Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s legal Lhasa Apso Tim Casey is either a past master of logical paradoxes, or he has a tin ear for irony. At least that’s how his latest filing with the federal court in the ACLU’s big civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio reads. Last Friday, the parties…
To alter a line from the great Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution will be UStreamed. In a demonstration Wednesday at the Phoenix Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DREAMers, undocumented moms, and U.S. citizens laid siege to the facility, in one instance blocking a bus filled with ICE detainees…
A court-ordered halt to an Arizona law that bans the state from contracting with organizations that provide abortions has been upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. In a 32-page ruling, the appeals court makes ground beef of arguments by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and Tom Betlach, Arizona Health…
At a pretrial conference Wednesday before Commissioner Virginia Richter, deputy county attorney Yigael Cohen signaled that the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will be offering a plea deal in the case of former minuteman leader Chris Simcox. Simcox, 52, was arrested June 19, and is currently being held nonbondable on six…
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Someone far, far away from Maricopa County has been arrested for threatening to blow Sheriff Joe Arpaio to greasy chunks.It’s possible you’ve heard this one before because this happens to be the fourth time an alleged “bomb threat” has been made against…
Remember the fable about the frog who does a scorpion a solid by giving him ride on his back across a river? In it, the scorpion promises not to sting the frog, observing that they would both drown if he did. So when the scorpion stings the frog midway across…
In the scrum of reporters, lawyers and family members waiting to gain entry to federal Magistrate Michelle Burns’ courtroom Monday afternoon in downtown Phoenix, one question was bandied about above all others. Was Danny Hendon’s name listed in the indictment? Hendon is the owner of the Danny’s Family Car Wash…
Buckeye will pay $30,000 to police-brutality victim and California resident Jerald Newman in a much-publicized 2011 case of Black Friday mayhem at a Walmart. The payoff is less than the $500,000 sought originally by Newman. But it still provides some justice in a case that saw the Maricopa County Attorney’s…
PLEASE SEE UPDATES BELOW Saturday morning, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided 16 locations throughout the Valley associated with Danny’s Family Car Wash and the company’s staffing provider HR Betty. According a statement issued by ICE, members of the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit began serving warrants on both companies…
If a judge-appointed monitor is good enough to make the New York City Police Department reform its “stop and frisk” policy, then a monitor should do the trick for Maricopa County’s serial racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the ACLU’s big civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio. In May, federal Judge…
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…
Deputy Chief Brian Sands, longtime aide to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, has retired after nearly 30 years on the force. The high-ranking deputy’s departure comes just ahead of a showdown between Sands’ boss and federal authorities over a racial-profiling mess that Sands helped create…
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…
A Phoenix-area resident claims he swallowed a piece of metal that was inside a burrito he purchased at a Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant.According to the lawsuit filed on behalf of Tyler Maiden, that piece of metal got stuck in his esophagus, and he “suffered serious, significant, and permanent injuries which…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s armed citizen patrols of schools is continuing for another school year.Arpaio’s NRA-approved posse patrols went without any serious incidents last year, when Arpaio instituted the program in response to the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school shooting…
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…
Due to prison overcrowding in California, state officials there are planning to release about a thousand inmates and relocate thousands more, according to recent media reports.The plan, according to the Los Angeles Times, is that “low-level criminals, as well as seriously ill and elderly inmates, could be released.”That’s not sitting…
Well, that didn’t take long — a lawsuit already has been filed against Federico’s Mexican Food, which county health officials said was the source of a “bloody diarrhea outbreak” in the West Valley.According to the latest count from Maricopa County Public Health, 33 people were sickened and 15 of those…
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…
Who celebrates 20 years of running what they describe as a “concentration camp,” and takes pride in exposing men and women to the elements of the desert?Only the leader of that “concentration camp,” of course — Maricopa County Fuehrer Sheriff Joe Arpaio…
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…
