OC jail phone vendor again records confidential calls between inmates and their attorneys

The telephone vendor for the Orange County jail system — already embattled for inadvertently recording nearly 34,000 confidential attorney-client phone calls before repairing the system in 2018 — is again breaching protected calls, according to court papers.

In the latest lapse, phone vendor GTL in 2019 recorded six calls from jail inmates to the Orange County Public Defender’s branch office in Westminster, said a motion filed Friday by Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders. The recordings were made from April to December 2019, even though the Westminster phone number had been added to a “do not record” list kept by GTL, of Reston, Virginia.

One of the recordings was of Sanders’ client, Ryan Franks, who pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing for car theft. Franks is hoping to take back his plea and have the charges dismissed under the premise that GTL violated his constitutional rights.

Franks has subpoenaed more documents from GTL, while prosecutors are fighting to quash the motion. The Public Defender’s Office was notified of the new recordings by a special master, who was assigned by a judge in 2018 to take custody of all the recorded calls and notify defense attorneys.

Sanders said the number of recorded calls to the Westminster office could be in the thousands.

“It is illogical that (only) six calls were recorded,” Sanders said, explaining that either the computer would record all the calls to that number or none of them. “It is unfortunate that over the years, GTL failed to deliver truth or transparency to these issues.”

Sanders noted that in the early days of the controversy, GTL kept delivering different numbers for the volume of recorded calls.

Authorities first learned in June 2018 that, for the previous three years, the phone system had been recording calls between inmates and their attorneys because of “human error.” In all, 4,356 such conversations were recorded because the lawyers’ phone numbers were mistakenly left off a “do-not-record” list. GTL assured the Sheriff’s Department in 2018 that the problem had been resolved.

Another 29,456 unanswered calls were also recorded, said GTL spokesman James Lee, in an earlier interview. Lee had no comment on Friday. Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, said the agency was unaware of any new attorney-client recordings.

Defense attorneys were fearful that the recorded conversations were turned over to prosecutors, who could then eavesdrop on planning sessions between defendants and their attorneys.

However, a May 2019 Orange County grand jury report found no wrongdoing on the part of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office or Sheriff’s Department in the handling of the recorded calls, which violated the most sacred of legal tenets. Grand jurors found no cases affected by the breach. The panel, however, concluded the Sheriff’s Department was insufficiently trained to oversee the phone system.

It wasn’t the first time GTL had recorded attorney-client calls. The telephone carrier had done it twice before in Florida. Calls between inmates and their attorneys were mistakenly recorded in Pinellas and Charlotte counties.