State Supreme Court won’t review request to take judge off Costa Mesa man’s murder case

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to review a defense attorney’s request to remove an Orange County judge from a double murder case based on the possibility of him being called to testify about allegations of an illegal jailhouse informant program.

Public defender Scott Sanders had petitioned the state’s highest court to review the request after an appellate panel also declined to pull Superior Court Judge John Conley off the case against Daniel Patrick Wozniak, a Costa Mesa man accused of killing two Orange Coast College students and dismembering one of them in an effort to cover his tracks.

Sanders has been fighting to take the death penalty off the table based on his wide-ranging accusations of misconduct, including that prosecutors and Orange County sheriff’s deputies have run an informant program that violated defendants’ rights and then lied about its existence.

Sanders argued that Conley should be removed from the Wozniak case because he was a homicide prosecutor in Orange County during the 1980s and could be called to testify about the use of informants.

Conley declined to step aside, and a Los Angeles judge ruled he could stay on the case, leading to Sanders’ appeals.

The prosecutor on Wozniak’s case, Matt Murphy, has repeatedly called Sanders’ allegations unfounded and pledged not to use any information from jailhouse informants, regardless of whether it was obtained legitimately.

Sanders made similar accusations in his defense of admitted mass killer Scott Dekraai, and in March, an Orange County judge found enough evidence of wrongdoing to recuse the entire district attorney’s office from that case. The California attorney general’s office has appealed that decision.

It now falls to Conley to sort out issues remaining in the Wozniak case, including a motion from Sanders alleging that prosecutors colluded with a film crew from the MSNBC TV show “Lockup,” which interviewed Wozniak behind bars.

Murphy has pushed to get the 5-year-old murder case moving.

According to grand jury transcripts, Wozniak admitted to police that he shot his neighbor, 26-year-old Sam Herr, in 2010 to get at his bank account.

Prosecutors allege that Wozniak then hid pieces of Herr’s body in a park, killed Herr’s friend — 23-year-old Juri “Julie” Kibuishi — and staged her body to look as if Herr had sexually assaulted her.