My name is Scott Sanders. I served as an attorney with the Orange County Public Defender’s Office for 32 years. For the past year, I have continued to practice criminal law as private counsel.
The following is an open letter to Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County
I am writing to share my profound disappointment with the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s (“CRF”) decision to honor Ebrahim Baytieh as Judge of the Year, and my hope that the foundation will reconsider its decision.
The issue that I raise is not with Mr. Baytieh’s level of involvement in mock trial competitions. I have little doubt that Mr. Baytieh has gone to great lengths to show his commitment to the CRF and his allegiance to constitutional principles.
Rather, it is the decision to honor a man who has repeatedly demonstrated a dangerous and enduring commitment to violating the constitutional rights of the accused. On March 6, 2026, six current and former members of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office came together to celebrate what all of us consider one of the great achievements of our careers.
Bringing justice to the case of People v. Paul Smith and exposing the devastating injustice that former prosecutor Baytieh and his prosecution team delivered in that case between 2009 and 2026. Unfortunately, I was compelled to share with them the recently received news of the award.
They were devastated. My personal journey on the Smith case began in 2016—six years after Smith was convicted of special circumstance murder and sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
I became aware of the case while in the midst of representing a defendant charged with the largest mass murder in Orange County history. During the course of litigating People v. Scott Dekraai, we would discover a hidden jailhouse informant program that the Orange County District Attorney’s Office (“OCDA”) and Orange County Sheriff’s Department utilized to systematically violate constitutional rights.
(This same conclusion was reached by the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) in 2022.) In February 2015, Judge Thomas Goethals granted our motion to recuse the OCDA.
During the period between the recusal ruling and the late-2016 decision by the Court of Appeal affirming it, I participated in several public forums to discuss issues related to the informant scandal. By that time, Mr. Baytieh—a homicide prosecutor for the department—had been appointed head of the OCDA’s “Brady Unit” intended to protect against constitutional violations.
Mr. Baytieh seized every available opportunity to suggest that our 505-page motion to dismiss the death penalty (supported by 15,000 pages in exhibits), and the two rounds of extensive evidentiary hearing that followed, failed to establish any wrongdoing by prosecutors. At one such forum, Mr. Baytieh insisted publicly that there was not a “shred of evidence” that a single prosecutor intentionally withheld informant-related evidence.
(OC Register Snitch Tank Community Forum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVuv0jLxpAs&t=3563s, beginning at 59:20.) Similarly, he had previously told a group that the allegations directed at prosecutors were “baloney.”
(Attorney Official Calls Claims of Intentional Misconduct in Use of Jailhouse Informants “Baloney[,]” OC Register, Oct. 1, 2015.) Mr. Baytieh was comfortable presenting this “analysis” even though during his own 2019 interview with the DOJ he insisted that he neither studied the motions filed in support of the allegations, attended the hearings, nor reviewed the evidence presented.
The willingness of Mr. Baytieh to publicly denigrate years of work bringing constitutional violations to light—having either never studied the evidence of misconduct or having studied it and dishonestly represented his analysis—is sadly the least significant reason why honoring him would be so repugnant to those of us who fight day in and day out to protect constitutional rights.
Within months of Mr. Baytieh’s comments at the forum, I stumbled upon the first clues that the Smith case had been infected with informant-related misconduct. During this time period, I routinely scanned appellate cases searching for evidence of undisclosed jailhouse informant evidence.
In 2016, I read the Court of Appeal ruling in Smith, which described informant Arthur Palacios’ testimony in the 2009 special circumstances murder trial. The opinion suggested that Palacios had fortuitously been at the right place at the right time when Smith, without any prompting, made statements about his involvement in the 1988 murder.
The Sixth Amendment and the holding in Massiah v. United States 377 US 201 (1964) prohibit questioning of a defendant by the government and its agents after the defendant has been charged with a crime—and under that standard the purported admissions to Palacios were admissible. However, the appellate opinion also included the name of another inmate, Paul Martin, who appeared in the opinion as merely being in the same dayroom when Palacios supposedly obtained the admissions.
Upon seeing the name, I was struck. As a result of my work in Dekraai, I recognized the second inmate, Martin, to be a well-established jailhouse informant.
Almost immediately, I believed it highly likely that Martin had worked as an informant on the case, and that his true role had been hidden from the defense. I then ran the case in Orange County’s Court Vision system and saw the name of the prosecutor: Ebrahim Baytieh.
The next case-changing revelations came while I was reading transcripts from the Grand Jury proceedings in Smith. During his questioning of informant Palacios, Mr. Baytieh had depicted Jeffrey Platt—another inmate assigned to the dayroom shared by Smith, Palacios, and Martin—as co-conspiring with Smith to kill the lead investigator.
However, when I examined the court records on Platt’s multi-count felony cases, I noticed that Platt had been released from jail and then was allowed to remain out of custody even after the prosecution supposedly learned he was working with Smith to carry out a hit on the investigator. The disinterest in having Platt arrested for supposedly plotting to kill a law enforcement officer was nonsensical—unless, of course, Mr. Baytieh knew the felon was an informant.
As a result of my investigation over the next several months, it became apparent to me that the Baytieh-led prosecution team had worked hand in hand with three informants (Platt, Martin and Palacios), encouraging them to repeatedly question Smith in blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment.
