As the Sheriff's Office was studiously under-investigating the Ryan death threat case, Dennis Wilenchik was investigating New Times with an eye on filing criminal charges against the paper.
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas has targeted judges from the start of his administration.
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Among other demands, Wilenchik, wearing his special prosecutor's hat, ordered that the paper turn over to him detailed information on every person who had looked at the paper's Web site since 2004, including viewers' IP (Internet protocol) addresses and other personal data.
Wilenchik later would claim that he had subpoenaed the paper's records to discern whether readers' IP addresses matched those of people known to have threatened Arpaio since publication of the sheriff's home address on New Times' Web site in July 2004 as part of the paper's investigation of his real estate transactions.
Publication of the sheriff's address on the Internet allegedly violated a state law aimed at protecting law enforcement officials. (There's no sanction in the arcane statute for broadcasting such information or printing it in newspapers or magazines, but it cannot be published on the Web.)
New Times exposed Wilenchik's bizarre machinations in a story by New Times owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin on October 18 ("Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution"), after which he or a member of his law firm approved the late-night arrests by sheriff's deputies of the paper's executives on misdemeanor charges of violation of grand jury secrecy.
The embarrassing published revelations followed by the arrests forced County Attorney Thomas not only to drop the charges against Lacey and Larkin and end the investigation of New Times, but to fire Wilenchik as special prosecutor.
Consider this: There were never allegations that anybody thought about harming Arpaio based on the address information on New Times' Web site. But two potentially identifiable people did make what could be construed as death threats against a sitting judge — yet county law enforcement never sought their IP addresses.
All this came after the Sheriff's Office had just spent about a half-million dollars investigating what appears to have been a phony plot to kill the sheriff.
"Quite a contrast, huh?" says Judge Ryan.
Andrew Thomas has always had bigger targets than a weekly newspaper that wasn't kind to him from the start.
Soon after he assumed office in 2005, Thomas began to engage in increasingly caustic public skirmishes with the Maricopa County Superior Court.
In February 2006, he filed a federal lawsuit against the court, alleging that its race-based drunken-driving probation programs are discriminatory and unconstitutional. In question were three court rehabilitation programs for convicted drunken-driving offenders on probation — a general DUI court and others for Spanish speakers and Native Americans.
The county court established the federally funded programs in 2002, before Thomas assumed office. Thomas claimed that they are racist and hark back to the long-discarded "separate, but equal" model that once was the law of the land.
Thomas hired Washington, D.C., attorney Michael Carvin at taxpayers' expense to represent the county in its lawsuit against the Superior Court. Carvin was one of the lead lawyers for George W. Bush in the 2000 election controversy in Florida, but he couldn't pull off this one. A federal judge dismissed the County Attorney's lawsuit earlier this year on technical grounds.
The county attorney complained loudly in 2006 about alleged delays by judges and defense attorneys in death penalty cases, another passionate issue with local voters. It turns out that many of the delays were caused by Thomas' prosecutors, many of whom have become overwhelmed with work in light of office policies against offering tenable plea bargains in most cases.
Thomas also has shown no hesitation in going after individual judges.
His top aides continue to file complaints with the Arizona Commission on Judicial Conduct against county Judge Warren Granville, a career prosecutor turned jurist.
In 2006, Granville questioned the propriety of prosecutors' focusing exclusively on a young and indigent black defendant in a Paradise Valley armed-robbery case, when an affluent white youth also had been involved.
Lotstein, Thomas' spokesman, termed Granville's statements "judicial activism at its worst. We would go further and question Granville's fitness as a judge."
The Judicial Conduct panel ruled in two separate complaints last year that statements made by Granville in court documents and in an interview with New Times did not merit censure or other punishment.
But Granville, whose mild manner on the bench belies a staunch law-and-order bent, is not a judge intimidated by attacks against him.
Earlier this year, he railed against the County Attorney's Office in a court document after sentencing skinhead Patrick Bearup to death for his role in the February 2002 murder of a Phoenix man. Bearup was one of four defendants who had taken their victim to the desert north of Phoenix. There, they beat him with a baseball bat, and Bearup cut off one of his fingers to steal his ring before another defendant shot the man twice in the head.
After Bearup's sentencing, Judge Granville noted that prosecutors originally had sought the death penalty against each of the four defendants. Prosecutors then offered a plea bargain of second-degree murder to the man who (under the prosecution's theory) had batted the victim to death, or close to it. The prosecutors also plea-bargained with another defendant, a woman said to have procured the murder.
