Appearance alert: on Northwest Liberty News talking probate abuse in Orange County, California
We also talked about how an Orange County judge may have withheld a lot of evidence when he was a prosecutor.
I was back on with James White on Northwest Liberty News. This time we spoke about my ongoing investigation of Orange County probate.
Since we covered a lot of ground I’ve already covered on the Substack, I’m going to focus on the end of the broadcast.
Before that, below are a couple videos about the Orange County probate Mafia.
At the end of the broadcast, Jim and I talked about a scandal involving current Orange County probate judge, Ebrahim Beytiah.
Judge Baytieh recently issued an important ruling in Marty Adair’s probate matter. He “dropped the hammer” on several members of the probate mafia.
That does not excuse the behavior alleged in a motion from when Judge Baytieh was a prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
Here is part of a story from Davis Vanguard.
The motion alleges that prosecution team “concealing numerous items of evidence and producing false and misleading evidence in order to secure Paul Smith’s 2010 conviction for special circumstances murder” but then more remarkably carried out “a fourteen-year cover up of historic proportions.”
Sanders alleges, “The acts described below have irredeemably eroded Smith’s right to a fair re-trial, unfairly delayed Smith’s re-trial, and eviscerated any reasonable belief that all favorable and material evidence will ever be disclosed to this defendant. The only appropriate remedy is dismissal.”
At the center of this motion and these allegations are former Senior Assistant Orange County DA Ebrahim Baytieh, now a judge.
Sanders told the Vanguard, “What’s extraordinary about what occurred here is how far [Baytieh] was willing to go to keep this misconduct hidden.”
The allegations go well beyond the actions of Bahtieh, and Sanders in the motion names numerous investigators and high ranking sheriff’s in the Orange County Sheriff’s Office who participate in what he alleges as a criminal conspiracy referring to the trial prosecutor and the law enforcement personnel that participated in the case investigation leading up to Smith’s 2010 conviction.
“The problem is then once a prosecutor joins forces with his investigators to hide evidence from a defendant, it becomes disclosure disaster in the making,” he told the Vanguard. “Here [Baytieh] was required to turn over the misconduct committed by investigator in our case to every defendant who had one of these deceptive investigators on the witness stand. “
But Sanders charges, “For more than a decade he refused to do that and the result is nearly a hundred cases were infected with disclosure violations. Nearly half of defendant were facing murder charges.”
The Voice of OC also has coverage of this scandal.
Ebrahim Baytieh, a prosecutor who District Attorney Todd Spitzer said he fired in Feb. 2022 over his failure to properly disclose informants, has since been elected an Orange County Superior Court Judge, and is facing new questions over his role in the informant program.
A 424-page motion filed by Asst. OC Public Defender Scott Sanders on Thursday alleges Baytieh violated the rights of one of the people he prosecuted while working as an assistant District Attorney by using information from interviews with informants who spoke to defendants without their lawyers present, and then covered it up for 14 years.
The motion also alleges Baytieh failed to properly oversee the confidential informant program and could throw nearly 100 cases into question.
Baytieh was unavailable for comment on Thursday afternoon.
A Brady violation comes from the US Supreme Court case Brady Vs. Maryland. In that case, prosecutors withheld important- or exculpatory- documents from the defendant, John Brady.
A Brady violation refers to any incident in which prosecutors withhold exculpatory evidence. Since prosecutors generally don’t get caught doing this, we only know of Brady violations in cases where they screw up.
Even so, former federal judge Alex Kozinski said, “there is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it.”
This is an evolving story, and I will continue to follow it.
Postscript:
Check out the previous articles on the series on Orange County. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25. Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Part 31, Part 33, Part 34, Part 35, Part 36, Part 37, Part 38, Part 39, Part 40, and Part 41.
The OC probate Mafia is on the ropes, but they are not out. Please consider contributing to the Orange County fundraiser so I can continue this investigation.