By Mark Gutglueck
SAN BERNARDINO (September 9)–San Bernardino 7th Ward Councilwoman Treasure Ortiz this afternoon was convicted on a charge of unlawfully recording her August 29, 2024 conversation with San Bernardino Police Chief Darren Goodman but acquitted of a similar charge relating to her use of her cellphone to electronically memorialize another conversation she had two weeks earlier, on August 15, 2024 with Sergeant Jose Loera, the president of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association.
While the jury’s verdicts have brought the curtain down on the trial court proceedings in what was a tightly circumscribed airing of facts that proceeded out of a far wider circumstance than what was framed by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office for the jury’s consideration, Ortiz’s attorney vowed to pursue an appeal and press forward with Ortiz’s civil case against the City of San Bernardino and its police department.
It was Ortiz’s effort more than two years ago to document a series of events that formed the foundation of that civil suit which resulted in the recordings that constituted the crimes the district attorney’s office alleged she had committed and which served as the primary evidence presented against her, which ultimately led to both her conviction and acquital.
Ortiz, a professor in the field of public administration at Cal State San Bernardino has been involved in county and local politics for the better part of the last decade. In 2018, she applied for and was considered by the four remaining members of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors for appointment to replace James Ramos as Third District County Supervisor after he was elected to the California Assembly that November with two years remaining on his term as supervisor. She did not garner that appointment, but ran in the specially called May 2019 election to fill the vacancy created on the San Bernardino City Council as a consequence of then-Third Ward Councilman John Valdivia having gained election as mayor in the same November 2018 election and his having resigned from his council post with, likewise, two years remaining on the term to which he had been previously elected. Ortiz lost the May 2019 election to Juan Figueroa, who had been handpicked by Mayor Valdivia to replace him and proved unbeatable with Valdivia’s endorsement and the support of the same network of donors who had backed Valdivia.
During and in the aftermath of the 2019 election, Ortiz demonstrated herself as an implacable opponent of the pay-to-play political culture that was festering around Valdivia in which he was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and under-the-table cash payments from landowners, real estate speculators, developers, city franchise holders and entities competing for those franchises, business owners and principals whose businesses were competing for or had obtained contracts with the city to deliver goods or services and entrepreneurs seeking business operating permits and then militating on behalf of those who had given him the money to obtain city council decisions in their favor. In this context Ortiz leveled barbs at the San Bernardino Police Officers Union for its involvement in the Valdivia graftfest, based upon the union’s endorsement of him and his support of police officers association in its collective bargaining with the city for pay raise and benefit increases for the city’s police officers.
In 2022, Ortiz was among six candidates who challenged Valdivia for the mayor’s post up in that year’s June primary election. She finished fourth, not too far behind Valdivia, whose third place finish behind former San Bernardino City Attorney Jim Penman and former San Bernardino Human Services Director Helen Tran kept him out of the run-off in the November 2022 race, ultimately won by Tran.
Ortiz remained active in civic affairs.
In 2023, having relocated to a residence in the city’s Seventh Ward, Ortiz resolved to run for the city council once again, challenging the Seventh Ward incumbent, Damon Alexander, in the March 2024 primary.
Shortly after taking out nominations papers for the Seventh Ward slot, Ortiz was contacted by Penman, also a Seventh Ward resident, who was likewise intent on running against Alexander. Ortizx met with Penman, who informed her that members of the police union were intent on preventing her from capturing a position on the city council and were researching her thoroughly to find damning information that would be utilized by the union’s political action committee as the basis for “hit pieces” – mailers attacking her on the basis of her arrest record and interactions with law enforcement officers memorialized in data bases shared by local, state and national law enforcement agencies. He advised her to pull out of the race at once to avoid irreparable harm to her reputation. Shortly thereafter, a push-poll was mailed to high propensity voters in the Seventh Ward featuring suggestive questions insinuating that that Ortiz had a criminal record and inquiring whether, that being the case, the voter would be more or less likely to vote for her.
Ortiz scheduled an appointment with San Bernardino Police Chief Darren Goodman on November 18, 2023, at which she alerted him that members of his department were, on behalf of the police officers association of which they were also members, accessing the one or more of the criminal justice system data bases – NCIC, JDIC, CLETS CNI – to assemble damaging or prejudicial information relating to the opponents of the political candidates the San Bernardino Police Officers Association was backing. Goodman expressed utter skepticism about what Ortiz was telling him, inisting that the men under his command were law enforcement professionals committed to upholding the law and abiding by the protocols and regulations pertaining to accessing and utilizing the information contained in those data bases, which is deemed confidential and is therefore closely guarded. That information, under the data sharing arrangements among the departments and agencies that make up those network, is strictly limited to use in investigations and legitimate law enforcement operations. The misuse of information gleaned from the system or its diversion into the hands of those using it for illegitimate purposes, including political campaigning, would risk the department’s continuing participation in the network and future access to information critical to the department’s operations. It was unthinkable, indeed impossible, Goodman said, that what Ortiz told him had happened could have occurred. Nevertheless, Goodman said, there were what he called “trails” showing what terminal at specific agencies tied into the network had requested information from the data bases, and he would look into whether an inquiry with regard to Ortiz had been.
Two months later, in January 2024 and just as the campaign for the March primary was intensifying, Ortiz contacted the police chief again about the matter. Goodman, in explaining why he had not gotten back to Ortiz, said that he had run an audit of the data bases and that there were no trails between the department and data files relating to her in the data bases.
In the March 2024 primary, both Ortiz and Penman outdistanced Alexander, but neither polled a majority of the vote, which would have resulted in the council post being awarded to the winner outright. Instead, Penman, with 31.1 percent of the vote was consigned to a runoff in the November balloting against Ortiz, who had captured 39 percent of the March primary vote. Ortiz’s stronger showing in the primary was alarming to Penman and his supporters, among the most prominent of which were the members of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association.
Penman had been the elected city attorney in San Bernardino for 26 years, having first been elected in 1987 and reelected six times. He had, in 1994 vied unsuccessfully for San Bernardino County district attorney, a run which had widened and increased his name recognition. He had garnered, in addition to the police officers association endorsement, the support of other public employee and public safety unions. He had greater political experience and a greater depth of support throughout both the political, business and social establishment in the county seat. One factor that ran counter to that and in Ortiz’s favor was that she had Scott Beard, an established real estate professional and developer, in her corner. Beard had proven over the years to be one of the most prolific of political donors in San Bernardino and the surrounding cities. More notably still, he had championed a recall effort against all seven of the city’s council members, the mayor, the city attorney and the city clerk in 2013. He abandoned that effort against two of the council members when they ran aground themselves with regard to other legal issues and he did not follow through on trying to remove the mayor, who opted out of seeking reelection that year, rendering his recall moot. The petition gatherers came up short in getting sufficient signatures to remove the city clerk and three of the council members. The recall effort proceeded against Penman, who was then the city attorney, as well as Wendy McCammack, a councilwoman who was running for mayor that year, and Councilman Valdivia. Valdivia managed to retain his seat, with 705 of his constituents voting to keep him in office and 425 voting to remove him. McCammack, however, was ousted from office by a vote of 1,460 to 1,033. Penman, likewise, was voted out of office, by a vote of 7,730 to 5,013, ending his streak of five straight electoral victories since what was at that time his only his previous electoral defeat when he ran for district attorney in 1994.
Beard brought to the 2024 7th Ward campaign not just his wealth, but a degree of experience and political savvy that included contacts with campaign consultants and publicity professionals, the ability to put the arm on other potential donors, some of whom came across with money provided to the Ortiz campaign and a built-in animus toward Penman, based on the 2013 recall and issues that had grown out of that. For that reason as well as Ortiz’s appeal to a grass roots element in the city that stood generally in opposition to the political, social and business establishment, the 2024 Seventh Ward November runoff was a spirited contest that was by no means one-sided or predictable in its outcome.
By July, the Seventh Ward race was heating up and the electioneering was becoming ruthless. Ortiz again contacted Goodman, this time providing him with multiple specifics about what sort of information was surfacing during the campaign. The police chief once again expressed his doubts, but said he would redouble his inquiry.
On August 8, 2024, Goodman contacted Ortiz, informing her that the California Department of Justice had responded to his request that it do an audit of requests of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System for information on individuals matching Ortiz’s identity and birthdate, and that the survey go back more than the three years Goodman had previously requested after his November 2023 contact with Ortiz. Goodman, somewhat sheepishly, told her that the more comprehensive audit had indeed verified that her name had been run and information pertaining to her retrieved from the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) database. Goodman apologized for having expressed doubt about the veracity of what she had told him and for the department’s invasion of her confidentiality. He identified Stephan Desrochers, a recently retired detective with department who had been the president of the SBPOA and was subsequently one of the association’s boar members, as the party who had accessed the system in retrieving her file, provided her with the date and time in March 2020 that the access had been made and told her there was going to be a criminal case put together against Desrochers, based on his illegal use of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. He told her he would provide her with a copy of the Department of Justice audit report.
Six days later, late in the morning on August 14, 2024, Ortiz texted Goodman, inquiring about the Department of Justice Audit Report. Goodman told her he had thought he had previously made it available to her, but she told him she had yet to see it. The police chief said he would attempt to schedule a meeting with her the following week to go over the report.
Over the course of the afternoon and into the evening, there were internal department communications between Goodman and other members of the department at the command level about the misuse of CLETS and its application for political purposes, in particular how it had, at the very least, the appearance of being related to the San Bernardino Police Officers Association’s endorsement of Penman. Sergeant Jose Loera, who had only recently before been elected president of the association, succeeding the immediate past president, Jon Plummer, was brought into the conversation, whereupon a consensus was developed that it would be best all around for the Police Officers Association to rescind its endorsement of Penman. Goodman asked Loera to meet with Ortiz as part of an effort to defuse an explosive situation. Loera agreed to do so and Goodman called Ortiz, telling her that Loera was going to call her to schedule a meeting with and for her to please make the meeting. Loera called Ortiz early the next morning, August 15, and they agreed to meet at DJ Coffee Shop, located at 265 East 40th Street in San Bernardino that afternoon. Ortiz arranged for San Bernardino Sixth Ward City Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin to attend the meeting.
By the time that meeting took place at 2:45 p.m., the Police Officers Association had made a withdrawal of its endorsement of Penman. Ortiz used her cellphone, which was placed on the table, between her and Calvin sitting on one side and Loera opposite them, to record the conversation that ensued.
On the recording, Loera can be heard telling Ortiz and Calvin that he had not been aware of Desrochers’ use of the CLETS database for political purposes until the previous day, but that he had been thoroughly brought up to speed with regard to what had happened. He owned up to what had occurred.
“I’m here to formally apologize for what they did in the past,” Loera is heard saying. “Clearly, I got a phone call yesterday. You got a phone call too. And I was just like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Like, that’s just the way they told me was, ‘You need to sit down.’ I’m like. ‘What happened?’ First of all, I thought that one of my members was injured. I was like, ‘Oh, my God something happened, right?’ And they told me. I was like, ‘Oh, Hell, no, there’s no way. There’s no way.’ Because, we, during that time, clearly, [immediate past San Bernardino Police Officers Association President Jon] Plummer and I were not in charge. And something happened: that. You know that. It was the guys, the people that were in charge at that time. And that is not the way we do business – ever since Plummer and I took over. While Plummer’s not in charge anymore, I am. We said we were different, right? And when I heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna burn down the house right now, because that is not okay, one hundred percent, you know, and I immediately removed the endorsement of Jim Penman, canceled the forum and all that stuff, because it’s not okay. It’s not. It’s not what Plummer and I created. It’s not.”
Loera told Ortiz, “I wanted to have a conversation with you, because we’re paying, obviously, we’re paying for the mistakes of our forefathers.”
The San Bernardino Police Officers Association president then told Ortiz that she should pursue pressing criminal charges against Desrochers.
“Do what you got to do with the criminal portion of it, which I highly recommend, because it is a crime doing that,” Loera told Ortiz. “The same way you hold bad people accountable. I get it.”
Two weeks later, On August 29, 2024, Goodman met with Ortiz at the San Bernardino Police Deaprtment headquarters. Accompanying her was Scott Beard, one of Ortiz’s major political contributors.
Goodman provided both Ortiz and Beard with a print-out of the audit showing that Desrochers had run Ortiz’s name through the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System database.
Upon showing Ortiz the audit report, Goodman indicated to both Ortiz and Beard that he was seeking to have Desrochers prosecuted by the district attorney’s office for having unlawfully utilized the department’s equipment and informational databases. He indicated that he believed a criminal case could yet be made against Desrochers, even though four years and the timeline within which a crime must be prosecuted, which is specified in the penal code under what is referred to as the stature of limitations, had elapsed.
“The statute of limitations is on the date of discovery [of the crime’s commission], which is why I’m pursuing the charges on Desrochers, because it’s from the date of discovery, not from the date of which he did it, which was back in 2020,” Goodman is heard saying on the audio recording. “So, we just learned about it now. I’m going to submit to the DA now and hopefully, they will file it.”
In 2020, when she was then a resident in the city’s Third Ward,
Goodman indicated his belief that, measured by both Desrochers’ intent and what the information he obtained was used for, the offense the former Police Officers Association president had engaged in constituted a serious offense.
“It’s a minor crime to just run someone you like, you know: ‘Oh, I’m just curious where this person lives” versus ‘I want information and then I’m going to use this information to hurt this person.’ That’s a whole other level,” Goodman said. “And that’s how I feel about this, and I want to nip this in the bud and, quite frankly, want to make an example of Desrochers, whether he is retired or not, to send a message to anybody else that’s playing these games.”
Goodman told Ortiz and Beard he was in the course of preparing the case to be presented against Desrochers by compiling a report along with the evidence of how he had used the state law enforcement data base for an illegitimate purpose.
“I’m planning on going forward,” Goodman is heard saying. “The DA has already been notified – not the DA but the DA’s office – and they know this is coming and I wanted to preface it with them because of the whole concern about the statute of limitations and I said, ‘Hey, look, I think this is different because we just discovered it’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you might be right and there may actually be some exceptions because there is a lot of new law based on use of technology and use of information from criminal databases.’ So, we’re hoping that they see it that way once it gets there and they see the entirety of the report.”
A little more than two months later, in the November 2024 run-off against Penman, Ortiz registered a relatively convincing 11.5 percent victory to capture the Seventh Ward council position, capturing 3,929 votes or 55.78 percent to Penman’s 3,115 votes or 44.22 percent.
Ortiz was installed as Seventh Ward councilwoman on December 18, 2024. Three months later, more than six months after Goodman said he was going to work through the district attorney’s office to pursue a criminal case against Desrochers and which Loera encouraged Ortiz to involve herself in, no action in that regard had been taken. After reverifying that no investigation was taking place within the police department or the district attorney’s office, Ortiz on March 25, 2025, filed a $2 million claim against the City of San Bernardino, alleging that the police department, in the person of Desrochers, had illegally accessed her criminal history through the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System without lawful authorization in the 2019-2020 timeframe, doing so for political purposes and used that information to harm her political campaign by claiming she had been arrested foir domestic violence. She alleged the San Bernardino Police Officers Association endorsed her opponent, Penman, and was maintaining a file on her that was compiled to silence her and that it was brought forward years later when she became a serious candidate.
The accusations created a firestorm. Reflexively, the city categorically denied the accusation. In May 2025, the San Bernardino City Council voted unanimously, 6-to-0, with Ortiz abstaining, to reject her claim. The city doubled down, having Mayor Tran read an official statement condemning Ortiz’s filing, which was intended to serve as a precursor to a lawsuit. Tran characterized the claim as one that was “frivolous… fraudulent… filed in bad faith… and dishonest,” and which existed as “an attempt to swindle the city of San Bernardino out of $2 million” in taxpayer funds. The city then tripled down, warning Ortiz that she was risking criminal prosecution, as she had filed the claim under the penalty of perjury.
