Bill Hunt Vindicated by Attorney General Report

Without a doubt, Jaramillo and Carona threw Hunt under the bus...or at least tried.

 

After 5 long years and leaks of what appeared to be damning allocations against Bill Hunt, the Attorney General's report has been released (or at least leaked in its entirety). Unfortunately, the OCSD under Hutchens nor the AG 's office would do it. It took the courage of Friends For Fullerton's Future, Travis Kiger, to have the guts to share this with the voters and tax payers of Orange County.  R. Scott Moxley at OC Weekly re-reports on it and tells us a little more about his own investigative work.
First let's note the purpose of the report: to conduct an inquiry and evaluation of the investigation; identify areas for policy development that could lessen the possibility of a reoccurrence. 


After spending the weekend reading and re-reading the report I have concluded that Hunt has had the exact same story since 2003.  He maintains that he did nothing wrong and that the failure in the system came from Sgt. Downing, Lt. Downing, Asst. Sheriff Jaramillo, and Sheriff Carona.  Indeed the report spells out the facts quite effectively even pointing out that Jon Fleischman, acting as the OCSD public information officer, "...operated as a proxy for his superior while operating outside of the chain of command."

Page 5 of the report is the first time that Hunt's name is mentioned.  The report says that Sgt. Downing called Hunt before calling anyone else.  Hunt has maintained that he did not give anyone "permission" to drive anyone home or call an assistant sheriff.  Hunt then called his Captain and told him it was being handled as a routine marijuana case.  While Hunt was calling his captain, Sgt. Roche decided to call the Watch Commander to get the phone number of Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo.  You would think that Hunt would have been able to give Sgt. Downing Jaramillo's phone number if in fact Hunt had actually given Downing permission to call Jaramillo.  What ends up happening are two different notification chains up two different chain of commands:
1) Sgt. Downing to Hunt and Hunt to Capt. Lasanti.
2) Sgt. Downing to Lt. Downing (same last name but no relation), Lt. Downing to Asst. Sheriff Jaramillo, Jaramillo to Carona. 

To top it all off, Dept. Roche, the first Deputy on the case, was off for the next several days causing the filing of his report to be delayed a total of 5 days.  In that report, Dept. Roche includes some opinion about the case which was not substantiated by the facts.  Hunt told him to remove the opinion which Roche did after some discussion.  This was witnessed by Sgt. Gaffner whose signed declaration is here: 

Another key fact stated on the second page of the report is the fact that Carona had asked the AG's Office specifically NOT to re-investigate the matter.  Why would Carona not want the AG's office to re-investigate the case?  Was Carona afraid the AG might find out the truth that Carona himself was complicit?  Yep!

The entire event on October 26, 2003 should have been handled by Sgt. Downing just like any other case involving teens and marijuana.  Instead, Sgt. Downing wanted to look good for Jaramillo.  Lt. Downing did the same thing.  Worse, yet, is that all of them were unduly influenced by Jaramillo which the AG's report characterizes this way: "...fear of an Assistant Sheriff's displeasure led a few persons in the chain of command to depart from sound law enforcement policy and practice."

The report concludes that, "Given the information we examined, however, there was no evidence of a whole-sale departure from sound policy and practice or a cultural condition where such departures are viewed as the acceptable norm in this Department."  It sounds like maybe it was a minor screw up on top of a minor screw up on top of yet another minor screw up.  I'm not so sure.  I think when it came to Jaramillo and Haidl, everyone ran scared like cockroaches in an El Pollo Loco at night when the lights get suddenly turned on.

In the end, I have to agree with Moxley's assertion that Hunt was just a convenient person whom Carona could dump this on.  Let's also not for get that Hunt had announced he was running for sheriff against his own boss, giving Carona substantial motivation to reprimand, demote, fire, etc. Hunt.  So what became of the screw ups?  Carona, Haidl, Jaramillo have all been found guilty of Federal crimes that are directly and indirectly tied to the OCSD.  Sgt. Downing passed away.  Captain Lasanti, Hunt's immediate boss, retired.  Lt. Downing???  And Deputy Roche, who I think was the original source of the leak of the audio/video, is now a sergeant.  I think Roche played his part straight.  I believe Roche had good intentions of making an outright pot bust, albeit in spite of a confession of another teen, and was pissed off when it appeared that Haidl would get away with it. 

Typical of government, the report condones early retirement as a reasonable way to fix some of the problems that had occured on or after the incident.  "...the zest with which the Department pursued its own investigation, and the termination, proposed discipline or retirements of some of the persons responsible indicate that the Department is aggressively attempting to regain its footing after poorly handling a field contact and enduring a negative media encounter whose effects may linger for quite some time."  If I owned a company where my employees did not understand the chain of command, shame on me for not training them better.  If they chose not to use the chain of command, shame on them and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a sheriff by the toe..