Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : COUNTY : Inmates Let Fingers Do Walking, Walk Out
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Inmates used telephones at the Orange County Jail to make bomb threats, charge long-distance calls to the county and gain freedom for fellow inmates by impersonating corrections officials, a jail official testified in federal court.
Such problems have been reduced, Sheriff’s Sgt. J. D. Green testified, since the jail switched four years ago to restricted phones, from which only collect and credit card calls can be made.
Attorneys for Orange County called Green to the stand as a defense witness in a class-action suit filed by Phil Senteno, a convicted killer who claims county officials violated his civil rights while he was an inmate at the jail four years ago.
Senteno’s lawsuit claims that the county failed to abide by orders to improve conditions at the Santa Ana jail that were issued in 1978 by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray.
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