A 35-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing his neighbor in a Huntington Beach apartment more than a decade ago has agreed to a plea deal, closing out a case that became entangled in one of Orange County's biggest courthouse controversies. Rito Samuel Tejeda pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury and was sentenced Friday to 16 years in prison, with the original murder charge dismissed as part of the agreement.
Tejeda pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing 51-year-old Frederick Sledge in an apartment at 1411 Delaware St. in Huntington Beach on Oct. 23, 2013, according to mynewsla.com. He also admitted sentencing enhancements for personal use of a deadly weapon and inflicting great bodily injury on the victim. Police were called about 11 a.m. after someone saw a blood-soaked man walking near Nashville Avenue and Delaware Street, the outlet reported, though a contemporaneous Los Angeles Times account placed the sighting near Delaware and Knoxville Avenue instead. An off-duty officer alerted police after seeing Tejeda with blood on his skin and clothes, triggering the investigation that led to his arrest.
A Case Pulled Into a Judicial Fight
What might have been a straightforward homicide prosecution instead became wrapped up in a fight over who would hear it. Tejeda's case was assigned to retired Fourth District Court of Appeal Justice Thomas Goethals, who was an Orange County Superior Court judge at the time, and prosecutors moved to disqualify him from the case. The dispute centered on complaints that the district attorney's office was engaging in blanket disqualifications of Goethals, with critics blaming the practice on prosecutors' dissatisfaction with his rulings against them in the county's jailhouse-informant scandal.
That scandal had erupted in the prosecution of Scott Dekraai, described in court records as the worst mass killer in Orange County's history. Defense attorney Scott Sanders led efforts to uncover how jail snitches were used to illegally collect evidence against inmates who were already represented by counsel. Goethals barred the district attorney's office from the Dekraai case after findings involving sheriff's deputies' testimony or disclosure of evidence, according to the Los Angeles Times, a ruling that fueled the broader standoff between his courtroom and prosecutors.
Numbers Behind the Disqualification Dispute
The scale of the pattern drew attention well beyond Tejeda's case. The Times reported that Goethals was disqualified at the district attorney's request in 46 of 49 murder cases assigned to him between Feb. 25, 2014, and September 2015, compared with being dismissed just once in 35 murder cases in the years before that. Then-Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard King ruled that the disqualification requests had substantially disrupted the orderly administration of criminal justice in the county, and separately found that the pattern was wreaking havoc on the flow of cases in the courthouse. King ruled that prosecutors could not disqualify Goethals from the case, a decision the district attorney's office appealed.
On Dec. 3, 2015, the district attorney's office moved to disqualify Goethals under California Code of Civil Procedure section 170.6 after Tejeda's case was assigned to him for all purposes, according to the California Court of Appeal opinion reproduced by FindLaw. The district attorney's office has maintained that its peremptory challenges reflected individual prosecutors' good-faith decisions rather than any blanket practice against a judicial officer, stating there has never been blanket papering of any judicial officer. The office went on to file five writ petitions challenging Judge King's rulings, including in the Tejeda case, according to an Orange County District Attorney press release, which also noted that an office study of electronically filed cases from Feb. 24, 2014, through Dec. 3, 2015, found 847 total judge-disqualification challenges, with 501 filed by defense attorneys and 340 by prosecutors.
Appellate Court Sides With Prosecutors, Yet Raises Alarm
In 2016, appellate court justices ruled that prosecutors had the legal right to disqualify Goethals, granting the district attorney's office's petition and directing the trial court to vacate its order and assign cases to a new judge. Yet in the same ruling, the justices accused prosecutors of abusing the disqualification privilege to punish Goethals and called for state lawmakers to reform the process. According to presstelegram.com, the appellate majority found that the office had engaged in blanket papering of the judge, and the justices urged the California Supreme Court to revisit the issue entirely.
With that legal battle resolved years ago, Tejeda's underlying criminal case has now reached its own conclusion. The plea bargain closes the book on a prosecution that outlasted the very judicial controversy it helped expose, ending with a 16-year sentence and a dismissed murder charge rather than a trial.
