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The Aerosmiths, Eagles and Rolling Stones rang out of speakers at a Santa Ana vacation bar last Thursday.
The gift table was located near the entrance. The pizza and cheesecake were sitting against my back. In the photo booth, guests grabbed the signs with all sorts of horny surpos quips for the retirement party. Enjoying is my new job. Still a boss. Goodbye to 9-5.
It seemed like a breakup from the other boomers. However, when the light dimmed due to the film’s homage to Scott Sanders, even strangers could speculate that the man of that time was not a regular office jockey.
The longtime Orange County official defender changed local history in 2013 when he presented the judges with evidence that sheriff’s deputies had illegally used prison snitches for decades.
Prosecutors and law enforcement have long used prison informants, but when the accused is charged and there is an attorney, they cannot tap. Sanders alleged that the OC District Attorney’s Office repeatedly deliberately violated this constitutional protection. Prosecutors ridden Sanders on their maskers to their side to protect their client Scott Dekrai, who was accused of massacreing eight people at Seal Beach Salon.
But Sanders was right.
Judge Thomas Gettals (former murder prosecutor) has removed the DA’s office from the Dekraai case and said he does not believe the office can pursue it ethically. In 59 other cases, the charges were dropped, convictions were overturned and sentences were reduced due to what Sanders discovered in the OC Snitch scandal.
OC Sheriff Sandra Hutchens decided not to seek re-election in 2018 in the aftermath of the scandal, the same year that Tony Ruckaccus, the first district attorney since 1999 and OC Legal’s world titan, lost his sixth term bid by a big margin.
“What he did was a monumental kind of tilt – a legal earthquake,” said Jack Ely, the OC’s public defense attorney in the 1970s, most famously representing La Jolla Social’s Betty Broderick in the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife. “And Scott got there by doing the hard, dirty work that great public defenders do.”
Applause and AWS exploded as soon as the film began. On the first day of work there was a fresh first day of work from a stint working for the Peace Corps, and a photo of a lawyer representing the fishermen affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. There was a video from Bowling Night and a rap battle with a colleague. Hoop was particularly loud for compilation comics featuring Sanders and grabbing headline screens from across the country when his national profile rose.
The biggest applause came to the final image. This is Sanders’ new business card for private practice he is starting out.
Sanders speaks during his 2019 appearance at Irvine.
(Allen J. Scheven/Los Angeles Times)
Over 100 people packed into a slow vacation bar to celebrate him while the hipster regulars at the facility looked oddly. Of course, his family was there. We included my son who goes to the store clerk at the LA County Alternative Public Defense Office. Many of the attendees were current or former public advocates or judges, almost all of whom refused to speak to me on the record.
There were people like Paul Wilson. Paul Wilson lost his wife in the Seal Beach massacre and was the first to dislike Sanders until he realized that Snitch’s scandal was real. The two continue to talk about their unlikely friendship at the Southern California Victims Rights Conference, with Wilson planning to support Sanders.
“God blesses him for being a warrior,” Wilson said. “A person who’s honest and works in the bones like Scott, I want him for my team.”
Matt Ferner was there too. He is a former reporter who covered the Huffington Post snitch scandal.
“Scott’s work changed the trajectory of my life,” Ferner said. “He was patient with my questions and brave enough to find out he tried to prove. He’s an example of how to live and work many times.”
Dressed in a football jersey that read “OCPD” and No. 32, Sanders enjoyed all his love, meaning the year he worked as a public defender. He was being pulled into the photo booth when he wasn’t hugging people or holding hands.
“There are a lot of good people here because they feel lucky,” the 58-year-old said in one of his few quiet moments. “It was great to see all this support, but it hurts too. I’m not going to spend another day.”
Suddenly, Getar cut between us. His retirement on March 31, seven years after as an appeals judge, happened to fall to Sanders’ final day as a public defense counsel.
“Write something good about him,” Getars laughed and told me, “Because he is one of the good things.”
My wife was there too, so we both managed to pay tribute to Sanders. He is a longtime customer of her Santa Ana restaurant, Altabaha Market, and to the point where I know his current orders (Esquaite salad with ice on a cold mason jar), my wife lovingly calls him “pinch scott.” He frequently punctures the back table for hours on laptops and document mounds, stopping just to call outside while his wife’s workers keep an eye on his thing.
I had the front row seating in the snitch scandal that unfolded through the comics I commissioned and the stories I edited for OC Weekly. What Sanders did — knocking out the popular sheriff and district attorney in the county of law and order — was unprecedented and gave much hope to progressive activists that Orange County is changing for the better. In the process, Sanders has become something unusual in OC politics: a genuine hero.
“When I first met him, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s Scott Sanders,'” Rose Anglo said. She wore a button that said, “Scott Sanders for DA 2022,” a gag campaign his colleagues created that year. “He would get a barrier to media attention, but he had a level of commitment to cases where he had not always been made to news, and was committed to the rest of us. Until the end, he had the same energy as our legal clerk.”
While my wife posed in the photo booth with Sanders, I caught up with his Alta Baja lunch buddy, official defender Brian Reznick.
“We’re going to miss his leadership the most,” said the 17-year veteran. “He was on a felony trial and he took the time to discuss my case with me. He didn’t need to do that.”
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it with Sanders for a few minutes. So I finally did what everyone else was doing: grabbing him and darting into the photo booth.
Finally, Sanders had the results. Earlier this year, the OC Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform the use of prison informants. Last month, a San Diego judge called the actions of former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now an OC Superior Court judge, “condemnable” in the murder case that was transferred to San Diego due to the Snitch scandal.
These developments convinced Sanders that his work on the Snitch scandal was in the end, really finished. And it’s time for him to start putting LA County, where he lived for decades, on his anti-rot radar.
I asked Sanders how he planned to spend his first day not a public defender.
A huge smirk spread across his face.
“I’m going to volunteer in the office for a week. Then I’m going to find the most challenging case I can find – murder, the death penalty.”
Did he make a difference? He nodded violently.
“We have instilled the fear that if you cheate, you will one day find it,” Sanders replied. “It can’t be hidden. There’s no time to make cheating comfortable.”
Someone interrupted us. Sanders returned to the photo booth and looked like the happiest man in the world.
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