It was the scandal that Orange County Judge Thomas Goethals didn’t want to believe, the incendiary allegations of law enforcement wrongdoing that landed the high-profile trial he was presiding over at the center of a public firestorm.
More than a decade has passed since the Orange County “snitch scandal” began to unspool in Goethals’ courtroom, ultimately leading the veteran jurist to remove the Orange County district attorney’s office from the murder trial of mass shooter Scott Dekraai and to take the death penalty off the table.
In rulings that rocked the local legal community, Goethals found that deputies had misused jail informants to wrongly elicit incriminating statements from defendants and that prosecutors had failed turn over related evidence to defense attorneys.
Despite the outcry at the time by the then-leaders of the D.A.’s office and Sheriff’s Department, a lengthy U.S. Department of Justice investigation would later back the judge’s findings.
Goethals — after a subsequent tenure as an appellate judge — is stepping down from the bench on Monday after five decades in the local legal profession. In a strange twist of fate, the judge is retiring the same day as Scott Sanders, the tenacious defense attorney who first unearthed the informant scandal.
“He is not somebody who bends to any political pressure, he doesn’t bend to any sensationalism or anything like that,” Kate Corrigan, an Orange County defense attorney and former prosecutor, said of Goethals. “He keeps his mind set on what is right, what is fair, what is just and what is consistent to the law.”
‘Just who he is’
The rare — and possibly only — jurist in the state to have prosecuted a death penalty case, defended a death penalty case and presided over a death penalty case, Goethals was no stranger to the legal spotlight, even before the snitch scandal.
But, in truth, the Dekraai case has never strayed far from Goethals’ mind over the past decade.
A devoted family man, Goethals, at the age of 72, plans to spend much of his time during retirement with his three children and his seven grandchildren and traveling with his wife. But the judge also hopes to use the extra time to put the finishing touches on a book he is writing outlining his firsthand experiences presiding over the Dekraai case.
The road to the public unveiling of the snitch scandal was a long one, and Goethals is quick to acknowledge that he was “reluctant to see the truth.”
“It had contaminated the system for a long time in a systemic way,” Goethals said during a recent interview at his office at the appellate courthouse in the Santa Ana Civic Center. “And I guess I just didn’t want to believe that or it took a long time for me to be convinced that it was true. But once I was convinced, it was pretty obvious.”
Goethals’ no-nonsense persona on the bench belied his gregarious nature. Outgoing and physically active — including taking part in daily runs and later jogs or walks around the civic center during courthouse breaks — Goethals in less formal conversation is friendly, good-humored and often self-effacing.
His wife, Patty, said when they go out to dinner the first 20 minutes of the meal is often dedicated to her husband engaging the waiters in conversation.
“He never talks about himself, he just wants to know about everyone else,” Patty Goethals said. “He just loves to learn about people. That is just who he is.”
Patty, who met her husband more than 50 years ago during a blind date in high school, said his devotion to public service and compassion for those he encounters during often emotionally charged criminal cases were constants throughout his legal career.
“These are real people with real feelings who are going through real horrible times,” Patty Goethals said. “He listens and respects them.”
A viable career
The son of a successful civil attorney, Goethals was the second-born in a family of eight children. Growing up in Glendale, Goethals recalled watching his older brother blaze a direct path to a law career. But Goethals initially resisted a legal career, instead majoring in history at Santa Clara University.
One day during his senior year of college, his father sat down with him to discuss his future prospects, and provided a nudge toward law school.
“He told me, ‘You like to talk to people and you like to write — that is what I do for a living,’” Goethals recalled his father saying. “You could use that as a lawyer and it is a viable career for you.
“That resonated with me,” Goethals added. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer, but I thought, ‘That makes sense.’ “
Law school didn’t initially seem like an easy fit, and Goethals recalls at first powering through sheer stubbornness. Eventually, the lure and excitement of trying cases in a courtroom won out, and Goethals upon graduation applied to both the local district attorney and public defender’s offices.
The Orange County district attorney’s office offered him a job first — a day before the call came from the public defender’s office – and Goethals began a rapid rise through the ranks of local prosecutors. Within four years, Goethals was in the homicide unit, trying death penalty cases.
Among those cases was serial killer Rodney Alcala, whom Goethals described as “the most dangerous person I ever prosecuted.” By the time Goethals took over the prosecution of Alcala — for the 1979 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Robin Christine Samsoe — his first death penalty conviction had already been reversed on appeal.
