Orange County sheriff temporarily suspends plan to erase 2-year-old emails as judge issues court order

Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes has temporarily suspended his plan to automatically delete all department emails more than two years old, just as a judge on Friday ordered a halt to any erasures.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge Gregg Prickett prevents the sheriff from destroying emails related to the improper recording of attorney-client phone calls from the Orange County jail and to potential evidence in a burglary case for six months.

Prickett also ordered the sheriff to send a departmentwide email notifying employees of the freeze.  Barnes also must retrieve emails from certain employees that might already have been deleted.

The sheriff had intended to return to the department’s old practice of erasing 2-year-old emails, which was halted in 2016 while the system was upgraded. But attorneys from the Orange County Public Defender’s Office went to court to block the erasures, fearful that critical evidence could be destroyed by a department already under a cloud for what appellate justices called “systemic” abuse by improperly using jailhouse informants.

Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders argued in court Friday that the court order was needed because Barnes’ suspension of the auto-deletion policy doesn’t stop the department’s 4,000 employees from deleting on their own. The emails cannot be retrieved 30 to 45 days after they have been deleted.

Consequently, Sanders asked for an existing temporary court order to be extended.

Annie Loo, a deputy county counsel representing the Sheriff’s Department, told the judge that the entire agency did not need to preserve its emails for just two cases.

Sanders was appearing on behalf of burglary defendant Justin Weisz. Deputy Public Defender Sara Ross was in court Friday seeking to preserve emails linked to the recorded attorney-client calls, which violate one of the most sacred tenets of the law. The improper recordings lasted three years and ended last June.

The numbers of calls have shifted over the past few months, but the phone vendor, GTL of Reston, Virginia, says 4,356 conversations between inmates and attorneys were recorded for various reasons. One of the main reasons given is that the lawyers’ phone numbers were mistakenly left off a “do-not-record” list. Other attorneys didn’t know about the list and failed to put their numbers on it.