This, though technically true, is a bit of a dodge.
Elected in 1992, Arpaio has been the continuous target of litigation. He knows from experience that he is not supposed to destroy evidence. Furthermore, he is obligated to turn over any and all relevant documents.
Racist correspondence among sheriff's personnel included the following Photoshopped images said to demonstrate Mexican engineering.
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As a precaution, opposing attorneys not only demanded a litigation hold on all documents, they filed a document search under Arizona's public-records statute.
Ironically, Arpaio and his staff are the single worst abusers of Arizona's public records. The Arizona Court of Appeals found Arpaio not in compliance four times in the past four years. He was ordered to pay fees in three cases involving more than a dozen violations, many involving this newspaper. Arpaio's dozen offenses in four years dwarf those of other offenders; all other state agencies had a combined total of three violations in the past decade.
Arpaio's resistance to scrutiny, as well as the destruction of evidence by his people, dates from the sheriff's earliest days in office, according to attorneys Joel Robbins and Michael Manning.
Robbins represented a paraplegic who was restrained so violently that the young man left his cell a quadriplegic.
"It took two years for them to produce the tape of the officers restraining Richard Post, and when they did, our expert said the tape was degaussed. It had been run past a magnet, so all you could see were snowy images," Robbins said.
Post was crippled in 1996. Robbins claims the destruction of evidence almost is a given in cases he's litigated with Arpaio.
No Arizona attorney has litigated against the sheriff for jailhouse brutality and death more frequently than Manning. He concurs with Robbins that destruction of evidence is a given with Arpaio. And, like Robbins, he says the pattern began shortly after Arpaio took office, with the killing of Scott Norberg. In Manning's case against the county, the following evidence was concealed or destroyed: a deputy's notes the night of the killing, critical X-rays, the existence of a fractured larynx. When an independent autopsy discovered the fractured larynx, the county seized the body and the larynx itself disappeared.
How does the federal government collaborate with a sheriff who does not just ignore the law but actually is a lawbreaker?
Scott Norberg was killed in 1996, two months after the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division notified the county in writing that the gulag-like conditions in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jail violated the Constitution.
The U.S. government has "collaborated" with Sheriff Arpaio in oversight of the jails for nearly two decades.
After two decades of "collaboration," the jails still are operated in defiance of human decency.
In 2008, federal Judge Neil V. Wake found that Arpaio's jail, despite some improvement, continued to violate the Constitution. The most serious offenses were threats to life and limb: a chaotic medical record system so unresponsive that it presents an active threat to health and welfare; the mentally ill, who form an inordinate percentage of the jailhouse population, are not merely undiagnosed, but are at physical risk and brutalized.
According to Judge Wake: "Detention officers often do not know which pretrial detainees in their custody have been identified as seriously mentally ill . . . pretrial detainees have been punished for behavior related to serious mental illness.
"Thorazine is an anti-psychotic medication with potentially severe and permanent side effects, including extremely painful involuntary muscle spasms of the neck, tongue, eyes, or other muscles, a profound restlessness and constant movement of the feet and legs, drug induced Parkinsonism and tardive dyskinesia [potentially permanent disfiguring involuntary movement at the face and/or limbs].
"Although Correctional Health Services witnesses testified they would not prescribe Thorazine as a first line of treatment, in fact, CHS has prescribed Thorazine for many psychotic, and even some not psychotic, pretrial detainees without justification for its use. CHS psychiatrists sometimes prescribe Thorazine as a sleep aid."
After 34 years of federal oversight, this is the color of collaboration.
On the morning of December 15, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez announced that his office would partner with Sheriff Joe Arpaio to rectify abuses. That night, as news of the "collaboration" circulated, deputies killed Marty Atencio, a bipolar veteran off his meds and acting strangely. The videotape shows a passive Atencio jumped by a mob of lawmen. The victim is Tased — repeatedly — tossed into a cell, and stripped. He never regained consciousness.
In 2010, we published Deborah Braillard's story ("What's Mom Worth?" December 9). Arrested on a minor charge, she went into a diabetic coma in Arpaio's custody. The jail had her medical records and knew she needed insulin. No one looked at her records.
Instead, numerous shifts of jailers watched her vomit and defecate all over herself. She groaned in agony, went into convulsions, and died.
Over a three-day period, the jailers ignored Braillard's misery, telling other inmates she was kicking drugs. (She was not. In any case, had she been withdrawing from alcohol or drugs, she would have required immediate medical attention.)
This systemic sadism continues after decades of collaboration with federal oversight, and now the Justice Department wants to partner with the sheriff on racial profiling?
