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…
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…
