Tony Rackauckas and the SHEriff going at it again.

[Gladiator]

Orange County D.A. says Sheriff's Department mishandled molestation case - Los Angeles Times


Orange County D.A. says Sheriff's Department mishandled molestation case
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times
Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas says sheriff should let an outside agency handle internal inquiries.
Prosecutor Tony Rackauckas says agency was 'merely going through the motions' in investigating charges against detective, who avoided arrest by killing himself.

By H.G. Reza and Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 19, 2008
In yet another sign of tension between Orange County's most powerful law enforcement branches, Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas has accused the Sheriff's Department of botching a child molestation investigation involving a sheriff's detective who ultimately killed himself before he could be arrested.

Rackauckas wrote to sheriff's officials and suggested their investigators were "merely going through the motions" as they investigated a deputy suspected of molesting young boys earlier this year.


The case that concerned Rackauckas involved sheriff's Investigator Gerald Stenger, who committed suicide April 2 after apparently learning that prosecutors had charged him with sexually molesting a 12-year-old boy he met through Big Brother Big Sisters of Orange County, where he was a volunteer.

In a June 11 letter to then-acting Sheriff Jack Anderson, Rackauckas said he was concerned that sheriff's investigators appeared to be uninterested in the allegations against Stenger -- concluding in the initial stages that the charges were baseless -- and failed to pursue evidence that later implicated the detective.

"One could easily conclude that the investigators had already made up their minds about the case before the questioning and were merely going through the motions," Rackauckas wrote.

He noted that the sheriff's lead investigator on the case was one of Stenger's friends and that the investigator had called Stenger to tell him that his name had come up in an investigation. Rackauckas said the phone call left the appearance that the investigator was tipping off Stenger.

Shortly after the phone call, Stenger apparently tried to commit suicide but was revived after being rushed to the hospital, the district attorney says in his letter. Not long after that, sheriff's investigators met with Stenger and told him that prosecutors would "probably not" charge him.

The district attorney also suggested that the department might be better served by allowing an outside agency to investigate criminal allegations against its deputies.

Orange County's new sheriff, Sandra Hutchens, replied to Rackauckas, saying that the captain who oversaw the investigation told her he had taken steps to make sure any flaws in the Stenger investigation would not be repeated. Hutchens said she was perplexed by Rackauckas' suggestion that her department could not competently investigate its own deputies.

"As I am sure you are aware, sending internal criminal investigations outside of an agency will be a major departure in established practice," Hutchens wrote in a June 26 response to Rackauckas. She suggested that if he wanted to make such a change, he should address his concerns with all police departments in the county.

"It's frustrating to me. I think he's taking every opportunity he can to discredit the Sheriff's Department," Hutchens said in an interview Thursday. "The district attorney and the Sheriff's Department should be working together. When one agency is accusing the other, it doesn't raise the public's confidence in law enforcement."

The exchange of letters came two months after Rackauckas' office released a lengthy report that criticized the way the Sheriff's Department investigated the 2006 fatal beating of inmate John Derek Chamberlain at Theo Lacy Jail in Orange. Chamberlain was allegedly beaten to death by fellow inmates.

The Orange County district attorney and sheriff's offices have also been quarreling over which agency is better suited to operate a new DNA crime lab.

In his letter about the molestation investigation, Rackauckas suggested that sheriff's Investigator Myrna Caballero failed to review Stenger's personal computer, camera or videotapes when she interviewed him.

He also faulted her for suggesting to prosecutors that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Stenger.

The sheriff's investigator also did not seek a search warrant or ask Stenger for permission to search his house. A subsequent investigation by district attorney's investigators found homemade DVDs and cassettes showing young boys engaging in sex acts.

In addition, Rackauckas noted, the department allowed Stenger to return to work even after the attempted suicide. The department should have placed the detective on administrative leave, Rackauckas wrote.

Stenger shot himself in the head in Aliso Viejo after apparently learning of his pending arrest by logging on to a county computer. Authorities said they had hoped to arrest him before he learned that he had been charged.

h.g.reza@latimes.com

stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com

Tony's Letter:

http://ocblog.typepad.com/Stenger_case_TR_letter.pdf

The SHEriff's reply:

http://ocblog.typepad.com/Stenger_ca...ens_letter.pdf

And MORE Dirt!
Orange County - Sheriff & DA Skirmish Over Suspected Pedophile Deputy - Navel Gazing - OC Weekly


Sheriff & DA Skirmish Over Suspected Pedophile Deputy
Posted by R. Scott Moxley in Carona Watch, Crime & Sex, Moxley
September 17, 2008 6:00 PM
Permalink | Comments (13)

Under the leadership of Mike Carona—our N-word-tossing, fanny-slapping, vodka-slurping, money-hungry, FBI-indicted ex-sheriff—the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) sank into an ethical cesspool. It didn’t make a difference if a deputy was a hard-working public servant (and I know quite a few in this category) or a lazy degenerate. OCSD careers promised damn-good pay, lots of paid time off, no repercussions for wrongdoing and generously funded retirement at the spry age of 50, more than a decade and a half before the rest of us. But there’s apparently another unpublicized perk: If you happen to be a deputy and a pedophile, count on the department to shield you from justice, too.

Before you starched-jeans types at the deputies’ union hyperventilate, swallow the olives from your martinis, drop your glossy vacation brochures and spout off about me, know that this is not me saying this.