In 2017, I incorporated my findings into written motions in People v. Dekraai. Those motions received media coverage, including in a 2017 article in the Huff Post entitled OC Prosecutor Who Defended DA’s Office Over Snitch Scandal Is Accused Of Covering Up Jail Informant Use (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oc-prosecutor-who-defended-das-office-over-snitch-scandal-is-accused-of-covering-up-jail-informant-use_n_5919d524e4b0809be156c409).
Mr. Baytieh would later claim, during his sworn 2025 testimony, that he never read the article and never read the motions in Dekraai describing the misconduct in Smith. I believe that this was just one of many instances in which Mr. Baytieh testified falsely during the course of the Smith litigation.
I quickly reached out to Smith’s appellate attorney regarding my findings. Amazingly, he agreed to prepare pro bono a writ of habeas corpus, which was filed in 2017.
The Public Defender’s Office later became counsel of record in that litigation, and I eventually joined the effort as co-counsel. In 2021, our motion for a new trial was granted.
Sadly, the court filing in Smith did not trigger transparency by Mr. Baytieh or his prosecution team. In fact, it took until 2019 for the defense to finally learn of a recorded interview of informant Platt.
Platt’s interview was only disclosed after DOJ attorneys—during Mr. Baytieh’s questioning that lasted one and a half days—confronted Mr. Baytieh with a report they had found memorializing the interview of Platt. In the recording, Platt described in detail how he, Palacios and Martin questioned Smith over many days before Smith supposedly admitted to the murder.
The conduct Platt described was in clear violation of the Sixth Amendment—and every member of the prosecution team would have fully understood this. (The report about that interview was also hidden.)
It had become clear that Mr. Baytieh and his team faced a choice before trial. They could reveal all of the reports and evidence showing who Platt and Martin were and what their true role was.
This, of course, meant proceeding without Smith’s alleged admissions and potentially revealing the still-hidden jailhouse informant program. Alternatively, they could conceal the informant-related evidence and have Palacios testify that Smith admitted his responsibility without any prodding.
They chose the latter. Over the next seven years, we would learn that every item of evidence that would have shown to the defense that Platt and Martin were working informants was hidden as part of the prosecution team’s effort to introduce statements about Smith’s charged crimes.
In 2024, I filed a 409-page motion to dismiss for outrageous governmental conduct. The case was later transferred to the Honorable Daniel Goldstein, who ordered that Mr. Baytieh and members of the prosecution team testify at the requested hearing.
During litigation in a San Diego courtroom, evidence continued to be uncovered—thanks in no small measure to Judge Goldstein’s unrelenting commitment to protecting constitutional rights. Eventually, the defense would unearth 23 reports, recordings, and other items related to the two undisclosed informants.
In 2025, Judge Goldstein struck the special circumstance as a remedy for “reprehensible” conduct in Smith. Last month, the OCDA and the defendant agreed to a resolution in which Smith pled guilty to manslaughter and the prosecution dismissed the murder charge.
The misconduct committed by the prosecution team in Smith is the most expansive and egregious that has been uncovered in any of the 61 cases impacted by what has become the nation’s largest informant scandal. Mr. Baytieh testified in 2025 that he never took any steps in the previous sixteen years to find out what was hidden or who was responsible.
I believe it is true that Mr. Baytieh took no such steps, as there was nothing hidden from him by his fellow prosecution team members. Just three weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Death Penalty Conference for California criminal defense attorneys and spoke at length about People v. Smith.
One of the sentiments I shared was the short-lived fulfillment that came with the court’s ruling and the favorable resolution. I explained that on the evening of that last appearance in court I experienced the enormous anguish that came with my belief that we had only gotten to the truth in one of the cases poisoned by this win-at-all-costs prosecutor, and that many other defendants would die in custody unaware of what was likely withheld in their cases.
Hopefully, you can now understand how painful it is for those of us who worked on Paul Smith’s case that a foundation committed to advancing constitutional rights would honor a man who has unapologetically violated the Constitution.
I must also state the following. While I do not expect everyone to whom I am writing to have known about these events, there have been numerous stories over the past several years about Smith and Mr. Baytieh.
In fact, the resolution of the case and the background was a front-page OC Register story in January 2026. Numerous other stories have appeared in news entities including in the LAist, the Daily Journal, Los Angeles Times, City New, Voice of OC, Vanguard News Group, KFI and NBC4.
Before this award was publicly announced, there should have been a study of the allegations or, at a minimum, contact should have been made with me to solicit our analysis of what has occurred.
If, despite what I am sharing with you today, you elect to move forward with honoring Mr. Baytieh, I hope that you appreciate the implications. You are giving Mr. Baytieh credibility as a man committed to honoring the Constitution—including the constitutional rights of the accused.
I believe he expects that his award will persuade others who are less familiar with the facts to conclude that things must not be as they appear—that perhaps there is not a “shred of evidence” that he withheld evidence. After all, what comes with this award is the implication that the Constitutional Rights Foundation conducted its due diligence and saw fit to honor Mr. Baytieh.
In other words, the CRF surely would not have named Mr. Baytieh the Judge of the Year with what occurred in Smith unless its own study brought into question the reliability of the proceedings and the evidence of Mr. Baytieh’s significant role.
Honoring Mr. Baytieh as “Judge of the Year” would demonstrate disrespect for both the accused who have unfairly suffered from his wanton disregard for the Constitution and all of us who battle to expose this type of wrongdoing. Lastly, if the principal objective of the organization is to encourage youth to become “responsible” members of the legal community, Mr. Baytieh’s selection would instead send the message that if one puts in the work even the most irresponsible and remorseless violations of constitutional rights can be forgotten.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Scott Sanders
Attorney at Law
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