The scandal that scrambled Orange County’s justice system, upending dozens of murder cases, began late on a Friday night in a legal office that formerly was a morgue.

It was April 2012, long past quitting time, when Orange County Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders found a notation in a police report that would ultimately turn county law enforcement on its ear. A notation that many, if not most, defense lawyers would have overlooked.

Sanders and paralegal Cathy Ware were digging through piles of investigative reports on mass killer Scott Dekraai, who months earlier shot dead eight people at a beauty salon in Seal Beach. They found a notation that Dekraai had made incriminating statements in casual conversation with jail inmate “Fernando P.”

The inmate’s name sounded familiar to Sanders. Then it hit him: He remembered seeing inmate “F Perez” listed as a witness in another case he was working on, the defense of Daniel Wozniak, a Costa Mesa community theater actor accused of slaughtering two friends.

“Holy (expletive) (expletive),” Sanders, 58, remembers yelling to the mostly empty office.

Sanders was immediately convinced that “Fernando P” and “F Perez” were the same inmate, and that it was no coincidence that he had casual conversations with two of the county’s most notorious murder defendants. The inmate had to be working for police.

At that moment, Sanders believed he had stumbled on an organized effort by Orange County prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies to use jailhouse informants in a way that violated the rights of defendants, a clandestine ring that had illegally been kept secret for years from defense attorneys.

“It all began at that moment. I felt in my bones everything had changed,” he says. “It felt like the ground had shifted.”

History — and the courts — would prove him right.

A folk hero emerges

Sanders, who is retiring Monday, March 31, after 32 years as a public defender, has come a long way since that first epiphany. Orange County prosecutors and police painted him as the Chicken Little of the legal world, constantly impugning evil on the part of law enforcement. They called his allegations “baloney.” And even “crazy.”

But Sanders and more than a dozen law clerks kept digging until they unearthed what came to be known as the “snitch scandal,” eventually unraveling 59 murder and attempted murder cases and wrecking the careers of elite prosecutors. Convictions were overturned, charges were dropped and sentences were dramatically reduced because of his work, earning Sanders folk-hero status among defenders.

Superior Court judges, appellate court justices and U.S. Department of Justice investigators all have confirmed Sanders’ suspicions of corruption — or, in the words of one jurist, “reprehensible” conduct — in Orange County’s justice system. The district attorney’s office, now under new management, has not used a jailhouse informant in six years. Most of the agency’s top homicide prosecutors retired under a cloud. One high-level official was fired.

“It opened people’s eyes to how much concealment, how much corruption had taken place,” Sanders says. “We were being taken to the cleaners for a long time.”

Outside the courtroom, Sanders cuts an unimposing, rumpled figure. He’s soft-spoken and polite with a Chicago accent. Inside the courtroom, he is a step-on-your-throat interrogator, quick to spot discrepancies, his voice rising an octave while making arguments.

He has a photographic memory that gives him command of the facts. Sanders is respected nationally by defense attorneys, not so much by prosecutors and police.

DA: ‘He’s made the system better’

“There’s a lot of cuss words to describe Mr. Sanders in my office, but, all in all, he’s made the system better,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who ousted 20-year veteran Tony Rackauckas in 2018, running on a platform of reform. Spitzer acknowledges he probably owes his victory to Sanders.

“The damage caused by Rackauckas and his progeny is so deep and so lasting, but the justice system overall is much more sacred as it should be because of Sanders,” said Spitzer, who has had his own run-ins with the feisty assistant public defender.

“I don’t always appreciate how he’s delivered his message, but the end result I have appreciated,” Spitzer said. “His writing can be very bombastic, animated and salacious.”

And very, very long, with court motions sometimes surpassing 700 pages, earning the nickname “eye bleeders.”

“I’ve burned out many highlighters on his stuff. It’s like ‘War and Peace,’ but the legal edition,” jokes Laura Fernandez, a research scholar at Yale Law School who specializes in prosecutorial misconduct.

Sanders “sets the gold standard for public defenders everywhere and people interested in the rights of the accused,” Fernandez says. “He’s phenomenally precise, prepared and knows the record better than anyone in the room. He’s never caught off-guard. You could use his transcripts to teach in law school.”

Sanders has a talent for finding the souls in people many see as monsters. Dekraai, caught in a tug-of-war for custody of his 8-year-old son, blasted his way through a beauty parlor where his estranged wife worked. He labeled some of his victims “collateral damage.” Wozniak dismembered a friend — scattering the body parts in a Long Beach park — to get the victim’s life savings so he could pay for his upcoming wedding. Wozniak then went on to gun down another friend to cover up the crime.

Sanders now represents Paul Gentile Smith, accused of stabbing his boyhood pal 18 times and torching the naked body to hide the evidence. Prosecutors note Smith later tried to set his own girlfriend on fire.

“A good defense lawyer sees the humanity in each client,” Sanders says. “Even if the person is responsible, our job is to make the jury feel how they got to that spot. It’s so important in cases that appear clear-cut that law enforcement is not left believing they can do anything (they want).”

