Countywide : Lawyers Dispute Gates’ Jail Contract

Regardless of whether Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates broke a promise, he didn’t break any contracts when he authorized sending more dangerous inmates to the Theo Lacy Branch Jail, Gates’ attorney maintained Friday.

Deputy County Counsel David Chaffee’s comments came during a break in Gates’ testimony in an Orange County Superior Court lawsuit brought by the city of Orange to block expansion of the branch jail and to prevent the transfer of maximum security prisoners there.

On Thursday, Gates acknowledged on the stand that to ease crowding at the county’s central jail in Santa Ana, he changed the classification system of inmates eligible to be housed at Theo Lacy Jail in Orange, despite a promise to Orange city officials that he would not.

“Legally, there’s miles of difference between a promise and a contract,” Chaffee told a reporter Friday. “His promise was to keep the types of inmates that were there as long as he could.”

Attorney Geoffrey K. Willis, who represents the city of Orange, told reporters that when Gates signed an environmental impact report on expansion of the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in 1989, he was agreeing not to change the type of inmates housed at the facility.

“When he signed the EIR, he signed a contract,” Willis said. “The city of Orange felt the type of inmate would not be changed.”

Gates reiterated from the stand Friday that only minimum- and medium-security inmates have been housed at the Theo Lacy Jail.

But Willis criticized Gates for keeping secret his criteria for classifying and screening minimum-, medium- and maximum-security prisoners.

“They’ve created this entire system,” Willis said of the sheriff’s office. “Then they have hidden the system to the rest of the world.”