All The New Questions We Have About The Orange County Jail Informant Scandal

Carol Ann Morris, the assistant director of the support services division of the OCSD, took the stand on Thursday. Morris is the author of the agency’s records retention schedules, which determine when OCSD can legally destroy records.

She described embarking on the herculean task of revising record retention policy for the agency in 2013. Most divisions hadn’t updated their policies since 2008, but she said updating the jail division’s retention policies was particularly challenging because they hadn’t been changed since 1979.

In August 2014, after about 15 months of work, Morris submitted her new record retention schedules to the Orange County Board of Supervisors. The board must approve all new record retention policies, she explained in court. Three months later, the jail division requested she add three additional categories to her policy: “confidential informant files,” “source of information” and “special handling jacket or file.” The jail requested the ability to destroy any records they maintained in those categories after just three years. The county supervisors approved the new record policy in December of that year. 

Thus as the county’s jailhouse informant scandal was exploding in 2014, a new record destruction policy was authorized. The policy allowed OCSD to destroy records that, according to testimony, documenting informant history for the previous 30 years. 

Moreover, the three-year interval of the new policy coincided with records that would seemingly exist around the same time that Dekraai was jailed and an informant was allegedly planted next to him to glean incriminating evidence from him. 

Sanders, who has unearthed damning evidence of a jail informant program’s existence, ordered OCSD to turn over those policies to the court in 2016. However, the new record retention policy was never disclosed. Instead, the old policy from 1979 was turned over.

Morris testified on Thursday that she learned in 2012 that some staff within the jail thought they could rely on the “Jail Operations Manual,” an internal rulebook for jail staff, to provide guidelines for evidence destruction. But the county’s board of supervisors hadn’t authorized those guidelines, meaning they could be illegal. 

An alternative set of unofficial record retention policies was circulated to jail staff sometime that year, Morris said. She said she immediately alerted OCSD commanders that these rules were not official and should not be followed. She testified that she doesn’t know what action was taken to make sure records were not destroyed.

Further, it became illegal to destroy jail records in 2009, when the U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation into county jails.

Sanders also questioned Morris about evidence of document destruction described in the special handling log. When defense attorney showed some of these entries to Morris on Thursday, she said she was “alarmed” by the notion that these deputies were destroying any records.

This week’s hearings came just days after “60 Minutes” aired a segment on the informant scandal.  In the segment, OC District Attorney Tony Rackauckas whose office faces three investigations over the use of jail informants said informants probably shouldn’t believed. Still, his office has been using jailhouse snitches to help secure convictions for decades, presenting them as credible witnesses with credible evidence.