“Nobody really wanted, honestly, to try that case again because all the evidence had been suppressed,” Goethals recalled. “I said, ‘You know what, I’ll try that case. We can’t let Rodney go. This is a bad guy and he is dangerous. We have to take a swing at it and I think we have enough evidence.’ “
Several years later, Goethals would also be part of the team that prosecuted Randy Kraft, a notorious 1970s-era serial killer dubbed the “Scorecard Killer.” Kraft — who some believe to be California’s most prolific serial killer — was convicted after a trial that lasted 11 months.
Goethals tried more than 100 cases by the time his tenure in the district attorney’s homicide division ended. He had risen to become co-supervisor of the unit, but his boss decided that they needed someone to head up the writs and appeals unit.
Goethals resisted the move, believing he was more cut out for the courtroom and not supervising a unit he referred to as the “brain trust” of the D.A.’s office. But, in retrospect, he acknowledges the move helped pave the way for his future legal career.
“It opened up my mind to the possibility that there were other things to do,” Goethals said.
For years, Goethals enjoyed his time in private practice, where he took on both civil cases and criminal defense cases. Then, at the age of 50, the Sept. 11 attacks led Goethals to turn his attention toward the bench.
“Not to overstate what I could contribute, but I thought people should stand up and, if they are called to public service, they should do it,” Goethals said of his reaction to 9/11. “And I felt called back.”
Goethals submitted his judgeship application, within months was chosen by the governor’s office, and was sworn in at the end of 2002. Within a decade, Goethals was presiding over some of the county’s most high-profile trials from his courtroom on the top floor of the central courthouse in Santa Ana.
Defense attorney John Barnett, who has known Goethals professionally for decades, described him as a “gifted trial lawyer” with a “natural style” that easily transitioned to Goethals’ time on the bench.
“He just knew things, he knew what lawyers were doing,” Barnett said. “He had a granular understanding of tactics, strategy, everything. Because he had seen everything and done everything.”
Corrigan described Goethals as someone with a strong moral compass yet “not at all arrogant …”
“He is always a gentleman, no matter what,” she said. “He is just a genuinely good guy.”
The Dekraai case
In 2011, Scott Dekraai, a former tugboat crewman, walked into a beauty salon in Seal Beach and opened fire, killing his ex-wife and seven others. The case was assigned to Goethals’ courtroom.
Dekraai had confessed after being arrested only a few blocks from the scene. There were countless eyewitnesses. The case seemed like a slam dunk for prosecutors, with the biggest question being whether Dekraai would end up on death row or spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Asked about his first reaction to being assigned to provide over the Dekraai case, Goethals turned to his life-long fascination with history and cited a quote from Winston Churchill about the Second World War: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.”
“I’m not comparing myself to one of the greatest people of the 20th century, I was nothing like him, but I kind of had that feeling,” Goethals was quick to explain. “I thought ‘I’m not going to fail either, I can do this. The media is here. The family members are here. We are under a microscope for everything we do. But I can do this.”
The hatred between the prosecution and defense was clear to Goethals, and the judge was taken aback when the prosecution team “went nuts” after being ordered to turn over information to Sanders about an informant. Both sides kept asking for extensions, and the judge recalled being shocked when Sanders told him he had already received thousands of pages of evidence related to an informant and was expecting thousands more.
One beautiful winter day in January 2014, Goethals walked into his courtroom, fresh from a run and looking forward to enjoying the view from his chambers of a snow-covered Mount Baldy. Instead, he was greeted by a cart full of binders, essentially barricading his way. Smiling, Goethals’ clerk informed him that the thousands of pages were a motion and related exhibits that had just been filed in the Dekraai case by Sanders.
Should an inmate happen to overhear an incriminating conversation and relay it to deputies, that information is potentially usable at trial. But planting experienced informants near defendants who have been charged and have lawyers, and using the informants to gather information, as Sanders alleged was happening in the jails, crosses a legal line.
Goethals was skeptical. While he didn’t know Sanders at that point, he knew the defense attorney had a reputation for sometimes being “hyperbolic.” But as he waded through the filing, Goethals also realized that Sanders’ claims would be “amazing if true.”
