After Orange County sheriff’s officials were ordered to turn over all the records they had kept on jailhouse informants, deputies stopped keeping one set of secret records and made plans to start a new one, according to evidence released in court Friday.

That revelation from the 31/2-year-old court order prompted the judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals, to publicly chastise Sheriff Sandra Hutchens.

“If the Orange County sheriff was sincerely trying to unravel this mystery, I can’t see why we haven’t gotten to the bottom of it,” Goethals said.

“It seems as if the sheriff believes that she can have documents and she can decide whether or not she can turn them over. That’s not the sheriff’s place.”

Although Goethals ordered the Sheriff’s Department to turn over its informant logs in 2013, the department only recently turned over the first 1,157 pages of the once-secret notes.

Sheriff’s officials and investigators for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said Friday they can’t find any new informant records, prompting the pointed words from Goethals.

Deputy County Counsel Elizabeth Pejeau, representing Hutchens, who was not in court, assured the judge that her client is conducting “a diligent” search for the records.

Hutchens said in an interview that she is turning over everything she can find.

“I am not aware of any other logs that exist,” she said. “I have no reason to withhold anything that would not cause security issues in our jails. I can’t find something I don’t know about.”

Unraveling what was in the deputies’ notes, and determining the extent of the county’s use of jailhouse informants, is part of an ongoing effort to restart the penalty phase of the trial of Scott Dekaai, who pleaded guilty to killing eight people in Seal Beach in 2011.

Dekraai faces the death penalty in the punishment phase of his trial, which Goethals took away from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office last year and gave to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. The state is appealing that decision.

At the same time, Orange County’s justice system has become the subject of a nationally-watched debate over prosecutorial ethics, stemming from the repeated illegal use of jail informants and the withholding of evidence from defense attorneys, as in the Kekraai case.

Assistant District Attorney Dan Wagner told the judge Friday that his office has looked at thousands of sheriff’s computer files without finding what the judge called the “successor” logs.

“Everybody is keenly aware that kind of document needs (to be brought) forth if it exists,” Wagner said.

Goethals and Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders say there is plenty of reason to believe a second set of logs was kept by special handling deputies who work with informants.

For one thing, the first set of notes – part of which were mistakenly turned over to Sanders without being adequately redacted – contains a January 2013 passage that says the log will be discontinued and a new document will be created for “important information,” Sanders said.

For another, Hutchens’ lawyers have argued the secret log contained information important to running the jail and its informants. Goethals said Friday if that were true, it stands to reason they would not end one log without starting another.

“It’s more likely than not there is additional responsive information out there,” Goethals said. “Maybe it is a needle in a haystack, but it’s a needle that needs to be found.”

Sanders had urged Goethals to go further and order police and prosecutors to turn over the second log by Friday afternoon.

“They sit here as if we have no idea there is a replacement log when we know there’s a replacement log,” Sanders said.

Goethals set a Nov. 10 meeting to revisit the issue of the successor log and to determine how many pages of redacted notes will formally be given to Sanders.

Contact the writer: tsaavedra@scng.com