Deal spared O.C. informant a life sentence. Now he faces another
In December 2017, federal prosecutors visited Orange County Superior Court to support something even more unusual than their cross-jurisdictional courtroom presence: an exceptionally light sentence for an attempted murder defendant who once testified he’d killed “up to five, maybe six” people.
Oscar Daniel Moriel originally faced life in prison under California’s threestrikes law when he was charged in 2005, but he spent more than a decade helping federal and state authorities as a jail informant in exchange for unprecedented leniency. Praised by federal and Orange County law enforcement officials as “instrumental” in securing convictions for major crimes, Moriel’s deal was described as fair justice for a man whose work against the Mexican Mafia mitigated his crimes.
But three years later, 40year-old Moriel is again facing life behind bars, accused of illegally packing a gun and ammunition as a felon.
It’s unclear, however, how his case will be affected by his role in a criminal justice scandal that’s the subject of an ongoing federal civil rights investigation, as the state attorney general’s office is prosecuting him instead of the Orange County district attorney’s office. And Moriel could face life in prison under the state’s three-strikes law.
“I don’t think three strikes apply; he will say it does,” Moriel’s court-appointed attorney, Christian Jensen, said in a phone interview.
Moriel’s new trouble is another indictment of Orange County’s decades-long use of informants, which dismantled several major criminal cases and brought civil rights investigators from the Department of Justice’s Washington office to Orange County for an investigation.
Moriel had been out of prison less than three months when he was arrested and charged on a parole violation in August. State prosecutors say they have the case because it came from their own law enforcement division.
Moriel was first questioned by Scott Sanders, an assistant public defender, in 2014 during Sanders’ defense of Scott Dekraai, who was being tried for the 2011 killing of eight people in Seal Beach. The case elicited testimony about Moriel’s uncharged crimes and propensity for gunplay that included several drive-by shootings.
Moriel isn’t the informant who talked to Dekraai in jail, but Sanders pointed to his work and prosecutors’ repeated failure to properly disclose it as evidence of a pattern of misconduct involving informants in Orange County.
Judge Thomas Goethals, now a 4th District Court of Appeal justice, eventually dismissed the death penalty because of the misconduct and sentenced Dekraai to life in prison. Moriel’s informant work had ripple effects beyond the Seal Beach murders too, including a murder defendant he questioned was released on a probation deal in 2014.
The central problem was that Moriel had questioned them after they’d been charged with crimes and didn’t have their attorneys with them. Given his status as a trained informant, Moriel was legally considered an agent of the government and thus couldn’t legally question anyone who was charged with a crime and represented by an attorney. Further, defense attorneys facing Moriel as a prosecution witness had a right to know information about him that could help their clients, such as a 2009 interview between Moriel and Santa Ana police detectives in which he speaks of grabbing “spots of my memory and [making] it seem like it was yesterday,” according to a transcript.
Sanders said the statement should have disqualified Moriel as a prosecution witness.
“He didn’t get a break because he gave credible testimony and reliable testimony. He gave it because they made a deal with the devil and they decided to keep that deal,” Sanders said.
Assistant Dist. Atty. James Laird defended Moriel after Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue sentenced him in 2017, telling journalists the informant shouldn’t be blamed for law enforcement misconduct.
“He didn’t know about constitutional law. Other police departments and other police agencies should have known about it at the time, but it’s never been his fault for what other agencies did,” Laird said.
Moriel had already served three prison stints for threatening a witness, vehicle theft and attempted armed carjacking when he was sentenced in 2017 for second-degree attempted murder, so under the threestrikes law he faced life in prison. But Donahue instead sentenced him to 17 years at Laird’s request.
Laird also told the judge that although Moriel testified in 2013 that he’d killed people, the Santa Ana Police Department had not found any victims.
Though sentenced to 17 years, Moriel was credited for time served in jail and for good behavior, so he was released May 24 to be supervised by a parole officer for three years, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That parole officer filed a violation report Aug. 12.
Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment on Moriel’s new charges. Orange County district attorney’s office spokeswoman Kimberly Edds directed questions to the state attorney general’s office.