When then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris started a criminal investigation into corruption inside Orange County’s jails in 2015 local activists and attorneys hoped it would show the breadth of a scandal that engulfed the Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office and may have affected countless court cases. Four years later ,after an investigation into the misuse of informants inside the jails came to an anticlimactic end with no explanation and no charges filed, the same advocates were left asking a much simpler question: What happened? Though the scandal started a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and led to retrials for dozens of defendants, including convicted murderers, the unexplained conclusion of the state inquiry has stirred frustration that many key players will escape accountability, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Harris’ successor, Xavier Becerra, has refused to discuss specifics about the inquiry or explain how a perjury investigation came up empty even after a Superior Court judge ruled that two deputies “intentionally lied or willfully withheld material evidence” about the misuse of informants at a murder trial. Since the inquiry’s end, law enforcement leaders in Orange County and attorneys involved in cases tied to the scandal have spoken about the tactics used by state investigators during the four-year review, raising serious questions about how thorough the attorney general’s office was. Assistant County Public Defender Scott Sanders said there are no records indicating that the investigation carried on past late 2016. “It’s been pretty hard to sit here watching them pretend like they had an ongoing investigation when they were done in 2016,” Sanders said. “All of them knew. It’s not like Sen. Harris didn’t know. It’s not like Becerra didn’t know they were perpetuating a scam.”