Nearly 34,000 Orange County inmates’ calls to attorneys recorded

Assistant public defender Scott Sanders said Friday that he does not believe the new disclosures come close to capturing the true number of client-attorney calls recorded by GTL, or the number of those calls that were accessed by the Sheriff’s Department. Both recording a phone call between an attorney and his or her client, and accessing that recording, could be violations of a confidentiality privilege considered one of the most sacrosanct tenets of U.S. law.

The Sheriff’s Department’s release did not specify the number of times calls were accessed, but the number 347 was revealed in court. What remains unclear is the actual number of calls that were accessed – meaning they were listened to or downloaded by sheriff’s deputies or prosecutors – because any one call could have been accessed multiple times.

So not only were the calls recorded, but the Sheriffs office actually may have listened to hundreds of those calls.

They should fire the entire department and arrest those who illegally accessed those calls. I fully believe that those in law enforcement should be held to an extremely high standard when dealing with civil rights issues and in purposefully violating them should be punished the maximum standard allowed. It is people like this that give all police a bad name and if they want to show that it is not a systemic issue then they need to weed out those responsible and hold them accountable.