Caught in between the accusations in Ortiz’s claim and the city’s reflexive denials, Goodman and Loera were forced into the position of having to go along with the city establishment’s emerging extemporaneous narrative. Statements they made or ones attributed to them were contained in city statements which propounded that the police department unequivocally denied that its access to local, state and national criminal information data bases had ever been used for political purposes.
In the spring of 2025, Ortiz approached both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office with regard to the CLETS issue. Unbeknownst to Ortiz at the time, the district attorneys office was then and is yet involved in a cooperative operation with the FBI through the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement Program. An area of focus in that program are crimes perpetrated by public officials. The district attorney’s office’s liaison to the FBI is Investigator Jorge Chavez. Together with another district attorney’s office investigator, Darnell McDermott, Chavez would be assigned to the matter brought to the district attorney’s office by Ortiz relating to the misuse of the law enforcement data bases by the San Bernardino Police Department. Consequently, to avoid overlap and redundancy in the investigative process, the FBI agent heading the Office of Partner Engagement coordination with the district attorney’s office, C.J. Sanders, disengaged from the inquiry, leaving the investigation up to Chavez.
It is not clear on what date in either April or May of 2025 that Ortiz provided a flash drive containing copies of the recorded conversations with Loera and Goodman and PDFs if other documents and materials she felt would be relevant to the investigation.
On May 1, 2025 or May 3, 2025, a date which is in dispute, with Ortiz claiming the former and the district attorney’s office claiming the latter, Ortiz approached the district office, intending to supply it with the same flash drive provided to the FBI in order to assist its investigators in the investigation she had reason to believe, based on her conversation and text exchanges with Goodman in August 2024, the district attorney’s office was carrying out into the illicit CLETS accessing.
The district attorney’s office, however, did not accept the flash drive from her, instead directing her to fill out a digitized complaint form. In response to her approach to the FBI, that agency had made a show of interest in the issue[s] she had contacted it about.
The district attorney’s office did not come across as interested in her complaint, which languished for three months. On August 14, Ortiz again went to the district attorney’s office with a flash drive containing copies of the audio recordings of the conversations with Loera and Goodman, along with other materials.
More than eleven months, at that point, had elapsed since Goodman had vowed to press the district attorney’s office into “making an example of Desrochers.” No head of steam on that prosecution had formed. There had been no enthusiasm for carrying out the investigation to formulate the report that would serve as the basis of any charges that were to be filed, indeed to the point that there had been no investigation whatsoever.
When McDermott and Chavez got around, a few days after Ortiz had dropped the flash drive off, to listening to the recordings, it was not Loera’s and Goodman’s admissions that a member or members of their department had violated the law by utilizing information complied exclusively for use in the context of criminal justice operations for use in a political campaign that interested them. Instead, they latched onto the lack, or what they took as the lack, of any overt verbal disclosure by Ortiz that she was recording the conversations. The nature of the crime McDermott and Chavez were ostensibly investigating, transmogrified into and investigation not of Desrochers but of Ortiz. From that point on, any pretext of getting to the bottom of the San Bernardino Police Department’s misuse of the assets entrusted to it for law enforcement purposes was over. If the district attorney’s office was ever looking at Ortiz as a victim whose rights as a citizen had been trampled upon by the San Bernardino Police Officers Association using a law enforcement data base to obtain information to use against her in her runs for political office, its investigators and prosecutors immediately reversed course to pursue her as a criminal who had taken advantage of the police chief and the police union president by tricking them into making statements she secretly recorded.
Leading Ortiz, Calvin and Beard to believe they were looking into the crime relating to the misuse of CLETS, McDermott and Chavez interviewed each of them, angling their questioning away from the subject of the police union’s and Desrochers’ abuse of a data base restricted for use by law enforcement agencies to investigating alleged or actual criminal activity to formulate electioneering material to the conversations of August 15, 2024 and August 29, 2024 and the circumstances under which they had taken place. During those exchanges with Ortiz, Calvin and Beard, the three maintained that the recording using Ortiz’s Samsung Galaxy cellphone’s built-in recording facility had been done openly, with Ortiz deliberately making a show of her cellphone and that it was in recording mode when she placed it down on each of the tables she and both Loera and Goodman were seated at during those conversations. Ortiz openly disclosed to McDermott and Chavez how the device worked and was operated. In separate statements they made to McDermott and Chavez, Loera and Goodman each claimed he did not the conversation was being recorded. Prior to what would be the investigators’ final meeting with Ortiz, they obtained a warrant and seized the phone from her, and downloaded from the phone the recordings.
In November 2025, represented by attorney Peter Schlueter, Ortiz filed a federal lawsuit against the City of San Bernardino, naming the police department, the San Bernardino Police Officers Association, Desrochers, Goodman, Loera, Penman and Eric McBride, who had been San Bernardino police chief when the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System data base had been accessed and the information relating to Ortiz extracted. A central element to that lawsuit were the admissions made by Loera and Goodman during the course of their August 15, 2024 and August 29, 2024 conversations that the CLETS data relating to Ortiz had been obtained by Desrochers.
On January 21, 2026, the district attorney’s office filed two California Penal Code Section 632(a) charges against Ortiz, one pertaining to the recorded conversation with Loera and the other relating to her conversation with Goodman.
During evidentiary hearings prior to the trial, the district attorney’s office made multiple motions in limine relating to limitations the prosecution was requesting as to what evidence and what testimony could be presented at trial. The prosecution’s theory of Ortiz’s guilt was that her criminal offense consisted of her violation of the all-parties consent law embodied in California Penal Code Section 632(a) when she recorded the conversations without explicitly informing Loera and Goodman that she was doing so and getting their informed consent. California Penal Code Section 632(a), which has been on the books since 1967 and is cataloged not as a felony but as a misdemeanor, makes recording someone without their knowledge or consent a criminal violation of privacy. The operative question was, according to the prosecution, whether Ortiz could establish that she had given both Loera and Goodman adequate notice that she was recording and/or that neither Loera nor Goodman had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this way, according to the prosecution, the subject matter of the conversations was immaterial and therefore irrelevant.
This approach was problematic for the defense in at least two ways. First, the subject at issue was criminal activity on the part of the police department or at the very least one of its members, such that Ortiz was, in both instances, reporting a crime to a sworn law enforcement officer, an inherently public act. Arguably, in this way, neither Loera nor Goodman might claim a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that argument would be an organic and logical element of the defense’s case. Second, Schlueter was serving as Ortiz’s lawyer in the federal civil trial and also as her criminal defense attorney in the state case brought against her in San Bernardino Superior Court. What he was being confronted with were motions that would greatly circumscribe, limit and weaken his ability to present a convincing show of his client’s innocence on the electronic eavesdropping charges. If she were to be convicted, the recordings, as a result of having been obtained illegally, would very possibly deemed as inadmissible evidence in the civil trial.
Schlueter contested the prosecutions pleadings and line of logic in its motions in limine, asserting that substance of what was being discussed in the August 15, 2024 and August 29, 2024 conversations as well as the actual statements and admissions made by Loera and Goodman were of direct relevance to the question of whether his client had violated California Penal Code Section 632(a) in that making the utterances they did, Loera and Goodman could not have reasonably expected a politician in the midst of an election campaign would consder what they were saying to be off-the-record.
Judge Melissa Rodriguez, who presided over the trial, however, found the assertions of Deputy District Attorney Carlo DiCesare, who was prosecuting Ortiz, to be more persuasive, and she granted virtually every motion in limine brought by the prosecution.
After jury selection and final pretrial motions, the case went before the six-man, six woman jury with two female alternate jurors, on August 25.
Following opening statements, DiCesare moved immediately into the prosecution’s case-in-chief, in which Goodman, testifying first, and Loera were the major prosecution witnesses. Their testimony would thereafter be augmented by McDermott.
In the case of both Goodman and Loera, while they were on the witness stand, DiCesare played for the jury the entirety of the recordings Ortiz had made, respectively, of their August 29, 2024 and August 15, 2024 conversations. DiCesare’s stated intent in doing so was to demonstrate to the jury that Ortiz had made no explicit disclosure of her intent to record the conversations, statement that she was recording the conversations or had sought Goodman and Loera’s consent to record the conversations.
Goodman, explicitly, and Loera, less directly, testified that there had not been any illegal use of the CLETS data base in carrying out a criminal history/informational search with regard to Ortiz. Those statements were diametrically opposite from what both of the law enforcement officers had said in their recorded conversations with Ortiz. When Schlueter attempted to explore the issue of the utilization of police department assets for political purposes or to contrast what Goodman’s and Loera’s testimony during the trial was with regard to the illicit accessing and utilization of the law enforcement network data base and what they had openly disclosed to Ortiz two years ago, he ran head on into the roadblocks the motions of limine had strewn in his path, as DiCesare sounded objections to his questions and those objections were repeatedly sustained by Judge Rodriguez.
Both Goodman and Loera testified that the recording Ortiz made of their conversations with her in 2024 and which were marked as exhibits and played for the jurors were true and accurate reproductions of their exchanges with her.
McDermott testified that in his interviews with Ortiz in 2024, she had acknowledged making the recordings and claimed she had obtained both Loera’s and Goodman’s consent before doing so. McDermott testified that when he spoke to Loera and Goodman about those conversations, they informed him that they were unaware, at the time, that Ortiz was recording them, and they stated that they had not given their consent to be recorded.
Schlueter called both Beard and Calvin as defense witnesses. Beard testified that he had been involved in multiple campaigns and political issues in San Bernardino going back some time and that he had supported Ortiz during the 2024 campaign. He testified that he had concerns about the attack tactics utilized in the campaign extending to the misuse of government or police assets by the police union and that he accompanied Ortiz to the August 29, 2024 meeting with Goodman with the understanding that was to be topic of discussion. He testified that he had previous contact with Goodman.
Beard corroborated Goodman’s testimony about the seating arrangements during the August 29, 2024 meeting in the conference room on the second floor of police headquarters in which Goodman was seated at the head of the table and he was seated in the first chair on the side of the table to Goodman’s right and that Ortiz was seated to Beard’s right. He testified, again corroborating Goodman, that all three of them had their phones on the table in front of them. Beard contradicted Goodman on the key point relating to Ortiz’s open rather than secretive recording of the conversation, saying that she deliberately placed her cellphone, which showed the lit indication that its recording function was enabled, one the table in front of her, tilting it so it was clearly visible to to the police chief just as she was setting it face up onto the table. Beard testified that the phone was within Goodman’s clear field of vision and that he had looked at it. Beard also testified, as did Calvin, McDermott and ultimately Ortiz, that the display on the phone’s display screen featured what was variously referred to as a red button or red dot and a moving waveform across the screen.
In an effort to undercut Beard’s credibility with the jury, DiCesare during his cross examination of him dwelt less on the specifics of the meeting but engaged him in questions with regard to his political differences with the prevailing political establishment in San Bernardino while seeking to elicit from him that he held the San Bernardino Police Officers Association, which has thrown its support behind many prominent members of that establishment, in low regard. DiCesare’s questions were framed in a way to suggest that Beard harbored some animus toward the police department in general, including Goodman, and that this had colored his testimony. DiCesare further layered into his questions the innuendo that Beard was hedging his answers in favor of Ortiz because he was one of her benefactors and her holding of a position on the city council was favorable to him. Beard testified that Ortiz had not overtly informed Goodman that the conversation was being recorded nor had she directly requested his consent to be recorded, but that the recording was evident to all participating in the conversation as a consequence of Ortiz’s body language in placing the cellphone on the table and the phone’s prominent presence in front of all three participants during the nearly hour-and-a-half conversation.
Calvin’s testimony identified a moment relatively early in the recording of the August 15, 2024 meeting at which, contrary to the prosecution’s narrative of events, Ortiz gave an indication to Loera that the conversation was being recorded. At that point, shortly after Loera and Ortiz had arrived at the DJ Coffee Shop and had been seated in a booth, Calvin arrived. As Ortiz scooted over to allow Calvin to seat herself opposite the police sergeant, Ortiz can be heard saying, “Just so we make sure, everything we say to each other, so whatever we talk about, you know what I say, I know what you say.” Thereafter, Loera can be heard saying, “I’m in.” Calvin testified that as Ortiz was saying “Just so we make sure, everything we say to each other, so whatever we talk about, you know what I say, I know what you say,” she was holding he Samsung Galaxy in her hand, which was palm up, and the face of the phone, displaying its audio recording graphics including the red dot and the moving waveform, was visible to everyone at the table.
Under intensive cross examination by DiCesare in which the prosecutor pressed the now-former Councilwoman on whether Ortiz had used the terms record or any of its variant forms including recorded or recording during the conversation, Calvin said those words had not been used but contended that it had been conveyed to Loera and to her by Ortiz’s gesture with the phone and her reference to those present knowing what was being said that the recording was taking place. As he had with Beard, DiCesera in his cross examination of Calvin sought to establish that they were friends political allies and professional associates, recapitulating what she had previously testified to during directed examination by Schlueter, that Ortiz had worked as a volunteer precinct walker during Calvin’s successful 2020 election campaign for city council, that Calvin had employed Ortiz as a grant writer and human resources director with her nonprofit youth education and training organization and that they had campaigned together and endorsed one another in their 2024 re-electoral and electoral efforts. DiCesera forcefully questioned Calvin about the “daily or every-other-day” contact she had with Ortiz and delved into how many times they had discussed her upcoming testimony at the trial in the days, weeks and months prior to the trial, implying that Calvin was lying under oath during her testimony in an effort to assist Ortiz that was coordinated in advance with the defense. This prompted Schlueter, in his last question to Calvin during re-re-direct examination to ask, “Would you commit perjury for my client?” Calvin uttered, “Absolutely not,” at which point DiCesare sounded an objection Judge Rodriguez sustained. DiCesare motioned to strike Calvin’s response from the record, and Judge Rodriguez granted the request.
Schlueter recalled McDermott to the stand as part of the defenses case-in-chief. Having to wade through objections liberally registered by DiCesare and irregularly sustained by Judge Rodriguez, sought to aggressively cross examine McDermott, zeroing in on his claim that as an investigator he favored he utilizing open-ended questions rather than hard-edged probing ones. This opened two issues unfavorable to the prosecution. One of those was that in McDermott’s questioning of Goodman and Loera, which at least ostensibly had as its precept the investigation into Desrochers’ illegal use of the law enforcement data bases available to the department, he had been diverted from the subject at hand by the police chief and the union president redirecting him onto the unauthorized recording issue.
“There is not a suspect in the world who wouldn’t want to” be subjected to inexact and softball questions, instead of “probing questions” that would cut to the heart of the matter under investigation, Schlueter said.
The second problematic area for the prosecution in Schlueter’s cross examination of McDermott was the inexactitude in the investigator’s inquiry with regard to the manner in which Ortiz had informed the police chief and the sergeant that their conversations with her were being recorded. In response to Schlueter’s questions, what was brought out was that McDermott had not focused in any real depth in his questioning of Ortiz, Goodman or Loera as to how her phone was positioned on either of the two tables.
An area Schlueter sought to explore with McDermott on cross examination and Ortiz on direct examination ran to the willingness Ortiz evinced in handing over to a prosecutorial agency – the district attorney’s office – the primary evidence of the electronic eavesdropping crime alleged against her, those being the recordings themselves. It was Schlueter’s contention that if Ortiz, a sophisticated and educated individual who is both an elected official and a college professor with a doctorate, would not have provided evidence of an illegally-made recording to the district attorney’s office. It was Schlueter’s legal theory that Ortiz considered the recordings to have been legitimately obtained as a consequence of the deliberate and open manner in which she had displayed the cellphone to Loera and Goodman and the prominent place on the table before them that she had placed the device face up with its activated transducer feature clearly visible on the phone’s screen. If she had surreptitiously recorded the conversations, she would not have posted their contents to her social media account, he reasoned, nor would she have turned the recordings over to a law enforcement agency, in particular the law enforcement agency with prosecutorial authority in the jurisdiction in which the recordings were made.
DiCesare fought, through the lodging of multiple objections, virtually all of which were sustained by Judge Rodriguez, to prevent Schlueter from airing that theory to the jury.
“At the time that [Ortiz’s provision of the recording to the district attorney’s office and her attempts to discuss its contents with McDermott and Chavez] was going on or immediately thereafter, were you given any idea you were being investigated for unlawful recording?” Schlueter asked.
“Objection,” DiCesare intoned.
“Sustained,” said Judge Rodriguez.
Persisting, Schlueter asked his client, “During that conversation with investigator McDermott, did he specifically ask you how you got permission to record chief Goodman?’
DiCesare interjected, “Objection, vague.”
“Overruled,” said Judge Rodriguez.
“No,” said Ortiz.
“If you knew it was illegal to surreptitiously record and you had surreptitiously recorded, would you have given…” Schlueter started, but was stopped before he could complete the questions by DiCesare’s sustained objection.
“Did anyone at the DA’s office offer you or did you ask anyone for some type of amnesty to provide surreptitious recordings?” Schueter asked.
“Objection,” DiCesare said.
“Sustained,” Judge Rodriguez ruled and then granted DiCesare’s request that the question be removed from the court record.
In discussions with Judge Rodriguez involving the prosecution and the defense outside the presence of the jury with regard to what ground could be covered during closing arguments Schlueter made a final effort to see if he could explicitly present to the jury what had been presented to them in the raw during the playing of the recordings but which had not been straightforwardly dealt with during any of the testimony at trial, that being the issue that had prompted Ortiz to record the conversations – the illegal use of information gleaned from law enforcement network data bases against her. His effort was aimed at demonstrating to the judge that at least some of the information that had been withheld from the jurors throughout the trial cut to the credibility of the two primary witnesses against his client – Loera and Goodman.
“Goodman and Loera made admissions [that the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System had been accessed to obtain information used against Ortiz in her city council campaign] and then they got on the witness stand and categorically denied they made those statements,” Schlueter said. “That is why that is relevant.”
This brought a rebuke from Judge Rodriguez.
“All quotes from those conversations and anything related to the illegal CLETS runs [are issues] which I have absolutely ruled are not relevant to this trial,” Judge Rodriguez said.
Backing up to regroup, Schlueter asked that if he was to be prevented from making reference to that issue, that the court at least prevent the prosecution from “taking advantage” of the lack of context the jury was being given as for the reason Ortiz had made the recordings.
Judge Rodriguez shot that request down.
“I’m not going to get into telling the People what they can say and not say,” she said.
As is customary, the prosecution gave its closing argument first, followed by the defense. Thereafter the prosecution, because it theoretically has the burden of proof, was allowed a rebuttal of the defense’s closing statement.
“This was a secret recording,” DiCesare stated.
DiCesare said the operative fact was, just as Goodman and Loera had testified, they did not know they were being recorded and they did not consent to being recorded. Ortiz admitted she had not asked for their consent, he said.
He called the defense’s assertion that Ortiz gesturing with the phone in her hand as she placed in on the table was a charade made up after the fact.
DiCesare argued that witnesses being present are irrelevant to the act of recording without consent under the state’s privacy law.
The prosecutor was dismissive of the testimony provided by Beard and Calvin, calling them “incredibly biased” in favor Ortiz, which was demonstrated by Beard being Ortiz’s primary political supporter and Calvin’s political alliance with her.
He insinuated that their testimony with regard to the “red button” visible on Ortiz’s Samsung Galaxy when the recordings were made was tantamount to perjury.
He mentioned Beard’s testimony that he had opened the door to the conference room on the second floor of police headquarters where Goodman, Ortiz and Beard had met on August 29, 2024, suggesting that too was perjury, as the door to the room is locked and can be opened only by means of keycards, which are entrusted only to department personnel.
“These are witnesses trying to assist their friend protégé and ally,” DiCesare said.
DiCesare invited the jury to contrast the character and believability of his witnesses to those of the defense, the implication being that the players on his team put those playing Schlueter to shame. He came close but did not quite explicitly remark on Ortiz’s having not adhered to Judge Rodriguez’s in limine rulings.
Of Ortiz, Schlueter said, the jury should consider “how forthrightly she answered questions, how she volunteered additional information. Compare that with Chief Goodman. Compare that to Sergeant Loera.”
That Ortiz was meeting with law enforcement officers to report to them about and exchange information regarding criminal activity by which she believed she had been victimized and to which she was a witness, Schlueter asserted combined with having witnesses present when the conversations took place eliminated any reasonable expectation of privacy Loera or Goodman might have had.
Privacy is different from confidentiality, Schlueter said.
“Consent can be expressed or implied,” he said. “It doesn’t require a ‘Yes.’”
“Why would Dr. Ortiz ever make a secret recording and then give it to law enforcement investigators?” Schlueter challenged the jury. If she had surreptitiously recorded conversations with two law enforcement officers, she would never have turned the recordings over to a law enforcement agency.
Moreover, Schlueter stated, for her own purposes, which would be to put the information obtained in the conversations to use in a legal or procedural forum, “There’s no reason for her to make a secret recording.”
With DiCesare having savaged his client and his witnesses, Schlueter, provoking objections from DiCesare and the ire of Judge Rodriguez, who sustained them, responded in kind. He insinuated that it was Goodman and Loera who had perjured themselves because their admissions during the discussions they had with Ortiz in August of 2024 that a member or members of their department had acted illegally by misusing the law enforcement network data base available through the department had created a controversy and circumstance that had complicated their existences and the only way open for them to undo what they had done was to lie, reverse course, say it never happened and then discredit and demonize Ortiz.
“You heard those discussions,” Schlueter said, referencing the recordings. “The [issue covered in] the meetings was damaging to them. They were trying to get out in front of it.”
Following DiCesare’s and Schlueter’s closing remarks and DiCesare’s rebuttal and final instructions from Judge Rodriguez, the 12 members of the jury were separated from the two alternates on the jury panel and were ushered into a conference room on the south side of the building behind the courtroom on the sixth floor, where they began deliberations at just before 2 p.m. on September 9.
With the jury sequestered, and the strict admonition against any discussion of the case taking place around the jurors no longer in force on the sixth floor hallway, a report began circulating in among the members of the public waiting there that the prosecution had managed to place a ringer on the jury in the personage of Juror 11, who was said to be the spouse of a law enforcement officer.
By 5 p.m. the jury had not reached a verdict and its members were excused for the evening. They returned the following morning at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, September 10 to resume deliberations. At around 11 a.m. it was announced the jury had reached a verdict.
Court reconvened at 1:30 p.m. at which time Juror 11, who had been chosen as the forewoman, was called forward to provide the verdict sheet to Judge Rodriguez. Judge Rodriguez provided the verdict sheet to her judicial assistant, Lisa Taylor, who read the jury’s determination. “The jury finds the defendant not guilty as to Count 1, PC632(A)-M: Eavesdropping.”
This provoked a loud cry from Calvin, who was in the courtroom. Judge Rorriguez sternly warned members of the public to engage in no disturbances of the court proceedings.
Taylor then read, “The jury finds defendant guilty as to Count 2, PC632(A)-M: Eavesdropping.”
Shortly after the verdict was read and the jury was still seated in the courtroom, Judge Rodriguez sealed the jury roster, telling its members that in the event of a motion to unseal the list, which would reveal the jurors’ identities, the jurors would be given notice of the motion and would be given an opportunity to oppose the unsealing.
Sentencing was set for October 14, calculated to be sufficient time for the county’s probation department to proved the court with a sentencing recommendation. A single PC632(A)-M charge carries with it a maximum of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
Schlueter said he understood the jury’s verdict and said he believed that the finding of guilt was “logical,” given the lack of contextual information relating to the entirety of the circumstance its members was provided as a consequence of the court’s granting of the motions in limine, which restricted him from making a “full and adequate” defense of his client. He said he intended to appeal the verdict.
Minutes after the verdict was read, DiCesare told the Sentinel, “We thank the jury for their service. Our office takes violations of the privacy rights of our citizens very seriously. We will always seek to enforce those rights.”
According to Juror 6, whom the Sentinel spoke with less than an hour after the verdict came in, the jury originally was split 7-to-5, in his words “60-40” in favor of conviction on both counts.
“A few wanted to find her not guilty,” he said.
As the deliberations progressed, he indicated, the split in perspectives of guilt and innocence across both cases shifted to balancing the distribution of sufficient evidence to uphold the prosecution to one case and routing the sentiment toward exoneration to the other. He said the jury gravitated toward considering the relative strength of the prosecution’s narrative in support of each of the two charges, with a consensus forming that there was a “lack of evidence” of guilt in the matter pertaining to Loera, but a sufficient marshaling of facts to uphold the electronic eavesdropping count relating to the conversation with Goodman.
In the former case, he said the consideration that the conversation took place in a setting in which those participating were surrounded, in relatively close proximity, by other patrons of the restaurant and taking into account Ortiz’s utterance – just – which was followed by Loera’s “Oh, okay, I’m in,” threw the prosecution’s assertion that Loera did not know the recording was ongoing into doubt.
Insofar as the case relating to the conversation with Goodman, he said the meeting taking place in an enclosed area outside the earshot of the public was a deciding factor in the guilty verdict.
“It was pretty clear they were sitting inside an office of a private institution where the doors were closed as the recording was taking place,” he said. Goodman’s assertion that he did not know of or consent to the recording was a factor, he indicated.
The case, which involved three days of jury selection followed by ten days of opening statements, presentation of evidence, testimony and closing statements, Monday through Thursday, with the exception of the Labor Day holiday, went roughly a week longer than was anticipated. The Sentinel asked Juror 6 if the extension represented a hardship on the jury.
“I’m a federal employee, so for me it wasn’t an issue,” he said. “I think it might have been a problem for some of the others.”
Asked his general impression of the case, Juror 6 said, “I felt the prosecution came fully prepared and their case was clear and precise. The defense was, I wouldn’t say lazy, but too relaxed or not fully prepared.”