“He is making these accusations that are really serious and wild,” Goethals said. “And my reaction was, ‘Well, what the heck, this can’t be true.’ He is alleging misconduct that goes back years. … I never had any sense that there was something like that going on in the jail. And I thought, ‘How could I not know something about it?’ “
The reaction of the DA’s office — at the time led by District Attorney Tony Rackauckas — to Sanders’ accusations of the misuse of informants was “indignant and condescending.” But, after testimony by the informant, the DA’s office agreed not to use a recording the informant made of Dekraai, even as they continued to strenuously deny any wrongdoing.
Weeks later, the judge recalled, the defense dropped a bombshell – Dekraai would make an open guilty plea, leaving only the penalty phase of the trial. Goethals described the hearing where Dekraai entered his plea in front of a packed courtroom of victims, media and onlookers as a “once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
In a ruling that he candidly now acknowledges didn’t go far enough, Goethals initially found that the D.A.’s office had acted negligently in the Dekraai case, but at that point refused to block a potential death sentence.
“I have asked myself, ‘Did you just blow it, or were you in denial, what was it?’ ” Goethals said. “In hindsight, that ruling was wrong. I mean, it was right as far as it went, but it just didn’t go far enough.
“I was reluctant to see the truth,” he added.
But testimony regarding the use of informants — including from jailhouse deputies — continued. Goethals’ skepticism to Sanders’ claims of informant misuse slowly gave way.
‘Fair and fearless’
Anger at the D.A.’s office toward Goethals only increased after the judge removed the office from the Dekraai case. Prosecutors had already begun steering cases away from his courtroom, leaving it often dormant. And Rackauckas denounced his decision to kick them off the case as legally inappropriate.
Goethals said he heard rumblings at the time that the DA’s office had recruited a challenger for his judicial seat. At one campaign event, Rackauckas would later accuse Goethals of personal bias in his rulings and implied – wrongly as it turned out – that Goethals was angry at the DA for not hiring the judge’s son. At times, the judge recalled, Rackauckas made rare appearances in his courtroom, sat in the front row and glared at him.
Rackauckas could not be reached for comment.
“I’m not going to say I was completely insulated from it,” Goethals said of the public pressure in the midst of the Dekraai hearings. “But — and I mean this as sincerely as I can say it — it really didn’t bother me that much. … I really thought I was doing what the law required me to do.”
As more evidence about the misuse of informants came out — including internal sheriff records that revealed the depths of their use of snitches – the full scope of the scandal became clear. Goethals ultimately decided to take the death penalty off the table, sentencing Dekraai to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Goethals’ rulings were upheld by appellate judges, and later backed up by a years-long U.S. Department of Justice investigation that concluded Orange County prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies violated the rights of criminal defendants by systematically using jailhouse informants to garner incriminating evidence.
Sanders — whose work Goethals credits with breaking the snitch scandal — described him as “fair and fearless.”
“I don’t think Orange County has ever had a comparable criminal justice hero,” Sanders said. “We wrote motions that would have simply collected dust but for his bravery. Instead, he looked prosecutors, police officers and even victims in the eye and told them this process was going to be painful but that he was going to follow the facts, wherever they led.
“We knew we were right, that constitutional rights had been systematically violated, but sometimes I still can’t believe we somehow found our way into his courtroom,” Sanders added. “For three years, he stood up to a district attorney in Rackauckas who wanted to end his career and a sheriff in Sandra Hutchens who loathed him. Every day more and more truth coming out. And, throughout all of it, there was Judge Goethals, completely unflappable.”
In 2017, Goethals was appointed by the governor to the Fourth District Court of Appeals, where he spent the last seven years of his career. He was initially reluctant to make the move, wondering if he would be able to adjust to the more academic and cerebral nature of an appellate court compared to a trial court. But Goethals quickly learned to enjoy the work, his colleagues and the courthouse staff.
Goethals said he’s nearly done writing his book on the Dekraai case.
“As I look at the progression of events now, I don’t think I would have done anything different given what I had in front of me,” Goethals said. “And maybe I should have seen the truth faster than I did. But maybe it is good I didn’t. It wasn’t a situation where I felt I just went off the deep end.”
Reflecting on the Dekraai case, and his entire career, Goethals recalled an admonition he had given countless times to attorneys appearing before him.
“A judge’s job is to follow the evidence to find the truth.”
Public defender Scott Sanders, who upended OC’s legal landscape, retires after 32 years