The accusation was made by District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, a former superior-court judge.

On June 11—after reportedly unsatisfactory meetings with sheriff’s deputies, Rackauckas sent then-Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson a four-page letter detailing dereliction-of-duty concerns that, if half-true, should make OC residents vomit. According to Rackauckas, the OCSD appears to have attempted to protect a serial pedophile, Deputy Gerald F. Stenger III, from criminal prosecution. Ultimately, Stenger escaped prosecution by committing suicide in April. But at the top of a long list of blunders, according to Rackauckas, was the department assigning the investigation to Myrna Caballero, a deputy who was on a first-name basis with Stenger—and who the DA says repeatedly botched the probe in ways that made it tougher to win a conviction.

John McDonald, spokesman for the sheriff’s department, please tell us Rackauckas is wrong.

“That gets into a personnel matter, and we can’t talk about that,” McDonald says.

It’s against the law to tell the public if a deputy and the deputy she had been assigned to investigate were buddies?

“We investigate our own all the time,” he says.

In his letter, Rackauckas spelled out his concerns, including:

•Caballero failed to conduct separate interviews with potential key sex-crimes witnesses and victims, tainting the information.

•Caballero told one victim, a boy allegedly molested by the deputy beginning at the age of 8, to make what would have clearly been a suspicious call to the deputy at work (he’d never called the deputy at work before), and then failed to ensure the call was recorded.

•Despite the fact that Stenger attempted suicide two hours after Caballero officially revealed the investigation in November 2007, sheriff’s officials let him return to full duty without a single condition or any special oversight—and, get this, allowed him to monitor the investigation via department computers. (Five months later, he later fatally shot himself in the head in an unmarked patrol car in a parking lot near a South County shopping center where his alleged victim worked.)

•Twelve days after Stenger’s November suicide attempt, Caballero and colleague Sergeant Jim England were “oddly” chummy with the 41-year-old Stenger, soothing his fears by assuring him that charges wouldn’t be filed—a claim Rackauckas called “highly unusual” for deputies beginning to interrogate a suspect.

•Though Caballero knew the unmarried Stenger had an adopted son in his Aliso Viejo home, she never interviewed the child to see if he’d been molested; Stenger was under suspicion of molesting a boy he had befriended through local Little League baseball and the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County programs.

•Though it’s standard procedure to seek a search warrant in such cases because pedophiles often store images of their crimes on home computers, Caballero didn’t bother to get one. (Later, DA’s office investigators searched Stenger’s computer and, despite his efforts to erase images, were able to retrieve videos of the deputy molesting his own adopted young son, as well as “thousands” of other child-porn images, according to Rackauckas’ letter.)

•After the sloppy investigation, Caballero told Deputy District Attorney Tony Ferrentino in the sex-crimes unit that he should “reject” prosecuting Stenger because of her “feelings” that no crime had been committed.

Under Carona, the sheriff’s department would have responded to such a letter from Rackauckas with a stiff middle finger. But times have changed, right? After all, there’s a new sheriff in town. And Sandra Hutchens (pictured) won her mid-June appointment to replace Carona and Acting Sheriff Anderson by portraying herself as the Angel of Anti-Internal OCSD Corruption. Surely, Hutchens would be horrified to learn that the department may have protected a pedophile deputy.

Nope.

Hutchens was appointed to her post on June 10, the day before Rackauckas sent his letter; she was sworn in on June 19. Proving she’s not a novice bureaucrat, the newly minted sheriff fired off a defensive June 26 blame-the-messenger letter to Rackauckas. Hutchens wrote that Captain Tim Board, who oversees criminal investigations, “assumes full responsibility for failing to identify any deficiencies in the investigation,” and then, despite that admission, she got pompous.

“I am somewhat uncertain as to why you would question the way our respective offices handle internal investigations,” Hutchens wrote in her a letter—which the sheriff’s office refused to share with me even after I filed a formal California Public Records Act request. (I obtained the letter through other law-enforcement sources.)

Perhaps, Sandra, the answer to your wonderment is elementary: Rackauckas questioned this investigation because the conduct of the OCSD in this case was, well, questionable.

Hutchens, who recently told Cameron Jackson, host of KUCI’s The OC Show, that she will seek election to her office in 2010, declined to field my questions about Stenger or the DA’s complaints. If she had, my first would have been: After all we’ve learned about deputy corruption and incompetence in recent years, can the public have confidence when one Orange County sheriff’s deputy controls the criminal investigation of another deputy?

Instead, Hutchens issued a short written statement that “acknowledged and accepted responsibility for missteps that had taken place,” claimed unspecified “appropriate measures were subsequently taken to ensure that there would be no recurrence of those missteps,” and reiterated what she told Rackauckas: Deputies investigating criminal complaints against deputies in the same department “is the standard for law-enforcement agencies throughout California.”

While Hutchens seems to be hiding behind the status quo, Rackauckas appears to want to play—at least in this circumstance—the role of reformer. We’ll have to see how this plays out, but for now, the DA is saying the right things.

“The Stenger investigation reveals the classic problem when a law-enforcement agency investigates its own,” Rackauckas says. “The perception of bias, whether fact or fiction, is an impediment to public confidence in law enforcement.”

-- R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly