Rampant abuse seen at O.C. jail

A grand jury transcript released Monday describes an Orange County jail in disarray, with deputies watching television, playing video games and taking naps while inmates were allowed to use brutality and intimidation to keep order in the cellblocks.

The conclusions are contained in 7,000 pages of transcripts from a special criminal grand jury impaneled by Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas to investigate the 2006 death of an inmate at Theo Lacy Jail, as well as how the Orange County Sheriff’s Department handled the incident.

The Sheriff’s Department tried to keep the grand jury’s evidence secret. The Times and the Orange County Register went to court to have the transcripts made public. They show that then-Sheriff Michael S. Carona exercised his 5th Amendment rights rather than answer the panel’s questions.

The grand jury found that while one of the ranking guards at the jail in Orange exchanged personal cellphone text messages and watched the television show “Cops,” a 41-year-old computer technician was stomped and beaten to death not far from the glass-walled guard station.

Though the pummeling lasted up to 50 minutes, guards said they were unaware of it until it was over. While jail logs from that day said guards checked the cellblock where the beating occurred every 30 minutes, the grand jury concluded that the area had not been checked for five hours.

The transcripts suggest that a mixture of systemic indolence and officially sanctioned inmate violence underpinned the death of the inmate, John Derek Chamberlain.

“Inmates do run the jail system,” Phillip Le, a deputy on duty at the jail that day, told the grand jury. “There is more inmates than deputies.”

Chamberlain was in custody on suspicion of possessing child pornography when inmates dragged him into Cubicle D and attacked him in successive waves, at times washing blood from the crime scene and their own clothes. Inmates believed, mistakenly, that he had been charged with molestation.

He suffered 43 displaced rib fractures and was stripped, sodomized, spat on and urinated upon. During the attack, he screamed and pleaded for help. According to testimony, jail guard Kevin Taylor spent that time watching “Cops” and exchanged 22 personal text messages on his cellphone. It was not until an inmate stood in front of the guard station, waving his arms at the window, that deputies said they noticed something wrong.

“The cumulative evidence often demonstrated that vigilance was the exception as opposed to the rule,” according to a the report of the investigation prepared by Rackauckas.

Four inmates told investigators that jail deputies falsely told inmates that Chamberlain had been charged with molestation, setting up the fatal attack. But Rackauckas said the inmates’ story could not be corroborated independently. Nor was there enough evidence to charge sheriff’s deputies and officials, even though several lied to the grand jury, he said. The district attorney’s summary report also showed instances in which deputies tampered with and withheld evidence and interfered with the grand jury investigation.

Rackauckas expressed doubt about a log entry at 2:30 p.m. on the day of Chamberlain’s slaying, saying that the Mission Viejo man told deputies he was not in fear for his life. “That’s probably not very believable, but we don’t have any evidence to contradict it,” he said in a statement. “We don’t have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the entry is a falsification.”

As part of its probe, the grand jury examined why the Sheriff’s Department, then under the command of Carona, insisted on conducting the investigation into Chamberlain’s death, despite a clear county policy that the task belonged to the district attorney’s office.

Despite the “thorough and complete” work of the grand jury, Rackauckas said, he still did not know who in the sheriff’s chain of command determined that the agency would investigate. Carona refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Asked if he was the sheriff of Orange County the day Chamberlain died, Carona declined to answer that question as well. Prosecutors finally gave up and excused Carona.

Conflicting evidence hampered the probe. A former sheriff’s captain, Bob Blackburn, testified that Assistant Sheriff Steve Bishop told him that Carona had made the decision to break policy and let his own department investigate the killing, though Bishop denied this.

The transcripts show that ranking sheriff’s officials professed not to know or were hazy on the details of who made the decision not to hand the jail death investigation over to the district attorney.

Bishop, who supervised investigations, and then-Undersheriff Jo Ann Galisky, who supervised jail operations, told the grand jury that they were unaware of cases in which the district attorney conducted a criminal investigation of an in-custody homicide, even though their own department had informed them otherwise. The district attorney’s office, in fact, had investigated 129 prior inmate deaths.

Galisky said she had a conversation with Carona about which agency should handle Chamberlain’s slaying, but “he never told me how it should be handled.” During her testimony she conceded having altered a memo from a lieutenant that outlined the policy for custodial deaths to say that the Sheriff’s Department was the lead investigative agency in such cases. The memo had been provided to an earlier grand jury.

