County Empowers Watchdog to Oversee District Attorney's Office

By PAUL ANDERSON

The Orange County Board of Supervisors today narrowly approved an ordinance that expands a watchdog office with oversight of the sheriff’s department to include several other county agencies.

By a 3-2 margin, the board voted to expand the Office of Independent Review to also oversee the Probation Department, District Attorney and Public Defender’s offices and the Social Services Agency.

Supervisors Shawn Nelson and Michelle Steel cast the dissenting votes.

“There’s unanimous agreement this office has failed,” Nelson said of the OIR. “The original solution didn’t work, so let’s give them more responsibility and that’ll fix it. That’s a mistake.”

Nelson argued that it makes more sense to get the office running correctly as an overseer of the sheriff’s department before looking to expand it.

Supervisor Andrew Do, who led the effort to expand the OIR with board Chairman Todd Spitzer, said the office failed because of who was in charge, not because of the way it was structured.

Do indicated the newly expanded office would ward off a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the county’s prosecutors and sheriff’s officials due to allegations of misconduct in the way jailhouse informants are used.

“The Department of Justice is looking into coming and looking at how we run our jail and our offices and court and the prosecutor’s office,” Do said. “Now that has elevated the need for oversight even more ... The last thing you want is the Department of Justice to come in with a consent decree and watch us like a hawk. That would increase the cost to run our business and it would be burdensome to have somebody monitoring our system.”

Larry Yellin, president of the union that represents the county’s lawyers, said Do was wrong about federal prosecutors taking an interest in investigating the District Attorney’s Office.

Yellin, who is a senior deputy district attorney, added that the Orange County Attorneys Association will now legally challenge the move.

“I’m not surprised, but I’m still disappointed in the board majority,” Yellin told City News Service. “We’ve already told the board we would take any legal action necessary, but now we are forced to move in that direction.”

Union officials believe that any change to the OIR involving oversight of the attorneys has to be part of a collective bargaining agreement, and that the supervisors have no legal right to just implement the changes without that change in the contract.

Steel has objected to the added cost to taxpayers in an expanded OIR and has asked staff to investigate the expense.

Spitzer noted that last week, the supervisors spent several hours behind closed doors getting up to speed on potential litigation the county faces with the misconduct allegations. UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky recently wrote a letter, signed by multiple Southland legal leaders, asking for the DOJ to investigate local prosecutors and sheriff’s officials.

“We spent over four hours getting briefed on recent cases that have flooded the front pages of our papers every single day -- allegations of jailhouse informant misuse, allegations of deputy misuse, allegations of deputy sheriffs invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination refusing to testify, prosecutors alleged in engaging in misconduct ...,” Spitzer said.

“This is our role as (the) Orange County Board of Supervisors -- to know what is going on, to implement policy, to make sure abuses don’t occur and to implement reforms to ensure that the highest degree of integrity in the criminal justice system,” he said.

Several supervisors have complained in the past that Stephen Connolly, when he was running the office, did not keep them up to date on misconduct allegations and that their primary source of information were news agencies.

But when the supervisors threatened to cut off the financial spigot in Connolly’s office, the DOJ expressed some concern. Justice Department officials have been investigating the sheriff’s department since the beating death of an inmate in 2006, but were close to wrapping up that review.

The supervisors backed down and agreed to let Connolly’s contract go month-to-month. They also decided today to pay former federal prosecutor Michael Gennaco $10,000 monthly while he helps recruit someone to fill the post of executive director of the OIR.

Connolly will stay on the payroll on a month-to-month basis at a cost of $17,500 per month.

The expanded agency will “review systemic issues and specific incidents which may identify systemic issues with regard to the performance and operations” of the various departments, according to a staff report. The newly expanded watchdog will also “have the same access to confidential records as the Office of County Counsel.”

The OIR will “provide periodic status reports to the Board of Supervisors and relevant county department heads and regular feedback to the board regarding ongoing and completed projects,” according to the staff report.

The OIR will also “conduct substantive, systemic audits of relevant county department functions...(and) review specific incidents implicating significant risk and/or liability to the county and participate in the development of corrective actions,” the staff report says.

The OIR’s reviews, however, “may (not) be used as the basis for taking punitive actions against an employee,” according to officials.

City News Service