Fate Of OC Housewives Son Remains In Question After Taped Calls

ORANGE COUNTY, CA - Though he was charged with three counts of attempted murder in a shooting spree from 2016, an Orange County Superior Court judge is considering a bid to dismiss the case due to "outrageous governmental misconduct" in recording inmate/attorney phone calls.

Joshua Waring has long-pleaded his innocence from inside the Orange County Jail.

Waring, who first acted as his own attorney in his case, was recorded on "hundreds of calls" according to his current legal council Joel Garson.

Garson argued in a motion that his client should be dropped due to the recorded phone calls, and the violation of attorney - client privilege.

These allegations led the Orange County Sheriff's Department jail phone call provider, GTEL, to acknowledge a glitch in "dropping hundreds of attorney phone numbers that were supposed to be blocked from recordings," City News Service said. More probes are ongoing to determine if other inmate rights were violated.

Orange County prosecutors John Maxfield and Cindy Nichols argued that Waring's phone calls that were accessed by authorities did not contain any information that related to his case from Nov. 29 to Dec. 28, 2016, when Warning acted as his own attorney.

They argued in court papers that "in some of those calls, (Waring) discussed his case with his father, his mother, his girlfriend, his grandma, a man named Julian, and another man named Christian -- none of whom are lawyers and none of whom are currently listed as witnesses in this case."
Maxfield also argued that Waring did not raise issues while making the calls and that he did not assert his rights as his own attorney.

"Defendant failed to make sure his phone calls were unmonitored if that was what he desired," the prosecutors wrote. "Defendant was ultimately responsible. Defendant, while in pro per status, was in charge of his own case... Defendant never made any request to have a number added to the GTEL database so any phone conversations to that number would not be monitored or recorded. He never made any request to unmonitored collect phone calls."

In Tuesday's hearing, Maxfield argued that Costa Mesa police Detective George Maridakis did not listen to Waring's calls until after the defendant's first preliminary hearing in 2016.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Jonathan Fish asked Maxfield if he had concerns that there appears to be no process in place to guarantee that inmates without an attorney can get unmonitored phone calls despite court orders to that effect.

Maxfield said he believed "there are mechanisms within (the court orders)... for a defendant to follow up and take corrective steps" if the inmate believes calls were being improperly recorded. Inmates must ensure that their calls must relate only to their case, the prosecutor said.

"It's really incumbent on the defendant to take ownership," Maxfield argued. Otherwise, he said, sheriff's deputies are in a tough spot having to decide between safety and stopping a defendant from abusing the phone calls to commit crimes and the rights of the accused.

"Otherwise you're going to have a blank check... just declare you're pro per and know that any call from the jail that you make will not be recorded," Maxfield said.

Garson said in court filings that requests from some inmates to receive unmonitored calls "fell on deaf ears."
He also argued that for an inmate to ask for unmonitored calls, he or she would have to first know they were being recorded. Sheriff's deputies have testified in the case that there were no procedures in place to even handle requests for unmonitored calls, Garson argued.

Garson said he believed the prior prosecutor on the case, Aleta Bryant, did commit misconduct in the case. Garson argued that Maridakis "double checked" with Bryant on the day Waring went forward with his case without an attorney to see if the calls could continue to be recorded.

"She doesn't stop him from doing it and he continues to brief her on it," Garson said. "The only reasonable inference is he was listening to (the recorded calls) for defense strategy. He didn't turn the volume down."

Even if they didn't access the recorded calls until after the preliminary hearing, it hardly matters because it would affect Waring's defense in the trial, Garson said.

Garson said that perhaps the only way to fix the problem is to have someone in the sheriff's department assigned full-time to monitoring the calls of inmates representing themselves and to turn off the recording or send the information to a judge to determine if it's privileged information. The system in place has deputies rotating in and out of the job every six months and there's a likelihood of ignorance of the law, Garson said.

The system could work the way investigators handle wire taps -- they just click off the recorder when the talk steers away from the issue covered by a court-ordered wiretap, Garson said outside of court.

Garson also has taken issue with a system that records requests from the inmates for case law and other legal information from the law library. In the Waring case, if a prosecutor accessed those records, they could tell what the defendant's legal theory would be in the case.

Fish said he would issue a ruling by next Tuesday.

City News Service, Patch editor Ashley Ludwig contributed to this report.

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