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Even after the Orange County Sheriff’s Department discovered one of its investigators mishandled evidence and lied about it, the department still tasked him with probing into widespread evidence mishandling of his peers, according to a recent court motion.
Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders alleges in his motion that the Sheriff’s Department then tried to conceal information from the district attorney’s office to lessen the chances that Det. Matthew LeFlore would be prosecuted.
LeFlore is one of the subjects of the widely reported evidence mishandling scandal, where Orange County sheriff’s deputies were found to have booked evidence late or failed to book evidence at all but subsequently lied about it in reports. For more than a year, Sanders has been revealing details about the scandal in court filings critical of the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s response to the scandal.