I’m not sure which is more obscene: Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s grotesque mockery of migrants who’ve died crossing the Arizona desert, or a compliant and wholly uncritical media’s reporting on Joe’s latest stunt involving white crosses in the desert. There’s nothing the local idiots in the Fourth Estate like more than…

Who better than a prisoner to criticize Arizona’s prison system? The most recent issue of Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine largely written for prisoners by prisoners, features a long, detailed overview of what’s wrong with the Arizona Department of Corrections, including ADC’s alarming suicide rate, its excessive use of…

As the saying goes, would you buy a used car from this guy? Or more to the point, a used home? The “guy” in question, as you can see in the pic above, is Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s fired, disgraced ex-top flunky David Hendershott, once the most feared man in Maricopa…

One week away from a major filing in the ACLU civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio, the MCSO performed its 74th worksite immigration raid on the Phoenix commercial cleaning service Pro-Serv, arresting four female employees Thursday evening. MCSO spokesman Chris Hegstrom issued the following statement in response to repeated requests…

Consider the following a confirmation of the obvious: an e-mail from Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s alleged mistress, Carmen Chenal, wherein she confesses her motivation for resigning her $108,000 post at the AG’s Office. “I need to leave here,” she writes in a May 24 e-mail, forwarded to Horne’s gmail…

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery’s crusade to silence county Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox on the Melendres case scored a win Thursday, with a superior court judge declining to weigh in on Monty’s argument that Wilcox has a conflict of interest regarding the federal civil rights lawsuit. In a minute entry…

After 23 years on death row, Debra Milke will have to wait at least another month to learn if she is eligible for bail, pending retrial for the 1989 murder of her four year-old son Christopher. Thursday afternoon, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Rosa Mroz set August 30 as the…

As Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery fights to keep Debra Milke behind bars pending a retrial on her overturned murder conviction, he also is fighting a proposed rule to the State Bar of Arizona that would require prosecutors to act on new evidence of a wrongful conviction. For the past…

The lawyer for Debra Milke, whose 1990 murder conviction was overturned earlier this year by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is asking the court to disqualify Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery’s office from being the prosecuting agency in the case. On the eve of an August 1, hearing on…

Though it feels like a decade or more, it’s only been three years since Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s ethnic cleansing legislation, went into effect, stoking the fires of ethnic discord, clobbering an already weak state economy, and putting Sand Land in the running for the most racist state west of…

As promised in a previous blog post, here’s videographer Dennis Gilman’s take on Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s anti-immigration worksite raids on two locations of the local Uncle Sam’s restaurant chain. The video includes interviews we did with two of the workers arrested by the MCSO. These were two of five men,…

About twice a month, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery holds a press conference at his office. I didn’t make it to the one this past week, but the MCAO has a YouTube account, where it posts videos of these events from start to finish. During the presser, Montgomery opened by…

Welcome to the latest horror-show vignette of Oz-like violence from our friends at the Arizona Department of Corrections, this time with a female corrections officer as the victim of a brutal beat-down. Wednesday night, CBS 5 reported on the recent attack of ADC Corrections Officer Benavidez (first name not given)…

Is there a crack in the anti-immigrant alliance between Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Sheriff Joe Arpaio? To say so, at this point, seems premature. There are rumors afoot that all 10 of those reportedly arrested in Arpaio’s recent raids on the family restaurant chain Uncle Sam’s have been…

Debra Milke should be granted bail in her pending re-trial for murder because the main evidence against her is the word of a lying scoundrel of an ex-cop with zero credibility. That’s pretty much the argument offered by Milke’s attorneys Michael Kimerer and Lori Voepel in a motion filed Monday…

I confess, it’s damn entertaining watching a highly-paid lawyer completely flummoxed in court, sputtering like a percolator, particularly when you disagree with him. Which is what happened Friday afternoon in Maricopa County Superior Court before Judge Dean Fink, as Fink gently grilled legal beagle Stephen Tully, the gent representing County…

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano — deporter of 2 million, coddler of serial racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and advocate of police-state programs such as 287(g) and Secure Communities — was confirmed by the University of California Regents on Thursday to head the UC system. I was happy to…

Remember when Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey told federal Judge G. Murray Snow that, “The MCSO is out of the federal immigration enforcement business”? That was during a hearing in June following Snow’s ruling in Melendres v. Arpaio that the MCSO is guilty of racial profiling. Snow has ordered…

The recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin is of particular relevance to Arizona. In many ways, Florida is as racist and as gun crazy as Arizona, though here in Sand Land, the divide is Latino/Anglo more than anything else. Like a lot of folks, I’ve…

I can understand why Republicans despise our next president, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s tough, smart, seasoned, and a skilled communicator, with a tongue like a bullwhip. And she’s a Clinton. Being a Clinton reminds folks of six words that drive the Rs ape: Eight years of peace…