SAN DIEGO, CA—A San Diego County Superior Court hearing proceeded this week here investigating the actions of a former lead Orange County prosecutor, Ebrahim Baytieh, in the conviction of Paul Gentile Smith for murder in 2010—Smith’s conviction was overturned in 2021, and is now in the midst of a retrial.
Following an internal investigation, Baytieh—now an Orange County judge and the reason the Smith retrial is being heard in San Diego, not Orange County—allegedly withheld evidence in the Smith murder case, violating Smith’s constitutional rights by placing him in a jail cell with three jailhouse informants.
Orange County Public Defender Martin Schwarz and Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders submitted a motion to unseal the search warrant from Dec. 7, 2009 earlier this month. The judge in the case criticized the mishandling of evidence that revealed a disorganized Orange County system for managing criminal cases.
In August of this year, former Senior Assistant District Attorney Baytieh testified at the San Diego Superior Court, claiming he was unaware the informant Jeff Platt and Arthur Palacios had illegally questioned Smith until after the trial in 2010.
This past Tuesday’s hearing covered information regarding the lead prosecutor and his connection with the informants. During the hearing, an unnamed witness was asked at what moment did he realize Platt was an informant.
The witness responded, “You said it, well at some point later in the day I met Mr. Platt, I thought he was just an inmate giving us information.”
While pledging deniability, he was then asked, “It (the transcript) says, ‘But I didn’t know he was an informant at the date of this interview.’ Remember testifying to that?”
The witness responded, “I don’t really know that he’s an informant, except for the 815 number.”
A report and warrant filed in the case refers to Platt as 815, which would insinuate at some time during the investigation he was classified as an informant.
The prosecutor this week clarified to the witness whether he agreed that in Orange County “with the training that an informant is someone who gives statements or a tribute statements to a defendant, regardless of whether they’ve signed up. Unless they signed up, they’re not.”
The witness specified, “By the time I wrote the warrant he was identified as CI 815, so he must have been an informant to that point.”
The witness was then asked, “Paul Smith is a charged defendant, he’s (Platt) working with you and your investigators on building the charge for solicitation while out of custody, right?”
While the witness did not remember the solicitation case he further emphasized that “at this point I would, from what I remember, he was giving us information. Stuff that he had heard in the jail.”
Ultimately, the witness said by December 2009 they had determined both Platt and Palacios were confidential informants. Specifically they had written that the CIS gave investigators “specific details about the homicide that had not been made public knowledge and that they came from suspect Paul Smith.”
The information of that statement includes Smith describing “the manner in which the victim was killed as well as the physical.”
The retrial is ongoing.
