Retired Fourth District Court of Appeal Justice Thomas Goethals said Friday he will always remember the day he came to work more than a decade ago and was met with a voluminous motion that would not only change his life but upend Orange County law enforcement with a scandal that continues to resonate.
“When I walked in that first day I remember it like it was yesterday,” Goethals told City News Service in an interview about his retirement.
The avid runner recalled exercising, coming into the courthouse as an Orange County Superior Court judge and seeing the snowcapped Mount Baldy peaks in February. Then he saw a large cart full of boxes, the kind that was more commonplace before the legal world went more paperless, he said.
“I see that and I immediately turn around to my clerk, Brenda (Raab), and I tell her, `I think one of your friends left their cart in my office. And she said, `No, that’s a motion for you.’ I said, “What? A motion like that wasn’t anywhere on my radar.”’
It was the motion to dismiss the death penalty option against Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in the county’s history, due to allegations of outrageous governmental misconduct. It became known as the Snitch Scandal and it continues to rock the county, most recently last month when a San Diego County Superior Court judge issued a scathing ruling regarding a 1988 murder in Sunset Beach.
The case involved the illegal use of jailhouse informants to elicit incriminating statements against defendants who were represented by an attorney.
“Just out of curiosity I picked up” one of the files, Goethals said. “I read a lot of it and my initial reaction was how could this be true?”
What threw him, he said, was the prosecution of Dekraai, who ultimately pleaded guilty to killing eight people in the Oct. 12, 2011, massacre at Salon Meritage in Seal Beach, appeared superficially to be a layup for prosecutors.
“I had a sense these terrible crimes happened in front of a bunch of witnesses,” Goethals said. “He had on a bulletproof vest and was caught with the gun in his hand. It wasn’t in my mind a whodunnit. So why would they have done such a thing?”
He didn’t understand why prosecutors were continuing to work a case, digging up dirt on a defendant who had even confessed to the worst mass killing in the county’s history. A longtime informant was placed next to Dekraai’s cell which was wired, and prosecutors got recording of the defendant appearing to brag about the murders.
Goethals, who was a prosecutor and a defense attorney, before serving as an Orange County Superior Court judge for 15 years followed by eight years on the appellate court, said he “never smelled a whiff of it,” referring to Orange County prosecutors using jailhouse informants improperly.
“You would have thought I would have heard something about it,” Goethals said.
He acknowledges that it was perhaps because he did not handle many gang-related cases on the county’s homicide unit as a prosecutor and most of the cases infected by the scandal involved gang murders.
Goethals was initially skeptical and after a round of evidentiary hearings in 2014 he sanctioned prosecutors, prohibiting them from using the statements Dekraai made in custody in his trial.
But attorney Scott Sanders, who represented Dekraai and filed the historic, 500-page motion, said he managed to get evidence in another capital case he was involved in that opened the door to another round of evidentiary hearings. Some Orange County sheriff’s deputies testified they did not know how the longtime informant ended up being placed next to Dekraai, but when Sanders received records of inmate cell assignments, which were denied under oath in the first round of hearings, it launched a second round that led Goethals to boot the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the case.
Former Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, who went from denying there was ever a jailhouse informant program, eventually changed her explanation to rogue deputies had run amok.
“It just didn’t make sense that a couple of rogue deputy sheriffs” were running an off-the-books informant scheme, Goethals said. “Just the fact that the DA kept using these informants in case after case.”
Goethals said he didn’t personally know Sanders or Dan Wagner, who was head of the homicide unit for the District Attorney at the time. But he knew them by reputation.
Goethals knew they both had reputations for being widely respected attorneys. So Goethals was shocked when Wagner took the stand during the hearings and said his understanding of his obligations as a prosecutor to turn over evidence to defense attorneys was “evolving.”
“I thought, `C’mon, Wagner, that’s basic stuff,’ ” Goethals said.
Prosecutors at the time argued that if they weren’t using evidence they didn’t need to turn it over, but Goethals believes that prosecutors are obligated to turn over all of the evidence they have and let the defense attorneys decide what they need.
Goethals gave Wagner credit for “being man enough to admit he didn’t know what he was doing” regarding the evidence law.
Sanders, who also recently retired from the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, exposed more corruption recently in the use of informants in the case of Paul Gentile Smith, who won a new trial for the 1988 killing of 29-year-old Robert Haugen.
The case was sent to San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein because the prosecutor on the case was now Orange County Superior Court Judge Ebrahim Baytieh.
Goldstein singled out Baytieh for criticism, saying he made a “falsified statement” in an evidentiary hearing in Smith’s case. He declined to boot the District Attorney from prosecuting the case, but restricted what evidence prosecutors can use in the new trial.
Goethals said he followed the hearing in the Smith case “from a distance,” and praised Goldstein’s ruling.
“It’s different than Dekraai, but it’s somewhat analogous to Dekraai,” Goethals said.
Goethals has written a book recounting his experience on the Dekraai case. He will also work for ADR Services Inc. as an arbitrator and mediator, he said.
The 72-year-old said he’s had two hip replacements and a knee replacement.
“There’s two ways to leave the Court of Appeal,” he joked. “They carry you out or you can retire. The only question for me was when.”
Easing into private judging is “a good way for me to transition,” he said.
“It’s hard for me to walk way and have nothing to do with the law,” he said.
The avid water skiier is also looking forward to taking a European riverboat cruise, he said.
“I’ve always been interested in going on a cruise but my beautiful wife is not,” he said with a chuckle.
So the riverboat cruise is a compromise, he said.