Before allowing cops to answer questions from the witness box about potential crimes, prosecutors typically elicit their employment experience to establish credibility. Most police officers remember the time of all promotions, even in careers spanning multiple decades. However, in 2018, in the courtroom in Little Saigon, Cyril Foster, the Deputy of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, seemed to have a total memory loss in a case involving Jordan Prinzi.
Right from his initial court appearances, Prinzi did not appear contentious. As the lone witness of deputy DA Sarah Rahman, Foster testified at the preliminary hearing in March 2018 and remembered his apprehension of Prinzi for selling heroin at Vagabond Inn in Costa Mesa. However, trouble happened as the deputy could not recall the four simple sentences that come in the so-called Miranda warning. Foster apologized as he said that he was a bit nervous.
The reason for the angst of the deputy was no mystery: the one who represented Prinzi in the case was Scott Sanders. For the uninitiated, Sanders uncovered the jailhouse-informant scandal, which exposed corruption in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the Office of the Orange County District Attorney. Eager to start cross-examination, the lawyer believed that it was not a case that could be easily settled as Rahman suggested. Foster also appreciated his fortune up to that day.
Before looking into narcotics activity, Foster worked in the Special Handling Unit of OCSD, which was at the base of the aforesaid scandal. Sanders successfully dealt with the five-year scheme of Sheriff-Coroner Sandra Hutchens and DA Tony Rackauckas of derailing him. Besides, Sanders showed that deputies breached the supreme rights guaranteed by America’s constitution of charged and pretrial defendants as well as committed perjury and concealed exculpatory evidence. Foster was on the brink of getting grilled in the Supreme Court as Judge Thomas Goethals announced that he did not have to hear more corruption evidence to realize that it existed.
OCDA and OCSD officials failed to mask their delight as Sanders got a transfer in February 2018 from central courthouse duties to deal with the operations of his office at the West Court branch. While the officials hoped that they would finally go beyond his reach, they were wrong.
In the course of cross-examination, lawyer Sanders asked questions that urged Foster to remember his general promotion days. The deputy played dumb, pretending that he failed to recall the key moments of his career from 2016 to 2018. Foster said that he did not realize whether he had been in specific units for even seven years. The deputy had difficulty remembering basic duties for assignments. The quadragenariandeputy testified in only five heroin trade cases but could not remember when those trials occurred or who the four defendants were in under a year.
Foster, his attorney, and OCSD leaders were not too happy as Judge Jeremy D. Dolnick of OC Superior Court let Sanders briefly investigate a scam of the agency. In the scam, the agency placed erstwhile Special Handling Unit deputies under IA (internal affairs) investigations to convince both the US Justice Department and the Office of the California Attorney General that the OC Sheriff’s Department was tackling its illegal-snitch actions by targeting rogue officers from that unit. The deputy relied on his memory issue as an escape route, saying that his memory had deprived him of his capability to state whether or when the fake internal affairs probe had ended.
Sanders established the memory issues of Foster before making the deputy concede that he went to raid Prinzi’s property without a digital recorder and did not consider using his recorder application. Foster insisted that he had forgotten to demand the phones or recorders of the five officers who accompanied him to that riad. In his testimony, Foster stated that he committed a mistake as he was pushed to make an explanation.
Nevertheless, Foster made a false report that outlined the most important thing to elevate the case of the government from the offense of simple possession as he claimed that Prinzi accepted selling drugs after getting Mirandized.
Sanders did not believe the story of the deputy on the basis of his own probe. Sanders confronted the deputy over how he managed to draft a detailed report of five pages hours afterward without any records or notes. The lawyer asked the deputy whether it was all down to his memory, and the latter answered him in the affirmative.
A fair law enforcement system allows defense attorneys and prosecutors to not only explore the trustworthiness of witnesses but also expose any past moral turpitude acts that perhaps undermine their allegations. That fact drove more than one Special Handling deputy to mention the Fifth Amendment as they refused to give testimony in several criminal cases. While the deputies had committed perjury, Rackauckas overlooked their transgressions as his office gained from the lies.
Judge Cormac Carney of California’s District Court opposed the attempts of federal prosecutors to keep the defense from questioning Bryan Larson, their witness, about his part in the scandal. As the defense called Larson onto the witness box, he invoked his entitlement against self-incrimination as per the Fifth Amendment in a California murder case. Carney observed that Larson was ready to testify as the government called him in that case. So, Carney rhetorically said how Larson could keep it away from even the jury.
The Office of the US Attorney did not want the counsel of Joseph Govey, a party in that case, to question the witness regarding the misdeeds of the Special Handling Unit and did not yield records related to those misdeeds. For fear of a negative ruling, those prosecutors discarded thousands of pages about Scott before the trial scheduled for February that year. An unamused Carney then dismissed the minor heroin case.
It showed how many documents law enforcement kept away from public defender Sanders, who had to fight for some of those pages for years. In 2016, DA Rackauckas announced discovering a big, buried OCSD snitch record cache and assured people that he would follow his duties to hand over evidence that favored defendants. As per OCDA, those records contained further proof of the secret, courtroom perjury, and illegal acts of the deputies.