Middle-class upbringing

Raised in the Chicago suburb of Glenview, Illinois, Sanders came from a middle-class family. His father, Robert, worked in advertising for a printing company and his mother, Sharon, taught special education. His brother became a doctor and his younger sister worked for a while as a public defender in Cook County.

While growing up, Sanders toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer but always figured he would follow his father into printing advertising.

In 1987, he took time off from his studies at the University of Wisconsin, majoring in history, to work in the presidential campaign of bow-tied Illinois Sen. Paul Simon. Sanders worked his way up to national student coordinator for the Simon campaign and then deputy field director in the pivotal state of Iowa.

“It was an absurd level of responsibility I didn’t deserve,” Sanders remembers. He left mid-campaign to resume his studies, disillusioned with politics.

“I realized it’s filled with people trying to have their candidate win. It wasn’t issue-driven. … I was interested in issues and just saw the hackery of campaigns,” he says. “I felt my destiny was to begin advocating in the courtroom.”

After his undergrad work, Sanders enrolled in law school at Emory University in Atlanta, becoming president of the student bar association, prosecuting students who violated the school’s honor code.

“I did not like that job. … I could feel myself advocating for the little guy,” Sanders says. “The prosecution angle never felt right to me. I found myself working for those who had less and needed more.”

On a summer break, he met a lawyer representing fishermen in Alaska who were damaged by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Sanders persuaded the lawyer to hire him as a paralegal on the case in Kodiak at $15 an hour. It was his first job making money in the legal profession. There were other perks, as well. Sometimes the fishermen brought him fresh lobster or crab.

After that gig, Sanders went on to help clerk at the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C. A pattern was emerging.

“Everything was pushing in the direction of … advocating for people who had the short end of the stick. By the time I left law school, it was public defender all the way. I felt it in my bones,” Sanders says.

Moves to criminal law

After a brief stint working in construction law — a job he hated — Sanders was offered a position in 1993 with the Orange County Public Defender’s Office.

He met his wife, Priscilla, at the office, where she worked as an investigative assistant. The couple now have three college-age children, Gabe, Isaac and Sophia — two of them are heading toward the legal profession.

In 1998, Sanders was assigned his first death penalty case and, sure enough, found evidence of police misconduct.

The investigation took two Orange County sheriff’s detectives to Vancouver, Canada, where they were looking for evidence against murder defendant David Valladares and another suspect. Away from home, the detectives partied with strippers at The Tycoon Club, a bar frequented by organized crime members. A witness said she believed both detectives snorted cocaine and one stripped down to his underwear and socks, dancing with a pink feather boa.

The investigators didn’t know the bar was under surveillance by Canadian police. Sanders forced the bad behavior onto the public record during two weeks of rare hearings in a Canadian courtroom.

The Valladares case was settled for second-degree murder, no death sentence. In other cases, Sanders took on the Orange County crime lab, accusing analysts of tailoring test results to support the prosecution.

‘Snitch scandal’ unfolds

“It all was very much preparing me for the (snitch scandal),” Sanders says. “When we got to Wozniak and Dekraai, I think I’m the right person at the right time.

“I had a lot of distrust at how police and prosecutors protect the rights of the accused and their over-emphasis on winning … if folks want to cheat, it’s very difficult to get the evidence.”

But that evidence came in the Dekraai case.

Prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies had moved Dekraai near Perez, a confessed Mexican Mafia killer who had helped police gather evidence against the violent prison gang. Deputies secretly put a microphone in Dekraai’s cell and recorded his conversations with Perez. This was illegal because Dekraai had been formally charged and had the right to have his attorney present when questioned by police or their informants.

What made the surreptitious operation so outrageous was that it was unnecessary. The case was a slam dunk. Dekraai had been arrested near the scene of the shooting, wearing a bulletproof vest and telling officers, “I know what I did.” Prosecutors, however, were concerned he might plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

All-nighters at Denny’s

After learning of Perez, Sanders spent a year, from 2013 to 2014, digging through police records and court transcripts, rounding up every case he could find involving informants.

Too excited to sleep, he went to bed late and got up early, doing most of his research and writing motions at Long Beach coffee shops, trying to avoid the distractions of working at home or in the office.

Sanders could often be found pulling an all-nighter at the local Denny’s, tapping on his laptop, listening to U2 on his headphones, immersed in hundreds of pages of court records. Sometimes he would break for a cat nap in his Toyota Prius in the deserted parking lot.

“This is a true archeological dig … the goal was to find as many hours in a day to read, study and write,” Sanders recalls. “Every moment was like an ‘aha’ moment. I would stay up as long as I could, every single day.” He created a database of informants, cross-referencing them to show if they had been used in multiple cases, in an organized manner.

That’s how he found “Puppet” and “Bouncer,” professional jailhouse informants Ramon Cuevas and Jose Paredes, who earned $335,000 over a four-year span secretly working for law enforcement behind bars throughout Southern California, including the Anaheim city jail. The Mexican Mafia leaders received as much as $3,000 a case as well as cartons of Marlboro cigarettes and Del Taco food from police detectives.

