An Orange County Superior Court judge has overturned the conviction of a jail inmate who pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to attack a veteran sheriff’s investigator as well as a witness.
At the request of the District Attorney’s Office, Judge Michael J. Cassidy vacated the conviction Tuesday, Aug. 30, against Paul Gentile Smith because of misconduct by prosecutors and deputies in the murder case that sent Smith to prison.
A murder conviction against Smith was dismissed last summer because the prosecution team had failed to turn over key evidence, while deputies refused to testify about it. He faces a new murder trial scheduled for November.
One of the deputies who refused to testify is retired Sgt. Ray Wert, one of the the targets of the attempted hit.
While Wert remained reluctant to talk in court, he sent his attorney Tuesday to argue against dropping the conviction for soliciting the murder for hire, which carried a prison sentence of more than six years.
Through attorney Lolita Kirk, Wert said that while more than 10 years had passed since Smith pleaded guilty, Wert and his family still feel threatened and anxious. Wert, through his attorney, also complained that Smith’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, had come to his home to try to interview him.
Sanders responded by criticizing Wert for the alleged misconduct that led to the conviction being dropped in the first place.
“It’s as if he’s blocked from his memory his misconduct, and that he took the Fifth so he wouldn’t have to answer questions about his cheating,” Sanders said after the hearing. “Jaw-dropping hypocrisy.”
Wert was the lead investigator in the murder case against Smith, accused of killing his childhood friend and sometimes marijuana dealer, Robert Haugen, in Sunset Beach in 1988.
Haugen was stabbed 18 times and his nude remains were set ablaze. A jury convicted Smith of the murder.
But his murder and solicitation convictions were overturned because Orange County sheriff’s deputies and prosecutors allegedly violated his constitutional rights by placing him in a cell where he was targeted by three jailhouse informants. Smith’s defense team was told of only one informant.
Wert and other deputies indicated that they would not testify at a hearing about their use of jailhouse informants that allegedly denied Smith his right to counsel.
A recorded police interview of one of the informants — which confirmed that three informants were used — was not turned over to the defense until 10 years after the jury trial in 2010.
Sheriff’s officials said the District Attorney’s Office, then under Tony Rackauckas, was responsible for turning over the recording. Ebrahim Baytieh, the prosecutor in the case, responded that he didn’t know about the recording until 2019.
Baytieh ultimately was fired in connection with the Smith case. He was elected in June to the Superior Court bench and is scheduled to be seated in January.
Contacted Tuesday, Baytieh said it would not be appropriate for him to comment on a pending case.
The misuse of informants in the Smith case was discovered as part of the “snitch scandal,” which unfolded in 2014 when Sanders uncovered a secret cadre of jailhouse informants assembled to illegally coax confessions from inmates. It is illegal to use informants on defendants who have lawyers and have been formally charged.
The snitch operation unraveled during hearings for mass murderer Scott Dekraai, who killed eight people in October 2011 at a Seal Beach hair salon. Dekraai escaped the death penalty, instead receiving life in prison, because of the misconduct in his case.
Source: Orange County Register
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