Orange County Sheriff's Department Evidence Booking Issue - Has it Been Resolved?*

The OCDA and OCPD question whether current OCSD policies and procedures related to evidence booking and reporting are being followed. Response: Agrees with the finding for reasons explained below: The Sheriff's Department uses an automated evidence booking system known as Remedy which records when an item of evidence was collected, who booked it and when it was booked. According to the Grand Jury's report, "All items are booked separately into the Remedy system. Each item is packaged with a securely attached evidence tag and bar code label identifying the item. The Evidence Case Items Report (Evidence List) is generated as a PDF file, and later attached to the department report." (P. 6, referencing Figure 5.) The Grand Jury goes on to report that "[t]he case packet OCDA receives from OCSD now includes the Remedy Case Items Report." Put another way, the Grand Jury determined that the Remedy report is printed out by the Sheriff, attached to the crime report (referred to as a department report) and provided to the District Attorney. However, for reasons unknown to the Public Defender, the Remedy report is usually not included in the initial packet of discovery that is provided to deputy public defenders by the District Attorney upon appointment to a case. Instead, deputy public defenders must separately request Remedy reports from prosecutors in order to obtain them. When clients are eager to obtain immediate settlements or are presented with credit-for-time-served offers by prosecutors or judicial officers, attorneys and their clients are often faced with making decisions without access to these critical reports. It is unclear to the Public Defender whether attaching the Remedy report to the department report is a Sheriff's policy (as suggested on ) which is not being followed or whether the issue lies with District Attorney who ultimately must provide discovery to the defense. Nevertheless, when the Remedy reports are provided, the Public Defender is generally seeing that evidence collected is now being booked in a timely manner. However, the Public Defender does not touch every case where an arrest is made and evidence is collected. Although the Public Defender handles most criminal cases, a significant number of clients, especially in misdemeanor cases, plead guilty at their arraignment without an attorney. Additionally, some criminal cases are handled by privately retained counsel. Importantly, in a many of the cases identified by the Sheriff involving evidence that was never booked or booked late, no criminal prosecution was ever initiated. In these three scenarios—cases involving self-represented defendants, defendants represented by private counsel, and cases where arrests were made, evidence was collected but no case was filed—the Public Defender does not have access to the Remedy reports and cannot speak to whether policies and procedures related to evidence booking and reporting are being followed.

An audit of OCSD department reports submitted from March 2018 forward has not been conducted to confirm that current OCSD policies and procedures regarding evidence booking and reporting are being followed. Response: Agrees with Finding

Lack of system integration between Remedy and FBR necessitates duplicate data entry and reliance on manual oversight to reconcile the DR# and evidence list between the two systems. Defers to OCSD. Response:

A tour of the Property/Evidence Central Booking Facility is no longer included during deputy training. This limits their understanding of the overall chain of custody process. Defers to OCSD. Response: