A judge has ordered the unsealing of the search warrant that helped kick off the criminal case against Stockton school board member AngelAnn Flores, a day after Stocktonia publicly detailed the document’s sprawling claims for the first time.
The search warrant affidavit in Flores’ case has been at the center of more than a year of dispute, an extraordinary arrest of a court staffer and larger questions about press freedom.
The November 2023 warrant had authorized the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office to search Flores’ home as well as Stockton Unified School District offices, and to seize untold amounts of personal data from her phones, laptops, digital photos, social media messages, emails and search-engine history.
The warrant document included a nearly 40-page affidavit from a sheriff’s detective seeking permission for the search. It preceded the criminal charges that Flores now faces.
The document was first released by court staff to members of the media shortly after the search. Soon after, the court said the release was inadvertent. But late last year, deputies arrested a former court clerk, who now faces charges relating to the released file.
Most of the file’s contents had never been publicly detailed before this week.
On Monday, a Stocktonia story examined the affidavit’s sprawling narrative of possible misconduct and financial crimes, finding that many of its claims were based on a single source, and much of the evidence it provided fell short. The criminal case ultimately filed against Flores showed almost no sign of the sweeping corruption investigators had described in the affidavit.
Stocktonia investigation: Search warrant affidavit for AngelAnn Flores speculated on far-reaching misconduct. Her charges turned out to be much narrower.
As of the close of business Tuesday, after the judge’s order, the court’s records department had not yet received the unsealed document from the judge’s clerk, so the officially unsealed warrant was not yet available in Flores’ case file.
The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office filed charges against Flores in May 2024. An indictment later superseded the charges; Flores now faces counts of felony embezzlement and a false insurance claim. The embezzlement charges center on Flores’ alleged misuse of a school district credit card, according to a Sheriff’s Office statement at the time of her arrest.
Stocktonia found the credit card issue appeared in about four pages of the nearly 40-page search warrant affidavit; the insurance issue did not appear.
Flores has pleaded not guilty.
At a pre-trial hearing in the case in Superior Court on Tuesday afternoon, visiting Judge Roy Hashimoto ordered the original search warrant file to be officially unsealed.
“I find it to be somewhat of a moot issue,” Hashimoto said. “The warrant was factually unsealed at (the) date” media received it from court staff, he said. The original reason given for sealing the document was to prevent damage to an ongoing investigation, Hashimoto added – but with the case “ready for trial allegedly (…) I don’t know how that’s true” now, he said.
Flores’ lawyer in late February had first asked the court to determine if the search warrant was validly sealed, and to unseal it.
On Tuesday afternoon, prosecutor Donald Vaughn of the San Joaquin County DA’s Office also asked the judge to unseal the document.
“There’s no legal justification to keep it sealed,” Vaughn said.
In her requests, Flores’ lawyer – former San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar – argued the document had not been properly sealed in the first place. She said sheriff’s detectives failed to put the search warrant in a sealed envelope, typical protocol for sealed records, when they returned it to court on Nov. 21, 2023 after executing the search. Court staff had provided a copy to media members that same day.
About a year later, the Sheriff’s Office arrested the former clerk, Pamela Edwards. Edwards was charged with disobeying a court order for allegedly intentionally releasing a sealed document.
Sheriff Patrick Withrow said at the time that the case was being investigated as a conspiracy, and that journalists also were subject to investigation. Led by the First Amendment Coalition, a group of press-freedom advocates pushed back, issuing a public demand that the sheriff not prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.
David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, questioned whether the search warrant should have been sealed to start with. “Once the warrant has been executed (…) then it should presumptively be open to the public unless the court specifically orders that it be sealed,” he said Tuesday. “That’s supposed to be a limited exception that should not swallow the rule.”
On Tuesday, Hashimoto also denied Flores’ attorney’s request for a hearing to argue that the warrant affidavit omitted facts that could have impacted the judge’s decision to allow the search.
“I don’t find any of these omissions to be so material that (the judge) would’ve changed his mind on signing this warrant,” Hashimoto said.
Tentatively, Flores’ trial is expected to start in the next few weeks. Edwards, the former court clerk, has not yet entered a plea; her next hearing is set for March 17.
Here’s how Stocktonia is covering the story of school board member’s arrest, search warrant.