San Diego judge weighs evidence of misconduct by prosecutors in OC murder case ...Middle East

New evidence revealed during a rare special hearing has proven that the Orange County prosecution team in a 2009 murder case hid evidence and for 15 years covered up the misconduct, making it unlikely the defendant will be treated fairly during a new trial, a defense attorney argued Friday.

The prosecution countered that even if the defense allegations are true — and not just “a series of blundering mistakes” by sheriff’s investigators and fired Senior Assistant District Attorney Ebrahim Baytieh, who is now a judge — defendant Paul Gentile Smith can still get a fair retrial.

The two sides are being weighed by San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein, who must decide whether to drop or reduce the charges against Smith or allow the retrial to proceed.

Goldstein ended the special hearing Friday by referring to a similar Orange County case also involving misconduct and the illegal use of jailhouse informants. In that case, then-Judge Thomas Goethals, who now sits on the appellate bench, recused the district attorney’s office and took the death penalty off the table for a defendant who confessed to fatally shooting eight people in 2011 in Seal Beach.

Goethals fell short of dismissing the charges, but gave Scott Dekraai multiple sentences of life in prison.

“His decision in Superior Court is a good road map for this case,” Goldstein said, potentially offering a hint of what he may decide in his final ruling, expected in late January.

“There’s no way we’re all leaving here today not thinking there was misconduct,” he said.

Smith was convicted in 2010 of stabbing boyhood friend Robert Haugen to death in Sunset Beach and setting his body on fire. The conviction was overturned in 2021 amid allegations that the prosecution team, led by Baytieh, withheld evidence that multiple jailhouse informants were illegally used. A new trial was ordered and moved to San Diego County to avoid a conflict of interest because Baytieh now sits on the Orange County bench.

Baytieh was fired from his job at the district attorney’s office in 2022 after an internal investigation into the Smith case. But within months voters elected the popular ex-prosecutor as a Superior Court judge.

Since April, Goldstein has intermittently heard testimony from Baytieh and sheriff’s investigators during the special hearing. The prosecution and the defense agreed the testimony was, at the very least, contradictory. Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders contended the witnesses flat out lied.

In a legal brief to Goldstein before Friday’s closing arguments in the hearing, prosecutor Seton Hunt wrote that no witness admitted to being directly at fault for not disclosing the evidence. Instead, Baytieh and the sheriff’s investigators appeared to either blame others or a supposedly confusing and “archaic” process of delivering items from the Sheriff’s Department to the district attorney’s office for disclosure to defense attorneys, Hunt wrote.

The judge tended to agree.

“Sorry to bash on Orange County, but the system that was set up was ripe for malfeasance and negligence,” he said.

Nobody disputes that Baytieh failed to disclose to the defense during Smith’s trial that multiple jailhouse informants were housed with Smith in an attempt to get him to confess. This violated Smith’s right under the Constitution to have his attorney present during questioning by police and their agents.

Baytieh formally disclosed to the defense at the time of trial that only one informant was used. He said Smith made a voluntary statement about the killing to the informant without being queried.

Baytieh later testified during the special hearing that he did not learn that at least one other informant — Jeffrey Platt — was being used until six years after the trial, with the release of a Sheriff’s Department log of informant activity. Platt disclosed in an interview with investigators — an interview that was not disclosed to the defense — that the informants did more than merely listen, but they pushed and prodded Smith to incriminate himself.

At the time of Smith’s trial, jail informants were secretly and illegally used by prosecutors and investigators to obtain confessions from unwary inmates who were represented by attorneys. The surreptitious use of informants was unmasked in 2014 during the case against Dekraai.

Sanders, in a legal brief to Goldstein, said there was more evidence of misconduct in the Smith case than in the Dekraai case.

Nearly two dozen pieces of evidence, including reports, recorded interviews with informants Platt and Paul Martin and transcripts of those interviews, were concealed from Smith’s defense out of fear they would damage the prosecution’s case and reveal his constitutional rights were violated, Sanders alleged.

The evidence was hidden by Baytieh with the knowledge and cooperation of sheriff’s investigators who are now retired, Sanders said.

“They will never tell the truth,” Sanders told the court in his closing argument Friday. “They decided keeping Paul Smith where he is for the rest of his life is more important than following the law.”

Baytieh’s denials unraveled during the special hearing when the judge unsealed a search warrant signed in 2009 by the former prosecutor. The document detailed Platt’s involvement.

Sanders noted that it is implausible that Baytieh didn’t understand the law pertaining to the use of informants because he was the district attorney’s resident expert on the subject, training dozens of prosecutors and incoming deputies.

“The prosecution team led by Baytieh has shown in the most unambiguous manner possible that it will never assist defendant in providing him with (required) evidence, and would stop at nothing to prevent a new and fair trial that creates the possibility of an acquittal,” Sanders wrote in his brief.

He said no one can know what evidence has been hidden, discarded or destroyed.

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In an effort to determine what evidence remains, Goldstein gave Sanders unprecedented access to the sheriff’s investigators’ work files and shared drive.

Hunt, in his final brief, argued that the crime was so heinous — the victim was stabbed more than 20 times — that the judge couldn’t let Smith off the hook. Smith also allegedly tried to solicit a hit on the lead investigator.

Hunt said no evidence obtained by jailhouse informants would be used in the retrial, which he said would solve the fairness problem.

If his brief, Hunt wrote: “The victim’s family and society deserve justice and the defendant can and will receive a fair retrial.”

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