Orange County deputies fired after audit finds widespread evidence mishandling
Hundreds of Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputies held onto evidence for days, weeks and more before booking it, results of a two-year internal audit uncovered by the Orange County Register show.
Four of the deputies have been fired and seven more disciplined for improperly booking evidence in the wake of findings that could throw one of California’s largest criminal courts into crisis.
Sheriff’s officials followed with a statement Monday, owning up to “systemic problems with evidence being booked outside policy.”
About 30 percent of evidence was booked late – a widespread problem owed to what sheriff’s auditors in their analysis blamed on “no system of accountability” and that the county’s public defender’s office said portends a potential crisis.
“Absolutely, it’s a crisis in Orange County,” Scott Sanders, Orange County assistant public defender, told The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday. “The question is: Where is that evidence going and how’s it being mixed in with other cases? If people are leaving it in their car or their locker or their desk, it denigrates the integrity of the process.
“This is our challenge: (to review) present and recent cases. It’s a massive quantity of work,” Sanders continued. “There are thousands of cases potentially at play.”
Evidence in a deputy’s possession must be booked at the end of the shift, per department policy. But often, the audit concluded, deputies would hang onto what was collected.
In all, 15 criminal investigations were forwarded by the Sheriff’s Department to Orange County District Attorney’s prosecutors, but no criminal charges have been filed against deputies, sheriff’s officials said Monday. Four other internal investigations are ongoing, officials said.
The audit examined more than 98,000 reports and more than 27,000 evidence bookings by 1,535 deputies from Feb. 1, 2016, through Feb. 1, 2018.
An internal sheriff’s department analysis of the audit obtained by The Bee showed Orange County deputies on average took 3.4 days to book evidence. Two of the department’s six patrol sections took more than four days, the findings showed.
Nearly 18,000 items, about 85 percent of all evidence, were booked within five days, according to the findings. Nearly 300 were still awaiting booking for at least 31 days.
Most of the evidence that was improperly booked was digital evidence – photographs, footage from surveillance cameras and audio recordings – sheriff’s officials said Monday.
“The audit achieved its intended goal and has made our agency better,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes, who served as undersheriff during the span of the audit’s focus, said in the Monday statement. Barnes said the audit showed his department has “no patience for substandard performance or criminal behavior.”
Still, “The underlying question is how did this happen? How did they develop such a terrible habit?” Daniel L. Feldman, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who teaches government oversight; and once a senior member in the New York State Attorney General’s office, said of the audit’s findings in a Bee interview. “To what extent is this the fault of a previous administration? These are gross supervisory deficiencies.”
The department’s policy that deputies book evidence at the end of their shifts is a “sensible policy that should be followed,” Feldman said, but added that the policy was so widely flouted raises potentially troubling issues.
“You have two different issues: one, there are really troubling problems where people could have access to (evidence). There’s the potential for witness tampering and evidence tampering becomes an issue.
“It’s also potentially ‘Brady’ material,” Feldman continued, referring to the landmark 1963 Brady vs. Maryland Supreme Court decision that compels prosecutors to hand over all evidence to defense that might clear defendants of the charges against them.
“I believe, in and of itself, if it wasn’t turned over to the defense, it could have pretty bad consequences,” he said. “It could result in an appeals court saying this case could and should be overturned.”
Officials said “immediate measures were taken to ensure personnel were educated” on evidence booking policy and procedure, due to the audits.
Supervisors now must check that “all property and evidence has been booked prior to approving any related reports.”
Sheriff’s officials, responding to a The Bee’s requests for comment beyond the Monday statement, said department officials have been working with the DA’s office regarding the audit’s findings and referred further questions to that office.
District attorney’s officials did not answer The Bee’s requests for comment, but Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer told The Register that his office only learned of the audit Monday, though Spitzer said his office had been reviewing individual cases.
Sanders sharply criticized what he said was a secretive process.
“This was known to the sheriff’s office and the district attorney but wasn’t disclosed to defendants,” Sanders told The Bee. “It is very clear that they decided not to let us know – 74 percent of deputies were not turning in evidence for 6-10 days.
“We have the press spokesperson admitting that it is a ‘systemic problem.’ If you have a systemic problem, that’s not a secret you get to keep to yourself.”
Feldman of John Jay concluded the department “did the right thing” by conducting the review, but was puzzled as to why the agency wouldn’t promptly release the audit’s findings.
“I’m trying to think of any good reason not to (release the audit),” Feldman said. “It seems to me they should’ve released it.”
Sheriff’s officials in January 2018 first became aware of what they said were “instances” of mishandling, prompting the departmental review.
But nearly two years passed before they shared the review with county prosecutors and public defenders, Sanders said.
“We were interested to know and entitled to know how and when Orange County deputies mishandled evidence,” he said. “The largest department in the county is mishandling evidence every day and there is a staff that knows about it. It’s literally the entire force. It’s just remarkable.”
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