Orange County’s police faced a hurdle to solving a crime from 1998 when they were attempting to accuse teen Arthur Carmona of an American juice bar robbery. The hurdle was that there were no useful witnesses. The cops noted that the robber wore an LA Lakers cap at the time, and that Carmona lacked a hat. Then, they retrieved that basketball team cap without any connection to Carmona, put it on the teenager’s head and got evidence that landed him in jail. However, the teenager was exonerated a couple of years later.
Carmona’s saga still seems old news, but local law enforcement was willing to create false outcomes two years before. That was known partly since sheriff’s deputies manipulated cases without constitutional strategies to secretly aid prosecutors in winning courtroom battles. Over the four years before 2019, disclosures of that kind of cheating damaged twenty major felony-related cases at the least, many of which involved murder.
The above-mentioned scandal caught the deputies who used jailhouse informers to illegal and dubious confessions of pretrial inmates. A 2019 mess in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department involved a different type of government wrongdoing against defendants. In 2018, there was solid evidence that deputies unlawfully recorded and got access to telephone calls between those kinds of prisoners and their legal trial representatives.
Deputies insisted that the monitoring of calls was an innocent action, and that valuable details were not used for their unseen benefit. Anyhow, when this story came out on OC Weekly, the scandal had not disappeared. OCSD alongside GTL officials offered not only shifting explanations but also conflicting figures for the illegal intrusions. That was among the problems involving GTL, OCSD’s advance phone service supplier for inmates.
Even after a year since the scandal started, there were no outsiders who knew how far law enforcement monitored those calls, a not-so-accidental situation. Expecting that the Judge of the Superior Court of Orange County, Gregg Prickett, would allow for running out the clock before commoners learn what happened, an obfuscation- and delay-inducing strategy was used. Tellingly, OCSD’s representative, namely the Office of County Counsel, and GTL took action as if those responsible were the defense attorneys who demanded answers regarding their privileged communication’s surveillance.
Office of the Public Defender members, such as Scott Sanders and Sara Ross, made a strong effort to solve the mysteries. They repeatedly demanded ex-prosecutor Prickett make GTL’s and OCSD’s officials, who were subpoenaed for records, give evidence as witnesses. That entailed the fact that officials would need to respond to questions from legal professionals under oath. Prickett might not have ruled out the above-mentioned move, but the judge seemed resistant to it back then.
At an August 2019 hearing in OC’s Harbor Court, Sanders and Ross were expecting to convince the judge that greater document transparency and an evidential hearing were needed. To strengthen their case, Sanders and Ross filed independent expert Scott Jordan’s sworn declaration. In 2019, Jordan taught Computer Science to students at California’s institution known as UCI, and he is an Electrical Engineering PhD holder. He also worked in the capacity of the Chief Technologist at the FCC.
He studied the claims that came from GTL, particularly the ones about the act of asserting big gaps in call monitoring to the OC PD’s offices. With the so-called Poisson Process Model, Jordan determined that GTL was unlikely to give an accurate account of events about a key telephone number. In Jordan’s own words, it was virtually not possible.
He also described the story regarding the absence of the monitoring of calls to another phone number as ‘implausible’.
