The admission came after the Public Defender's Office discovered at least 20 of its confidential calls with clients had been recorded and delivered to the District Attorney's Office, according to the sheriff's department. In California, intentionally recording a conversation between someone in custody and their lawyer is a felony under Penal Code Section 636.

The sheriff's department, which operates the county jails, records nearly all inmate phone calls through the company ViaPath and routinely shares them with district attorney staff, who can use the recordings as evidence. But calls with attorneys are supposed to be excluded from recording through a process in which lawyers submit their phone numbers to the sheriff's office to be placed on a do-not-record list.

Sheriff's spokesperson Tara Moriarty said some emails containing those excluded numbers were not processed correctly. "Attorney telephone numbers designated as confidential are placed on an exclusion list to prevent those calls from being recorded," Moriarty said. "Our review identified an administrative breakdown in the process for updating that list."

An internal investigation found that at least 38 phone numbers associated with the Public Defender's Office were not properly registered. Every attorney whose calls were improperly shared had submitted their numbers, according to the Public Defender's Office.

The breach came to light in at least one case when a prosecutor emailed a colleague at the Public Defender's Office saying he recognized the public defender's voice on a call. The prosecutor stopped listening after that, the public defender was told. In other instances, public defenders discovered the recordings while reviewing documents shared by prosecutors before trial.

Deputy Public Defender Kwixuan Maloof provided his phone number to the sheriff's department on July 8, 2025. Yet he said at least five calls with clients from that number were recorded and shared with prosecutors over the past year. Three of those calls involved homicide cases, and in every one he discussed legal strategy.

"I mean, [the prosecutor] cannot unhear what he heard," Maloof said. "You cannot un-ring that bell."

The improper sharing has damaged trust between clients and their attorneys. Maloof said many of his clients now refuse to speak on the phone. "They know the district attorney has been listening to our phone calls," he said, "even when I told them the district attorney can't."

Data obtained by the Public Defender's Office and reviewed by Mission Local shows that district attorney staff requested jail phone calls from the sheriff's department more than 1,000 times between Jan. 1, 2025, and July 2026.

Since Aug. 27, the sheriff's department has frozen its regular process for sharing recordings, requiring prosecutors to subpoena any calls they want. Moriarty said the attorney phone number lists have been revised and updated, and the department will evaluate possible technological or administrative changes to "strengthen safeguards and prevent similar errors in the future."

The District Attorney's Office did not respond to a request for comment.

The revelations raise significant questions about whether the constitutional right to counsel has been compromised in potentially dozens of cases, and whether any prosecutions could be tainted by prosecutors' access to privileged communications. The sheriff's department has not said whether it will permanently change its recording and sharing procedures.