The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday that the sheriff's department and prosecutors in Orange County, California, ran an extensive jailhouse informant program for years that violated the rights of criminal defendants.
The federal agency, which began investigating the allegations in 2016, issued a lengthy report detailing Orange County authorities' use of the informants from 2007 to 2016 and their failure to release information, as required by law, about incriminating statements gathered by the informants to lawyers for the accused.