Both Galisky and Bishop were forced out of their jobs in January, shortly after Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson was briefed by the grand jury.

Assistant Chief Charles Lee Walters, who is in charge of overseeing the county’s jail operations, professed ignorance of the district attorney’s long record of handling inmate deaths.

After lengthy testimony in which Walters appeared to have few specific answers to questions about jail practices, a prosecutor told him, “You don’t seem to have any passion about your job.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. Yvonne Shull testified that she made the initial decision to have the Sheriff’s Department assume the lead role in the investigation.

Along with their troubling glimpse of the sheriff’s hierarchy, the transcripts offered a rare look into a jailhouse’s inner workings.

Le, one of the officers on duty during the beating, said inmate “shot-callers” would enforce jail rules with beatings, called “taxations,” and receive special privileges in return.

He said guard Kevin Taylor, who was accused by inmates of instigating the attack on Chamberlain by telling inmates that he was a child molester, would tell shot-callers about certain inmates flouting policy. He said Taylor was aware the shot-callers would use violence to keep other inmates in line.

Le was the first one to notice Chamberlain’s wounds. He said he was alerted by an inmate standing on a table waving his arms. Asked why Taylor would not notice this himself, Le responded, “I am assuming Deputy Taylor’s focus was on the TV, sir.”

Another guard, Sonja Moreno, said Taylor told her he had been watching “Cops” when the attack occurred.

Jason Chapluk, another guard, said that after the incident he talked by phone with Carona, who was in Europe.

“He said something along the lines of ‘Hey, nobody knows what it’s like to have people writing bad stuff about you in the newspaper more than me. Don’t worry about it. We’re supporting you. Just hang tough in there,’ ” Chapluk testified.

The grand jury transcripts were released two weeks after Superior Court Judge James A. Stotler found that the Sheriff’s Department had no legal standing to keep them secret.

The Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register argued for full access to the grand jury transcripts, pointing to the California law that requires their release after indictments are returned, unless they jeopardize defendants’ rights to a fair trial. The Sheriff’s Department argued they should be kept under seal until sheriff’s officials could review the transcripts, on the grounds that they might contain “highly confidential” information about deputies, witnesses or inmates.

The county this year agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Chamberlain’s father, who alleged that deputies instigated the assault, promising attackers they would be able to watch a baseball playoff game, and ignored his son’s cries for help.

Nine inmates were ultimately charged in the death, and all have pleaded not guilty. No charges have been filed against sheriff’s personnel, and all of the guards remain employed as deputies. Chamberlain’s death marked the first slaying in an Orange County jail since 1994. Anderson, who took over after Carona was indicted in an unrelated criminal case, has promised greater transparency.

At times, Sheriff’s Department brass appeared out of touch with the realities within the county’s own jails. Brian Wilkerson, a captain who oversees Theo Lacy Jail, said in testimony that he was surprised and disappointed to hear that deputies acknowledged using shot-callers to control the inmate population, used cellphones to conduct personal text-message conversations while on duty and recorded log entries saying that their barracks were secure without walking the floor.

“You have a very different view of Theo Lacy Jail than what has been presented to this grand jury,” one grand jury member responded to the captain. “You may want to spend more time there.”

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Jailhouse jargon

Orange County sheriff’s deputies testifying before the grand jury about an inmate’s death in 2006 used a variety of terms to describe life and conditions inside Theo Lacy Jail. They include:

10-12: Radio code to alert jailers who are sleeping, watching television or playing video games that a supervisor is approaching

Chester: An inmate accused of molestation

Cut paper: A report, such as medical papers on behalf of inmates, that jailers try to avoid filing

Fish: A new inmate

Mouse: A veteran inmate who assists a fish acclimate to jail. He helps a fish decide which racial group he wants to align with, where to eat and which bathroom to use.

Pisano: A Mexican-born inmate

Prowler: A jailer who is out of the booth, patrolling barracks and cells, counting inmates and checking on their welfare

Shot-caller: An inmate who earns special treatment by keeping other inmates in line

Snitch jacket: A jailer or inmate identified as a snitch

Southside rep: An inmate who watches over Latino inmates

Tank heavy: A female inmate who keeps women in line

Taxation: A beating of an inmate, ordered by a shot-caller

Torpedo: An inmate who administers a taxation on behalf of a shot-caller

Wood rep: An inmate who keeps white inmates in line

Source: Orange County Grand Jury