Man guilty in 1998 murder gets new trial

Appeals court rules that Orange County D.A.’s office failed to disclose information about jailhouse snitch.

A man convicted in the 1998 killing of a pregnant woman will receive a new trial after an appellate court concluded that the Orange County district attorney’s office failed to disclose pertinent information about a jailhouse informant, the latest fallout from a years-long controversy embroiling the county’s justice system.

In a 55-page opinion made public late Friday, the appellate court upheld a ruling by Judge Thomas Goethals ordering a new murder trial for Henry Rodriguez, who was twice convicted in connection with the slaying of Jeanette Espeleta and her unborn child.

The ruling is the latest to stem from allegations that the the district attorney’s office and Sheriff’s Department maintained a covert network of jailhouse snitches and repeatedly failed to disclose information about those informants to defense attorneys, violating the constitutional rights of criminal defendants.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said prosecutors are prepared to retry the case. A pretrial setting conference is scheduled for Aug. 11. In a previous news release, the district attorney’s office denied it had done anything improper in Rodriguez’s case.

The ruling comes less than two weeks after the Orange County grand jury released a report dismissing as a “myth” claims that sheriff’s and district attorney’s officials ran a secret operation using jailhouse informants to obtain confessions from criminal defendants. The report was hailed as a vindication by the district attorney and sheriff but blasted as a whitewash by several attorneys who have won retrials for their clients in the wake of the allegations about the use of informants.

Espeleta was eight months pregnant with the child of Rodriguez’s friend, who authorities say did not wish to pay child support, when she was killed and her body dumped in Long Beach harbor. Rodriguez was first convicted of aiding in Espeleta’s slaying in 2000, but an appeals court threw out the conviction based on a Miranda rights violation.

At a second trial in 2006, Michael Garrity, a jailhouse informant, testified that Rodriguez made incriminating remarks about the murder to him while they were housed together in jail. Rodriguez confessed he had helped dump Espeleta’s body in the ocean and left her as “shark bait,” Garrity said.

Rodriguez’s attorney, James Crawford, argued in court at the time that Garrity’s testimony should be thrown out because he had been acting at the government’s behest as a “planted snitch” during his talks with Rodriguez.

Doing so would have been a violation of Rodriguez’s right not to be questioned without his attorney present. Nevertheless, Rodriguez was convicted of murder in the second trial.

In February 2016, Goethals vacated that conviction based on Crawford’s argument that prosecutors failed to disclose important information about Garrity’s background. Rodriguez has remained out on bail since then, Crawford said.

In Friday’s ruling, a three-justice panel found that the district attorney’s office failed to give the defense information about Garrity’s history of receiving lenient sentences in exchange for providing information on other inmates.