So they placed an informant, Fernando Perez, in an adjoining cell. While Dekraai admitted to carrying out the massacre, investigators feared he would seek an insanity defense to avoid the death penalty. The Justice Department’s findings come eight years after evidence of the scandal was uncovered during the trial of Scott Dekraai, who slaughtered his ex-wife and seven others during a mass shooting inside a Seal Beach salon in 2011. While it isn’t uncommon for jailed informants to offer information to prosecutors or investigators, deputies with the Sheriff’s Department’s Special Handling Unit built a stable of snitches to launch at defendants charged with serious crimes. We have been alleging since 2014 the same civil rights violations analyzed by the Department of Justice, and now we finally have a governmental agency that describes why we were right and lays out just how bad the conduct has been by both agencies,” said Orange County Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, who first uncovered the scandal. “This report’s findings represent a critically important development for the county’s justice system.
