Scott Sanders, who shook up the Orange County justice system by challenging the use of jailhouse informants and unearthing a scandal that has impacted dozens of cases — including that of the worst mass killer in county history, officially retired Monday from the Public Defender’s Office.
Even during his last day at work, he was still scrambling at day’s end to finish what he deemed to be important paperwork, exemplifying a worth ethic that came as no surprise to those who worked alongside him.
“My daughter worked for him a little bit and she would say this guy never sleeps,” Defense attorney Joel Garson told City News Service. “He’s always working on these cases. It takes a guy like that to make change. Not a lot of people have the energy he has to keep going no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Garson said he was “inspired” by Sanders when he broke his own major scandal with the improper recording of confidential phone conversations between inmates and their attorneys.
“I would think what would Scott Sanders do” as he worked the case, Garson said. “He helped me be a better lawyer.”
Sanders made a name for himself by shining a light on the questionable use of jailhouse informants, or snitches, in criminal cases during his representation of Scott Dekraai, who killed eight people in a 2011 shooting at the Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach. The resulting scandal — uncovering cases in which the Orange County Sheriff’s Department improperly and at times illegally used inmates to solicit incriminating information from other inmates while they were in custody awaiting trial — has impacted at least 59 other cases so far. The revelations stemming from the Dekraai case have led to new trials, reduced sentences, plea bargains and other impacts.
Sanders, for his part, emphasized that he didn’t do it all alone. He noted it was Scott Van Camp, who is now an Orange County Superior Court judge, who wrote the successful appeal in the Dekraai case that upheld the recusal of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from prosecuting Dekraai.
“A lot of lawyers like Gary (Pohlson, a retired Orange County Superior Court judge), Rudy (Loewenstein) and Jim Crawford — they advanced this tremendously, and others too,” Sanders said. “It isn’t like I carried the torch myself. There were lots of lawyers doing incredible work.”
Sanders, who grew up in Glenview, a northwest suburb of Chicago, joined the Public Defender’s Office in 1993. Sanders plans to continue working in private practice and will hang on to some of his cases, including representing Paul Gentile Smith, who has won a retrial in a 1988 killing.
Sanders won a significant ruling in the Smith case this year when a San Diego County Superior Court judge singled out an Orange County Superior Court judge, who prosecuted the case against Smith, for making a “falsified statement” in an evidentiary hearing that echoed the three rounds of hearings for Dekraai on the use of informants.
Sanders said he reluctantly retired because, “We only touched the surface. When we look back these same practices were used at least since the early 1980’s and most of those defendants don’t know what happened to them and that’s a tragedy and that’s haunting.”
But, Sanders added, “We didn’t stop. We kept pushing these issues all the way into Smith. … The thing I’m most proud of is we didn’t stop with the win. We kept going for another decade. I’ve been working on this stuff since 2012 and I’m leaving in 2025, and we just had a ruling of reprehensible conduct in the worst case in the whole scandal.”
Sanders was also credited with breaking the so-called Evidence Booking scandal, which also rocked the Sheriff’s Department. He said his work on the Dekraai case led to sources telling him about the dilatory and at times sloppy booking of evidence in cases.
“I got access to the (evidence) audit in a way that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t in the informant scandal,” Sanders said.
When Sanders filed a more than 500-page motion alleging abuses of confidential informants in the prosecution of Dekraai in 2014 he initially won just some lower-level sanctions of the prosecutors in the case. But then when he asked for records for another notorious client, mutilation murder defendant Daniel Patrick Wozniak, he received the so-called special handling log — a rolling, confidential diary kept by deputies regarding their work with snitches.
Sanders also received the so-called “tred records,” which documented the placement of informants to give them access to other inmates they could pump for incriminating facts to turn over to law enforcement, which is illegal when a defendant is represented by a lawyer. That led the judge overseeing Dekraai’s case — Thomas Goethals, who is now an appellate judge — to grant a second round of evidentiary hearings which led to the recusal of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the case.
“You need a break like that to start,” Sanders said of obtaining the informant records. “And then you need a break like arriving in Goethals’ courtroom. If he doesn’t take this seriously and do something most judges never do at that time then these stories, which are so important, never get told and understood.”
He was 20 years into his career at that point, “and for someone like myself you’re living the dream in a horrible case where people are suffering and you’re finding terrible misconduct and a win-at-all-costs behavior. It felt very much like the chance of a lifetime.”
Defense attorney John Barnett, who often represents those in law enforcement, praised Sanders’ diligence.
“I did not agree with the conclusions or results of a lot of his work,” Barnett said. “I was on the other side of that, but I appreciated and appreciate the extremely hard work and attention to detail and dedication he had. He did work nobody else would or could do and that’s very important work.”
Barnett said the fact he would differ with Sanders on some issues was not important.
“That happens all the time,” he noted. “It’s not a criticism, but an observation. But he did very important detailed hard work. And the system is better for it. … The system can’t run unless lawyers are hardworking, smart and dedicated and honestly don’t, or shouldn’t, care what other people think about what they’re doing.”
Sanders’ legacy will include changing how the county’s lawyers and law enforcement officials view the so-called Brady obligation, which involves the evidence prosecutors must turn over to defendants.
“He shifted the way Brady is looked at, not only in Orange County but (at) large,” Barnett said.
Defense attorney Jack Earley said of Sanders that “systems often need resets because people forget what their mission is, which is justice. … And he was just a bulldog on seeing something and following it, which is a tremendous amount of work. And the work he did wasn’t just for one client, and when he realized it was system-wide he kept adding. It was a reminder that you can’t take your eyes away from what the system is. You can see he got a lot of pushback from people in the system who were saying this is the way we’ve always done it, why are you interrupting it?”
Earley added that some Orange County prosecutors “think their job is to win for a quote-unquote victim, and it really isn’t. Their job is justice is done. Often you hear them talk about what we do is for the victims and as you can see the system fell apart, a bunch of cases fell apart so in the long run it didn’t help the victims in general. … So for Scott the legacy is we need people in the system who will hold it to account.”
UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, the former UC Irvine Law School dean who was influential in pushing for a Justice Department investigation of the informant scandal, said Sanders “was tireless in exposing the constitutional violations in the Orange County sheriff’s office and jails. He was often unfairly vilified. His efforts made a huge difference in protecting rights and reforming the system.”