rackauckas’ comments on the Dekraai case “bewildering.”
Rackauckas, when asked about the snitch scandal, said he found the allegations from defense lawyers to be “highly exaggerated.”
Rackauckas questioned Goethals’ fairness.
“I have serious questions about whether that judge intended to be fair,” Rackauckas said.
Rackauckas noted that ultimately prosecutors agreed to not use Dekraai’s “bragging” about the murders in the penalty phase of his trial.
“We took that off the table,” Rackauckas said.
Rackauckas said Goethals’ evidentiary hearings in the case amounted to “almost like a grand jury inquiry” that reviewed allegations of abuse of informants in multiple other cases not related to Dekraai’s.
A panel of Fourth District Court of Appeal justices upheld Goethals’ move to boot Rackauckas’ office from prosecuting Dekraai, leaving it to the Attorney General’s Office. The justices ruled there was evidence of systemic corruption in the use of informants in the jails.
“No pattern (of cheating) was ever found because there wasn’t any,” Rackauckas said. “The deputy DAs in my office don’t do that… I know they’re honest, hardworking people and these allegations are insulting to them and wrong.”
Rackauckas implied that reporters take the allegations from attorneys in the Public Defender’s Office and regurgitate them unchallenged.
“They get in the press like they’re fact and they’re not fact,” Rackauckas told the group.
Rackauckas said that whenever his prosecutors uncovered any abuses or questionable tactics in the use of informants that defense attorneys were alerted right away.
“And we have put procedures in place to be sure before we use an informant that all the rules are followed,” Rackauckas said.
Spitzer said Rackauckas’ remarks appeared to imply that Goethals wasn’t fair because “his son had been denied a job at the District Attorney’s Office.”
In a mailer to supporters, Spitzer added that the group was “led to believe by Rackauckas that even more bias occurred because of friendships between members of the Court of Appeal and Judge Goethals.”
When contacted for comment, Rackauckas’ campaign spokesman, Dave Gilliard, said, “The California Impact Republicans could meet in a phone booth and still have room to put their feet up.”
—City News Service