A defense attorney details how the rights of a murder defendant were violated behind bars — and how a top prosecutor covered it up for years.
Days before suspected killer Paul Gentile Smith arrived at Orange County jail in June 2009, sheriff’s investigators were already plotting to put him with a group of informants.
The three informants unleashed on Smith should have been disclosed to his attorneys as required by law, but that evidence was withheld until nine years after Smith’s 2010 trial. Because of that misconduct, Smith’sScott Sanders last week filed a 424-page motion Informants Jeffrey Platt and Paul Martin had asked deputies if they and another inmate, Arthur Palacios, could be assigned to the same day room time slot as Smith, according to a previously secret log kept by deputies. Informing can be helpful to inmates looking for leniency in their own cases.
From there the interview went downhill. The talkative Platt told investigators precisely how the trio of informants interrogated Smith, in violation of his Massiah rights. The Platt interview was not disclosed to the defense until nine years after Smith was convicted. Baytieh would have been responsible for turning over the interview to defense lawyers, but he told federal investigators he didn’t know Platt was an informant in the Smith case until six years after the trial, according to the motion. Sanders finds that explanation implausible.
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