Much at risk

The result of Sanders’ research was an explosive 505-page motion in the Dekraai case, with an additional 15,000 pages of exhibits, that for the first time in 2014 publicly accused Orange County prosecutors and police of cheating through the use of jailhouse informants and hiding their corruption from defense attorneys. He made similar accusations in the Wozniak case.

It was nervous time at the Public Defender’s Office. If Sanders was wrong — or if the judges didn’t bite — it could be catastrophic for the agency.

“Everybody was a little bit holding their breath to see what happens next,” Sanders recalls.

The backlash from law enforcement was immediate and long-lasting. They accused Sanders of slander for his outlandish accusations. One judge in the Wozniak case so disliked Sanders’ tactics that he recused himself because he started rooting against the defense lawyer.

Sanders “gets and deserves no respect,” Mark Geller, a senior deputy district attorney, said in 2015. “Scott Sanders shouldn’t even be a lawyer based on the tactics he’s engaged.”

Geller, once the focus of Sanders’ attacks, has retired from the prosecutors’ office. He declined to comment for this story.

An unlikely ally

Families of the murder victims in the Wozniak and Dekraai cases complained that Sanders was prolonging the proceedings, prolonging their pain, with his zealousness. However, the vitriol subsided for Paul Wilson, whose wife, Christy, was killed by Dekraai. Wilson soured on the prosecutors telling him that Sanders was just making things up when the evidence showed otherwise.

“If someone is going to fight like (Sanders), I want to be on that guy’s side, not the guys who are lying to me,” says Wilson, who befriended the attorney representing his wife’s killer. “As a victim, I want the judicial system to work the way it is supposed to work. Until Scott came along, they didn’t get caught.”

Adds Wilson: Sanders “pissed off the giant.”

A lonely road

Retired defense attorney Rudy Loewenstein says Sanders was mostly alone in that endeavor.

“Most of the criminal defense attorneys in the county, almost all of them, were afraid to go against the D.A.’s office,” Loewenstein says. “They were afraid the office would retaliate against them when it came to cutting deals. There was a go-along to get-along (attitude).”

But Sanders was never one to court law enforcement or bow to their attacks.

“I knew it was all about an effort to stop the truth from getting out, to delegitimize my efforts. In the courtroom, we had the cards. We knew the facts better. I was better prepared and had a much better understanding of the facts than they did,” he says.

Sanders’ allegations were shot down by a disbelieving Judge John Conley in the Wozniak case — a judge who Sanders had also accused of wrongdoing. But in the Dekraai case, Judge Thomas Goethals was different. He wanted to hear more and ordered a special hearing, called an evidentiary hearing, in 2014.

“I remember feeling a little stunned,” Sanders says. “(Goethals) said there’s a lot of work and a lot of support for the allegations and all of a sudden we’re heading toward a hearing. We’re about to put on (the witness stand) informants, police officers and, perhaps, prosecutors.”

Goethals wasn’t pleased with their testimony. Over the next three years, he removed the entire district attorney’s office from the Dekraai case and then did the unthinkable — he took the death penalty off the table for the worst mass killer in Orange County history. Goethals sentenced Dekraai to eight life terms in prison without the possibility of parole, one for each of the dead victims.

The slam dunk prosecution had rattled out of the hoop.

Goethals credits Sanders with an “extraordinary” legal effort.

“I didn’t know him before all this happened — I knew his reputation,” Goethals said. “I had my armor on, expecting him to be a tough person to deal with. And he at times did push me up to the edge. But I don’t know another lawyer who could have done what he did on this case. It was an extraordinary piece of litigation he put together.”

Another win

Sanders didn’t stop there. He later accused a well-respected, high-ranking prosecutor, now a judge, of withholding evidence in the murder case against Smith. Working with Assistant Public Defender Sara Ross, Sanders persuaded the court in 2021 to overturn Smith’s earlier conviction and order a new trial.

San Diego County Judge Daniel Goldstein was appointed to the Smith case and held a special hearing on Sanders’ allegations. Goldstein recently found the conduct of former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh and his team to be “reprehensible.” So egregious was the conduct that Goldstein reduced the sentence that Smith could face if found guilty during the pending retrial, erasing a special circumstance charge.

Sanders had scored another win.

Tireless advocate

He says he plans to enter private practice, continue representing Smith and keep going after law enforcement officials he believes are crooked.

“The thing that haunts me about leaving is I recognize I’ve been an important person in incentivizing folks not to cheat,” Sanders says. “I could spend multiple lifetimes on this project and, if I win the lottery, I will.”

His soon-to-be former boss, Public Defender Martin Schwarz, credits Sanders with becoming one of the office’s main draws for new recruits.

“Over the years, I have conducted countless hiring interviews where aspiring public defenders cite Scott as their inspiration,” Schwarz says. “His legacy as a tireless, dogged and utterly fearless advocate will permeate the work we do on behalf of some of Orange County’s most vulnerable residents for years to come.”

Thomas Goethals, veteran judge whose rulings rocked the OC legal community, is retiring