Ethical Malpractice in the Orange County's Prosecution Office

Being a prosecutor is an extremely important ethical responsibility. Prosecutors are supposed to be the moral compasses in the judicial process because they decide whether or not a person deserves to be charged with a crime and how much they should be charged. District attorneys are either appointed by the chief executive of the jurisdiction or elected by the voters in that jurisdiction. The prosecutors at the Orange County Districts office worked hard to get that position and instead of being grateful, they took advantage of it. The Prosecutors in the Orange County District Attorney’s office lost sight of their ethical duty and mishandled the physical

evidence, committing prosecutorial misconduct and therefore dishonoring the

The Orange County district attorney’s office was not a small office, it had around 250 prosecutors and all of them got disqualified. The Orange County district attorney’s office used the horizontal model of prosecution, meaning that “one attorney or a group of attorneys may be responsible for all initial appearances, another for preliminary hearings, and others for arraignments, and so on” (Criminal Courts, 135). This way Kaur 2

the large office can handle numerous cases efficiently. This is why all 250 prosecutors were

disqualified. They did what they wanted without thinking about the consequences their decisions would lead to. All they cared about was winning and if winning meant not handing over exculpatory evidence so an innocent person had to go to jail then so be it, as long they won. The alleged misconduct of the Orange County district attorney’s office goes all the way back to the 1980’s. In the 1980’s, there were two defendants on trial. One defendant was to be executed and the other a long sentence. They got the sentence because of various jailhouse informants. Even though the stories that the jailhouse informants told were conflicting, they

The jailhouse informant, Leslie Vernon White, later on said in an interview in 1989 about how he made up the confessions and used them to get himself shorter sentences. So it is possible that the people that the prosecutors sent to prison may have been innocent. The defense lawyer who found out about the misconduct went through thousands of pages of records to prove that the Sheriff’s office was doing something unconstitutional by putting the jailhouse informants next to high profile prisoners to get confessions out of them. The Sheriff’s office knew that it was prohibited, but they did it anyway. They made deals with the jailhouse snitches to get confessions when the defendant had a lawyer and were not supposed to be interrogated by police officers let alone by a snitch. In Dekraai’s case it was suspected that a deputy had purposely put him in a cell next to a known jailhouse snitch to get a confession out of him which is illegal. Prosecutors are supposed to work with law enforcement to develop witnesses, not get illegal confessions. Kaur 3

At first the District Attorney’s office was only going to be ruled as negligent, but