A grand jury transcript released Monday describes an Orange County jail in disarray, with deputies watching television, playing video games and taking naps while inmates were allowed to use brutality and intimidation to keep order in the cellblocks.
The conclusions are contained in 7,000 pages of transcripts from a special criminal grand jury impaneled by Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas to investigate the 2006 death of an inmate at Theo Lacy Jail, as well as how the Orange County Sheriff's Department handled the incident.
The Sheriff's Department tried to keep the grand jury's evidence secret. The Times and the Orange County Register went to court to have the transcripts made public. They show that then-Sheriff Michael S. Carona exercised his 5th Amendment rights rather than answer the panel's questions.
The grand jury found that while one of the ranking guards at the jail in Orange exchanged personal cellphone text messages and watched the television show "Cops," a 41-year-old computer technician was stomped and beaten to death not far from the glass-walled guard station.
Though the pummeling lasted up to 50 minutes, guards said they were unaware of it until it was over. While jail logs from that day said guards checked the cellblock where the beating occurred every 30 minutes, the grand jury concluded that the area had not been checked for five hours.
The transcripts suggest that a mixture of systemic indolence and officially sanctioned inmate violence underpinned the death of the inmate, John Derek Chamberlain.
"Inmates do run the jail system," Phillip Le, a deputy on duty at the jail that day, told the grand jury. "There is more inmates than deputies."
Chamberlain was in custody on suspicion of possessing child pornography when inmates dragged him into Cubicle D and attacked him in successive waves, at times washing blood from the crime scene and their own clothes. Inmates believed, mistakenly, that he had been charged with molestation.
He suffered 43 displaced rib fractures and was stripped, sodomized, spat on and urinated upon. During the attack, he screamed and pleaded for help. According to testimony, jail guard Kevin Taylor spent that time watching "Cops" and exchanged 22 personal text messages on his cellphone. It was not until an inmate stood in front of the guard station, waving his arms at the window, that deputies said they noticed something wrong.
