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SANTA ANA (CNS) - Orange County prosecutors said a Seal Beach man can still receive a fair trial and his case should not be thrown out even if he claims he was the victim of outrageous governmental misconduct in his murder trial, it was revealed Friday in a court filing.
The defendant's attorney said Friday the prosecutor's argument feels like a flashback to the District Attorney's position regarding Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in the county's history.
Next week, a San Diego County Superior Court judge will consider a request from Paul Gentile Smith, 63, for an evidentiary hearing into allegations his rights were violated in his first trial for the killing of 29- year-old Robert Haugen in Sunset Beach on Oct. 24, 1988.
Smith's attorney, Scott Sanders of the Orange County Public Defender's Office, represented Dekraai when he won a recusal of the Orange County District Attorney's Office from prosecuting his client in a case that unraveled a jailhouse informant scandal through evidentiary hearings.
Dekraai, who had been facing the death penalty, ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The District Attorney's Office sought to avoid an evidentiary hearing in Smith's case, conceding the defendant did not get a fair trial and agreeing to a retrial. Now Sanders is pushing to have Smith's case thrown out. The case was reassigned to San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein last year.
Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt argued in a brief filed last week that Goldstein "should deny the request for an evidentiary hearing because, as a matter of law, even if the court presumed, arguendo, that all of defendant's allegations of misconduct were accurate descriptions of what occurred -- the appropriate remedy would be a new trial and the exclusion of any evidence from informants. The People have already agreed to these remedies and the defendant can receive a fair retrial."
Sanders said, "Ten years ago this month we filed a motion to dismiss in the Dekraai case alleging a hidden a jailhouse informant operation that systematically violated constitutional rights. The D.A.'s office responded by attacking the allegations as unreliable speculation and unfair personal attacks. The trial court, Court of Appeal and the Department of Justice agreed we got it right. Yet here we are today facing a nearly identical response after filing a detailed motion laying out the most egregious misconduct of the entire scandal."
Sanders' motion filed in September alleged that Smith's first prosecutor, Ebrahim Baytieh -- now an Orange County Superior Court judge -- violated Smith's rights in the way he used informants to win a conviction of Smith. Baytieh was fired by District Attorney Todd Spitzer shortly after prosecutors conceded the retrial for Smith and cited Baytieh's alleged failure to share evidence about his use of informants.
Hunt brushed aside much of Sanders' allegations about what he said was the systemic misuse of informants.
"The People do not feel it is necessary to address many of these claims in detail as they are unrelated to any issue that is relevant to the analysis of whether defendant can receive a fair retrial," Hunt wrote.
"Further, although the former trial prosecutor, now a sitting Superior Court judge in Orange County, would presumably want an opportunity to rebut the claims made against him, and defense counsel would like the opportunity to explore his theories, this is not the appropriate venue for that dispute."
Sanders told City News Service, "What makes the D.A.'s response even more bizarre and troubling is that it was the D.A.'s office that claimed Baytieh's conduct in this case that required his termination. Now, though, they are singing a very different tune. Although we indisputably found far more evidence had been hidden from the defendant, the D.A. actually insists our analysis is nothing more than `conjecture' and that Baytieh is the victim of `personal attacks' without offering a drop of analysis about the reasons that what we alleged is inaccurate. This is clearly not where we should be 14 years after a mountain of evidence was hidden from Mr. Smith and a decade into the informant scandal."
Hunt conceded that interviews of two informants were not turned over to defense attorneys before Smith's first trial, but, he added, prosecutors "do not conceded this was purposeful or that there was a conspiracy to violate defendant's Sixth Amendment rights."
Hunt added that the "vast majority of defendant's motion doesn't even involve this case, but rather appears to be a personal attack on the integrity of the previous trial prosecutor generally. Nevertheless, even if any nondisclosure of information regarding informants before the first trial was purposeful, it would not prejudice defendant in the retrial as no evidence regarding any informant will be presented by the people in the retrial."
After Smith's conviction of killing Haugen, he pleaded guilty to allegedly soliciting an attack on Orange County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Raymond Wert for his work on the murder case, but prosecutors moved to dismiss those charges in August 2022.
Baytieh also came under fire in a Department of Justice report sparked by the informant scandal in Dekraai's case. Sanders alleges that prosecutors and sheriff's investigators illegally used jailhouse snitches to gather incriminating statements used to convict Smith and others.
Informants can be used in some cases to legally gather incriminating information, but not after defendants are represented by an attorney, as was the case with Smith.