The Orange County district attorney’s office said two of its former veteran prosecutors committed malpractice by willfully ignoring the use of a veteran government informant to obtain a confession from mass killer Scott Dekraai, according to an internal review of the so-called Orange County “snitch scandal” that was made public Monday.
The 57-page report concludes that the two men tasked with prosecuting Dekraai — the admitted gunman who claimed eight lives in the 2011 Seal Beach salon massacre — made a “deliberate choice not to find out the criminal and informant history” of Fernando Perez, who was housed next to Dekraai when he confessed to the shootings days after his arrest.
Dekraai’s trial was key to revealing that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had made a practice of placing seasoned informants near high-profile defendants while in the county’s jails, ultimately allowing them to question inmates about crimes for which they were awaiting trial without a lawyer present, a violation of their constitutional rights.
The scandal has led to retrials and reduced sentences in several Orange County homicides in recent years, but the blame for the misconduct had largely been focused on the sheriff’s department and former Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas.
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