An Orange County Sheriff’s Department training facility will be renamed after controversial former Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, who died of breast cancer earlier this month.
The Katella Training Facility in Orange will now be known as the Sandra Hutchens Regional Law Enforcement Training Center.
Orange County supervisors voted unanimously to approve the name change after each praised Hutchens for her decade-long term as sheriff.
“She came into the department at a very difficult time,” Supervisor Don Wagner said Tuesday. “She restored honor, not to the badge, not to the department, because the men and women of the department had never lost it under prior leadership, but she did restore it to leadership.”
By City News Service
Key in Jail Cell Door
SANTA ANA (CNS) - An Orange County Superior Court judge has said he would consider hiring an expert to comb through jail records to help determine which inmates can be released to help inmates better comply with physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last month, Orange County Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson ordered the jail population reduced by 50%. During Friday s hearing, it was noted that Wilson meant the jail population should be lowered by half from where it was in March when there were 5,200 inmates.
So, Wilson is aiming to lower the population to 2,650. As of Friday, the population in the jails is 3,358. So about 708 inmates could be released to home confinement, placed on GPS monitoring or moved to another facility.
About half of those inmates are already ticketed for prison.
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes has attempted to appeal Wilson s order, but so far has failed, compelling him to submit a plan on how to halve the inmate population.
American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of several current and former inmates, said in papers filed this week Barnes failed to submit the plan Wilson ordered.
Instead, the ACLU attorneys argued, Barnes “devotes most of his plan to discussing measures that are unrelated to population reduction. None of these measures address the urgent need for social distancing within the jail. The few measures that could conceivably promote social distancing are woefully inadequate.”