In court, defense attorney Scott Sanders continually came up with reasons to postpone the trial while the court deliberated over what he termed prosecutorial misconduct. For instance, the lawyer alleged, the interview that Dan agreed to do for the MSNBC show Lockup violated his constitutional rights.
According to Sanders, Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputies deliberately set Dan up by facilitating the interview, hoping that the defendant would make the type of incriminating statements that would hurt him at trial.
The charge was vehemently denied. The producer repeated her claim that she chose Dan because the charismatic actor had caught her eye; she knew nothing about his case beforehand.
Witnesses claimed that deputies were not even present when Dan was asked to appear on the program. But even if they had been, attorneys for both NBC and 44 Blue—the company that produced the Lockup series—said that the show actually provided Dan with a forum to make his case to the public.
“Wozniak denies that he committed the murders,” the producers stated in court papers, recounting Dan’s on-air appearance, “describes his surprise when he was arrested during his bachelor party, explains how he attempted suicide after his arrest, and professes his love for the Bible.”
Indeed, senior deputy district attorney Matt Murphy insisted that he knew nothing about the interview beforehand. When he did learn about what transpired in the jail, he said, he extended the professional courtesy of informing Sanders about the interview. With a confession from Wozniak, Murphy continued, he was uninterested in using an excerpt from the program to convince jurors of the defendant’s guilt.
Once again, the prosecutor blamed Sanders for creating a scandal where none existed. But the lawyer was unconvinced that his adversary was being truthful. “A lot of coincidences seem to happen in that jail,” Sanders told City News Service.
The lawyer was even more vehement about an “unchecked and lawless custodial informant program” that he claimed was institutionalized in the Orange County jail system. On January 31, 2014, Sanders and fellow public defender Lisa Kopelman filed a 505-page motion asserting that the district attorney office’s informant system prevented their client Scott Dekraai—the accused Seal Beach salon shooter—from receiving a fair trial.
Shortly after Dekraai’s arrest, he was placed in a cell next to a fellow prisoner at the Central Jail Complex in Santa Ana, a gang member facing charges in two separate cases. After speaking to Dekraai, the inmate allegedly told deputies that the suspect had provided him with details about the 2011 killing spree. In response, prosecutors had a recording device installed in Dekraai’s cell and recorded him continuously for 132 hours, the motion maintained.
The county’s informant system had also been utilized, Sanders argued, to entrap Dan. In the Wozniak case, his defense attorney said, a paid informant was used to elicit a jailhouse confession. But Murphy countered that he generally avoided using data provided by jailhouse “snitches” and did not plan to include the man’s statements at Dan’s trial.
The use of informants by American law enforcement predates the founding of the United States. The first documented wrongful conviction in the newly formed country centered on a forger, Silas Merrill, who was placed in a cell with Jesse Boorn in Manchester, Vermont, in 1819 after his brother-in-law, Russell Colvin, disappeared. Merrill testified that Boorn confessed that he and his brother, Stephen, had murdered Colvin. The siblings were convicted of the killing and sentenced to death—while Merrill was set free. But before the Boorns could be sent to the gallows, Colvin was located in New Jersey.
According to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, prosecutors had used informant testimony to convict close to 50 percent of all inmates exonerated from death row. This meant that erroneous testimony from informants was responsible for the greatest number of wrongful convictions in the United States—hence the slogan “If you can’t do the time, drop a dime.”
After Sanders filed his motion in the Dekraai case, Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals ruled that prosecutors had improperly used informants and didn’t turn over necessary evidence. However, the judge added, the actions were “negligent rather than malicious.”
Sanders vowed to continue the pressure. “Unless there is a fear created … that there are ramifications when you commit misconduct,” he told the Davis Vanguard, a watchdog and news reporting organization for the city of Davis, California, “it’s going to happen.”
But while these platitudes were being discussed, prosecutors were so preoccupied with defending themselves that bringing an actual case to trial seemed like an afterthought. And that meant that the agonizing wait to see Dan Wozniak face a jury would continue a lot longer.