A farewell party for the public defender who changed the Orange County policy

Aerosmith, the Eagles and the Rolling Stones sung of the speakers of the vacation bar in Santa Ana last Thursday.

The gift table was near the entrance. The pizzas and the cheese cake were seated back. In a photo booth, the guests caught panels with all kinds of cheesy jokes, about a retirement party: having fun is my new job. Always the boss. Goodbye at 9-5.

It looked like any other farewell Boomer. But when the lights were sized for a tribute to the film at Scott Sanders, even a foreigner could assume that the man of the time was not an ordinary office jockey.

The long -standing public defender of Orange County changed the local history in 2013 when he presented to a judge of evidence that the Sheriff deputies had illegally used prison molds for decades.

Although prosecutors and police have long used prison informants, they cannot be exploited once the defendant has been charged and has a lawyer. Sanders said that the District OC prosecutor’s office had violated this constitutional protection several times. The prosecutors, for their part, ridiculed Sanders in court and in the press as a desperate hack willing to lie to defend Scott Dekraai, a customer accused of having massacred eight people in a Seal beach fair.

But Sanders was right.

The judge, Thomas Goethals – a former homicide prosecutor – withdrew the DA office of the Dekraai affair, saying that he did not think that the office could pursue him ethically. In 59 other cases, accusations have been abandoned, reversed convictions or sorrows have been reduced due to what Sanders discovered in the Snich OC scandal.

The sheriff of the OC Sandra Hutchens decided not to request a re -election in 2018 in the consequences of the scandal, the same year as Tony Rackauckas – District prosecutor since 1999 and a Titan in the legal world OC – lost his candidacy for a sixth mandate by a huge margin.

“What he did is a monumental type of inclination – a legal earthquake,” said Jack Earley, an OC public defender in the 1970s who is the most famous for representing the Jolla Socialite Betty Broderick in the murders of his ex -husband and his new wife. “And Scott arrived by doing the hard and dirty work that a great public defender does.”

Applause and AWS broke out as soon as the film’s homage started. There were photos of a baby’s sandplage during his first day of work, fresh from stays working for the Peace Corps and for lawyers representing the fishermen affected by the dark tide of Exxon Valdez. There were videos of bowling nights and rap battles with colleagues. The Whoops were particularly noisy for editorial caricatures featuring Sanders and for the screenshots of the headlines from across the country while its national profile got up.

The biggest applause came for the last image: Sanders’ new business card for the private practice it begins.

More than 100 people piled up in the stifling vacation bar to celebrate it, while the hipster regulars of the establishment looked at the punch. His family was there, of course, including a son who will be employed for the office of the Public Defender of the County of Los Angeles. Many participants were current or former defenders or public judges, who all refused to speak to me in the file.

There were also people like Paul Wilson, who lost his wife in the massacre of Seal Beach and initially hated Sanders until the SNich scandal was real. The two then talked about their unlikely friendship during the conferences of victims’ rights across southern California, and Wilson plans to help Sanders, as he can.

“May God bless him from being a warrior,” said Wilson. “Someone who is honest and who works in the bone like Scott, I want it in my team.”

Matt Ferner was also there. He was a former journalist who covered the Snitch scandal for the Huffington Post.

“Scott’s work has changed the trajectory of my life,” said Ferner. “He was patient with my questions and courageous with what he sought to prove. This is an example of the way of living and working, several times. ”

Dressed in a football jersey who said “OCPD” and number 32, to signify how many years he worked as a public defender, Sanders reached all love. When he did not squeeze people or hugged his hand, he was pulled on the photomaton.

“I’m lucky, so many good people are here,” said the 58 -year -old man in one of his rare calm moments. “It was great to see all this support, but it also hurts. I’m not going to have them day after day. ”

Suddenly, the Goethals cut between us. His retirement on March 31, after seven years as an appeal judge, he managed to fall on the last day of Sanders as a public defender.

“Write a good one about it,” said Goethals, laughing, “because he’s one of the voucher.”

My wife was also there so that we could both pay tribute to Sanders. He is a long -standing client of his restaurant by Santa Ana, Alta Baja Market, to the point that I know his current order (Eskish salad and water with ice in a jar of refrigerated mason), and my wife affectionately calls it “Pinche Scott” for having caused so many problems. He often draws himself to a rear table for hours with his laptop and documents of documents, stopping only to take calls outside while my wife’s workers keep an eye on her belongings.

I had a seat on the line at the forefront of the SNITCH scandal in progress through the cartoons I ordered and the stories I edited for OC Weekly. What Sanders has done – to knock out a popular sheriff And The district prosecutor in a county of law and order – was unprecedented and gave progressive activists a little hope that the County of Orange changed for the best. In the process, Sanders has become something rare in OC politics: a hero in good faith.

“The first time I met him, I said to myself:” Oh my God, it was Scott Sanders “, said Rose Angulo, who joined the OC public defender’s office in 2017 after a passage as a federal public defender. She wore a button that said “Scott Sanders for DA 2022”, a gag campaign that her colleagues created that year. “He would draw the attention of media walls, but he always had the same level of dedication to cases that had no news, and dedication to the rest of us. Until the end, he had the same energy as our clerics.”

While my wife posed in the Photoaton with Sanders, I caught his boyfriend from the Alta Baja lunch, the public defender Brian Reznick.

“We will miss it the most leadership by example,” said the 17 -year -old veteran. “He would make a crime trial, but would take the time to discuss My case with me. He didn’t have to do that.

No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t hang on a few minutes with Sanders. So I finally did what everyone was doing: caught it and I went to the Photoaton.

Until the end, Sanders obtained results. Earlier this year, the OC Sheriff Department Office and the District Prosecutor’s Office concluded an agreement with the United States Ministry of Justice to reform their use of prison informants. Last month, a San Diego judge called the actions of the former OC prosecutor, Ebrahim Baytieh – now judge of the OC Superior Court – “reprehensible” in a murder case which had been transferred to San Diego because of the Snich scandal.

These developments convinced Sanders that his work on the SNITCH scandal was finally, really finished – and it was time to start putting the county of the, where he has lived for decades, on his anti -corruption radar.

I asked Sanders how he had planned to spend his first days not to be a public defender.

A giant smile spread on his face.

“I will volunteer with the office for a week. Then I will find the most difficult cases I can find – murder, death penalty. ”

Did he make a difference? He nodded vigorously.

“We have instilled the fear that if you cheat, you will be discovered at some point,” said Sanders. “You can’t hide. It’s no time you can be comfortable cheating.”

Someone interrupted us. Sanders has returned to the Photoaton, resembling the happiest guy in the world.