In early 2015, the Orange County District Attorney’s office heard that Scott Sanders planned to file a 500-page motion backed by 20,000 pages of exhibits on behalf of his client. At a pretrial hearing in January, Matt Murphy, the senior deputy district attorney, blasted the defense lawyer in front of Superior Court Judge James A. Stotler, claiming that the document would exceed—by fourteen thousand words—the cumulative text of the U.S. Constitution, the Koran, the New King James Bible, Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Gettysburg Address. This effort to delay the start of the trial, Murphy argued, was nothing less than “unconscionable.”
As in the past, Sanders countered that the prosecution was belittling him and his attempts to find fault with the judicial system.
Almost unnoticed during the testy exchange was the defendant, whom writer R. Scott Moxley of the OC Weekly characterized as “merely a smiling, upbeat observer at today’s hearing.”
“I was pissed,” Steve Herr said. “Every time they argue like this, Sam Herr and Julie Kibuishi become secondary. Sometimes, they don’t even mention their names.”
So irritated was Steve by the slow process that he couldn’t even muster the fury that most in his position would feel when Dan nodded at him. The defendant did not appear to be self-satisfied or taunting. “He just acts like nothing happened,” Raquel said, “nothing at all.”
Yet the Herrs sensed that Dan was having a good day. “After being in that jail, he comes out, the courtroom is sunny, there are people there,” Steve said. “He can sit back and watch these guys argue with each other. For him, it’s a show. It’s entertainment. I’m sure his demeanor will be a lot different once we get this damn thing going.”
But it appeared that the trial would not occur for a while. Because so many judges were former prosecutors, Sanders indicated that he was on the verge of filing another motion seeking to disqualify the entire bench of Orange County Superior Court.
Then, on January 27, Judge Stotler announced that after days of “soul-searching” he’d made a painful decision.
The previous Friday, as Sanders lobbed “vociferous invectives” at prosecutors, the judge wondered whether people in the gallery were questioning why he didn’t halt the defense attorney.
“I was actually thinking that,” Judge Stotler said. Yet he allowed Sanders to continue, he explained, so he could “dig his own grave.”
In other words, Judge Stotler had grown to dislike the lawyer so much that he wanted Sanders to sabotage himself. “That’s not proper judicial thinking,” Stotler concluded.
As a result, he said, he had no choice but to recuse himself from the case.
Steve was stunned. “It’s just not fair, sir,” he shouted in court.
“This is a travesty of our justice system,” he told the Daily Pilot. “What [the judge] … did was add another year or two to the case.”
What infuriated Steve the most was that he’d been promised that the trial would start within a month. Stotler “despised the public defender, but that didn’t help us out,” Steve said. “Sanders doesn’t want this case to go to trial unless we drop the death penalty. He’s dragging it out, and it’s working for him. Now, we have to start again with a different judge.”
Within weeks, Superior Court Judge John D. Conley had been assigned the case. Sanders immediately filed a motion asking him to step down, as well. Between 1972 and 2001, Sanders pointed out, Conley had worked for the district attorney’s office. During Conley’s time as a homicide prosecutor, the lawyer claimed, he relied upon at least four questionable informants—including a man called “Orange County’s most used informant,” a habitual criminal who answered to a plethora of aliases and was convicted of felonies in both California and Utah. Since Sanders intended to call Conley as a witness during hearings about law enforcement misconduct in Orange County, the attorney insisted that the judge was not suited to preside over Dan’s case.
Murphy claimed that he’d never seen a judge challenged so close to the start of a murder trial. “This is all new territory for us,” he said.
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Conley maintained that he hadn’t used a jailhouse informant in more than thirty years and asked if Murphy and Sanders could decide on another local judge to consider whether he was biased. “I think it’s unlikely we’re going to agree,” Sanders replied.
In March, a judge in neighboring Los Angeles County denied Sanders’ motion. It would take months for Conley to catch up on the motions and filings related to Dan’s case.
“Remember, I’m coming in the middle of a movie,” he said.
With the focus off of his capability at being a fair arbiter, Conley attempted to assert his authority by scolding both the prosecutor and defense lawyer for bickering in court. “Both of you say the exact same thing—‘My opponent is a jerk. He keeps accusing me of untrue things. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him,’” the judge said at one hearing. He termed the confrontations “child’s play.”
“Your own personal dislikes for each other have taken over your cool detachment,” Conley said. “You have gotten wrapped up in this, and you are angry at each other and you are striking out.”
The therapeutic lecture did nothing to ease tensions.
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After one hearing, Steve and Sanders were standing outside the courtroom and briefly exchanged greetings. Now that the attorney had failed in his effort to replace Judge Conley, Steve said, it was time “to get this trial going.”
He claimed that Sanders replied, “Get the death penalty off the table and we’re done.”
“I can’t do that.”
According to Steve, Sanders said, “Then, expect a lot of motions.”
Steve viewed the comment as akin to extortion. He wrote a complaint to the California Bar Association, hoping to bar Sanders from the case. Not surprisingly, the effort was denied.
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In August, Sanders filed another motion—this one 754 pages long—along with thousands of exhibits, once again accusing law enforcement of decades of improperly utilizing informants, withholding evidence, and general misconduct.
In a letter to his blogging friend, Dan contended that the lengthy motion was part of a remedy to an engrained virus that affected more than just him. “You can’t cure any sickness without finding the CAUSE and removing it,” Dan wrote. “People are angry and confused as to why this has taken so long. Well, how about looking then to the REAL CAUSE? This motion is the cure to MANY individual ILLNESSES because it’s targeted towards what’s truly damaging our justice system: CORRUPTION!”
Murphy had heard every argument of this nature before and remained unmoved. “These are the same allegations Mr. Sanders made in February of 2014, and again, in January of this year,” the prosecutor said. “He has added nothing new. These claims were false then and they are false now.”
In an interview with the Orange County Register, Sanders agreed that the victims’ families “have suffered terrible losses, and we empathize completely with what they have been through. However, this case was never delayed for the sake of delay. We continue to believe that the motion was meritorious and was needed to be brought in Mr. Wozniak’s case.”
Yet for Junko Kibiushi—still wracked with guilt because she had been too busy cooking to give Juri a final hug—Sanders would never understand the taxing effect that the delays were having: “If he were in the same shoes as we were, and if he is a parent, if this happened to his child, I don’t know if he would do the same thing as he is right now. He said in court, ‘I’m not a bad person.’ Well, I don’t think he is, but understand how we feel.”
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But her frustration would soon come to an end. On October 27, Judge Conley denied Sanders’ request to recuse the Orange County District Attorney’s office from the case. Three days later, Conley also ruled that—despite what may have occurred during previous investigations—there was no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in Dan’s case and the district attorney’s office would be allowed to argue for the death penalty.
“This case cannot be used as a vehicle to right any wrongs there might have been in the past, or to express disapproval of them,” Conley wrote. “Mr. Wozniak’s potential sentence should not be reduced based on what law enforcement did or did not do in other cases. His case must stand on its own.”
After attending more than one hundred hearings over the past five years, Steve sounded both relieved and optimistic.
“We’re now moving closer toward a trial,” he told KABC in Los Angeles, “which is all we’ve ever asked for.”
Nobody in law enforcement doubted that the defense would file other motions that might further slow the process. But it looked like Daniel Wozniak was running out of options and, sometime in the very near future, he’d face justice.
Or so they hoped.