Following testimony earlier in the morning from a deputy, Arpaio took the stand, starting off with the disclaimer that he had a touch of the flu. The sheriff didn't appear to be at his sharpest as he struggled to flip through binders to find various exhibits.
Under pointed questioning by Young, Arpaio denied that he equated brown-skinned people with illegal immigrants, as a press release from 2007 demonstrates he did. Young took time to go over a letter received by Arpaio from an anti-immigrant group in which Arpaio had emphasized statements about how police shouldn't be afraid to check the status of day laborers. And Young played a video from another press conference in which Arpaio said he'd have a "pure" program that went after illegal immigrants first, and their suspected crimes second.
See also: Joe Arpaio's Scooby Doo Gang Nails Obama on Alleged Damning Phone Interview With 95-year-old Woman, Presents Zero Real Evidence
See also: Joe Arpaio on Trial: The Background File
See also: Joe Arpaio's Racial Profiling Trial Begins, and, Yes, He's Guilty as Sin
But the sheriff made his worst impressions while answering questions about his book, Joe's Law.
Basically, anytime Arpaio was shown some of the blatant bigotry in that book, he blamed it on co-author Len Sherman. And this was despite being read back his testimony from a previous deposition in which he'd said he didn't need to read his own book because he'd written it himself.
Arpaio was forced by Young to back off from a couple of statements in the book, including one in which he wrote that Mexicans don't come to the United States with the same hopes and dreams as people from other countries.. In another part of the book, Young pointed out, Arpaio wrote that second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans were not part of the American "mainstream."
"My co-author wrote that," Arpaio blurted out.
The morning break is about to end, and we're going back in the courtroom to hear more from this bloodbath
