Jail deputy convicted in conspiracy to hide federal informant

A federal court jury convicted a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Tuesday of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in a scheme aimed at hiding an inmate who had been working as a federal informant.

Jurors convicted James Sexton after deliberating for roughly two hours about his involvement in handling the inmate at the Men’s Central Jail. A previous trial of Sexton earlier this year had ended with jurors deadlocked 6 to 6.

The verdict means that Sexton becomes the seventh sheriff’s official found guilty of trying to thwart an FBI investigation into jailhouse abuse and misconduct.

Prosecutors argued that Sexton was an integral part of a plot to hide inmate Anthony Brown, an FBI informant, in an effort to stymie the federal probe and prevent abuses by deputies from coming to light. Sexton named the mission Operation Pandora’s Box, prosecutors said, using his skills as the senior deputy at the jail’s intake department to assign aliases to the informant and keep the informant’s fingerprints off the falsified booking records.

Sexton’s attorney painted a different picture of his client, emphasizing that Sexton had been a deputy for less than three years. The Pandora’s Box email was a joke, the attorney argued. Since Brown had been revealed as an informant, Sexton and others were told to protect the inmate from other inmates and deputies he was accusing of wrongdoing, the lawyer told jurors.

Six sheriff’s officials were convicted on related charges during a separate trial earlier this year.