SPECIAL REPORT: FLORENCE EXPOSED | Part two of three Dustin Kemp is upstairs making his bed on a Sunday afternoon, when someone carrying a .45-caliber handgun walks into the room. Maybe he sees the person. Maybe his back is turned. Dustin is a cute 9-year-old with short, wavy, brown hair…
What if the MCSO had a community meeting and nobody came? That’s what happened recently when the MCSO held what it called a “community after-action meeting” in a lame attempt to comply with Judge G. Murray Snow’s orders in the ACLU civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio. Videographer Dennis Gilman…
As I’ve said before about Arizona’s ethically-challenged Attorney General Tom Horne, you can tell a man from Harvard, but you can’t tell him much. Which is no doubt why the Harvard-grad persists in some of the dumbest, self-destructive activity possible for a public official, barring that of Toronto Mayor Rob…
SPECIAL REPORT: FLORENCE EXPOSED | Part one of three Richard McAnally was annoyed. His face, framed by a shock of gray hair and a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, puckered with disdain. Florence had hired McAnally, paying him more than $7,000, to preside as a hearing officer in cases involving two…
It ain’t 2014 yet, and already Attorney General Tom Horne is taking it on the chin in a new TV ad, demanding that he return the nearly $400,000 in donations that two county attorneys say were improperly used on Horne’s behalf in his successful 2010 general election run against Democratic…
I’m guessing that members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors are familiar with the phrase, “no taxation without representation,” but maybe they need a refresher course in what that Revolutionary War slogan means. On Halloween, appropriately, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey filed a notice of appeal, challenging federal…
No one can say Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery lacks chutzpah. For years now, Montgomery has exploited anti-Latino bigotry to obtain and retain public office. When he campaigned for attorney general in 2006, Montgomery was one of many politicians who snuggled up to the racist minuteman movement. In 2010, he…
Here’s a free piece of advice for all you journalism majors out there: Go to law school. As a lawyer, the hours are the same, you can read and write to your heart’s content, and you get paid a pant-load to make a phone call. No kidding. Reading through invoices…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio was recently on the Al Jazeera America program “Consider This ” to discuss immigration (what else?) and got b-slapped in the nicest way possible by filmmaker Dan DeVivo, one of the two persons behind the immigration-related documentary Two Americans, the other person being Phoenix-based reporter Valeria Fernandez…
When it comes to duplicity, Lance Armstrong, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the Roman god Janus got nothin’ on Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Here’s a for-instance: State Senator Steve Gallardo, a Democrat and fierce critic of Arpaio’s, tells me that since April, one of the sheriff’s latest hires, Miryam Gutier-Elm, has…
So what do you do if you’re in law enforcement and you want someone’s help catching and prosecuting bad guys? If you’re Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, you start off with an insult. That’s what Monty does in new public service announcements he’s rolling out in Spanish and English, aimed…
Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow unsealed the operations plan for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “crime suppression” sweep, which took place this weekend in the West Valley. Significantly, the document, which was filed last Thursday under seal by Arpaio’s attorney Tim Casey, does not identify any “exigent circumstances”…
Please see update below with Tim Casey’s whiny objection to the legal fees caused by the bad behavior of his client. Who better to help me inaugurate a new category in this blog, entitled “Bigotry Is Expensive,” than the man known for sucking all of the air out of the…
How bad would things have to get for Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne to do the right thing and resign? You’d think pleading no contest to a vehicular hit-and-run witnessed by two FBI agents who’d been tailing him would be enough, at least for the state’s top prosecutor. Then there’s…
Late Thursday evening, the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s big civil rights lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio fired back at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s surprise announcement that the MCSO would begin one of its notorious Hispanic-hunting sweeps on Friday. Responding to a filing by Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey earlier in the day, plaintiffs’…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is sticking his tongue out at federal Judge G. Murray Snow, telling the jurist that the MCSO will execute one of the sheriff’s infamous crime suppression sweeps beginning Friday, October 18. Though Snow recently ordered that a monitor be appointed to oversee 59 pages of instructions on…
In June 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s then-director John Morton issued a memo outlining the agency’s exercise of its “prosecutorial discretion” in civil immigration cases. Morton emphasized that ICE would use this discretion to ensure the agency’s “enforcement priorities.” And ICE’s number one enforcement priority, as described in a…
They came, they saw, they protested, they partied. I’m talking about the local pro-immigrant activists who have been promising for at least a few weeks now to “shut down” the Phoenix Field Office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday, October 14. Though Monday was Columbus Day, a federal…
Ahead of pro-immigrant demonstrators set to march at noon from Phoenix’s Margaret T. Hance Park to the Phoenix Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE has closed its facility, which remains the target of a “Shut Down ICE” protest, demanding an end to deportations. A letter posted to…
***Please see updates at the bottom of this post*** Pro-immigrant activists chaining themselves to buses and a courthouse entrance today in Tucson forced a halt to Operation Streamline, a controversial federal program that prosecutes migrants arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol after they’ve entered the country illegally. According to U.S…
Now that we know Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the MCSO will be getting a babysitter appointed by federal Judge G. Murray Snow to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, the question is, who is the right man (or woman) for the job? Actually, consent decrees and court-appointed…
What is it with Republicans and Nazis? It used to be, several decades ago in hippie times, the word “fascist” was bandied about so often by lefties that it lost all meaning. These days, seems like every time you turn around some GOP putz is calling someone a Nazi. Teabaggers…
