The Thin Blue Whine, Pt. II: The Crybaby Thugs of Maricopa County (Second Update, December 18)

Uniformed thug as "political prisoner": Maricopa County Deputy Sheriff Adam Stoddard strikes a martyr's pose for the camera after a few days in "jail." Stoddard was found in contempt after stealing a document from the table of a defense attorney during a court hearing.


To his comrades in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), Adam Stoddard is a martyr to principle and an innocent victim of injustice -- a heroic figure unjustly consigned to prison by petty, power-hungry figures. His boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, went so far as to describe Stoddard as a "political prisoner" during his brief and uncommonly comfortable incarceration.


All of this, predictably enough, is nothing but several acres of stockyard carpeting.


Stoddard, a member of the MCSO's correctional unit, was videotaped stealing a document from the desk of a defense attorney. As a result he spent several days in the custody of his co-workers after being cited for contempt of court by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe for refusing to apologize for his offense.


It's important to recognize that Stoddard -- unlike many others who have been cited for contempt -- actually committed an offense against an individual's rights.

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Stoddard claimed to have seen something on the handwritten documents that constituted a threat to “court security" -- some cryptic conjunction of the words "going to" "steal" and "money," which apparently weren't part of the same sentence.


In addition to his unusual ability to divine the concealed intentions of criminal defendants from words randomly scattered across a page of notes hand-written by somebody else, Deputy Stoddard apparently possesses some form of X-ray vision, since the document he stole was concealed by several on top of it.


Obviously, Stoddard is no ordinary deputy; he must be the Last Son of Krypton, concealing his true identity in the guise of a mild-mannered bailiff.


Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe wasn’t buying Stoddard's explanations, and was offended Stoddard was trying to sell it.


In his ruling he correctly observed that Stoddard's actions were "unreasonable and unlawful" and resulted in a breach of attorney-client privilege, and that Stoddard's facially ridiculous explanation -- which implicitly accused defense counsel Joanne Cuccia of collaboration in a crime -- injured the attorney's professional reputation.


Had a mere mundane committed an offense similar to Stoddard's, the penalty would have involved some combination of a fine and mandatory jail time. However, Judge Donahoe -- perhaps mindful of the need to maintain cordial relations with the brown-shirted paladins of public order who carry out his decrees -- didn’t send Stoddard immediately to jail, or slap him with a fine. Instead, he ordered Stoddard to apologize, in public, to defense attorney Cuccia.



While there were problems with this proposed compromise, it would have spared Stoddard from spending time behind bars by treating his offense as a mistake, rather than a crime. One could round down to "never" the frequency that common people are offered such consideration by the courts.


But Stoddard's actions weren't a mistake. They were the predictable product of the institutional culture of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Under the reign of the oleaginous proto-fascist Joe Arpaio, the MCSO has mutated into a lawless armed clique suitable to a third world dictatorship. Indeed, Arpaio and his minions -- including a contingent called the "Special Enforcement Unit" -- have conducted late-night or early-morning raids to intimidate and imprison people who have criticized the Dear Leader.


The controversy involving Adam Stoddard came amid an escalating conflict between Arpaio and his critics in Maricopa County.

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With the support of his Dear Leader -- who insisted that his deputies only follow his orders, not those of a mere judge --Stoddard defied the court order, telling a press conferece that he wouldn’t apologize “for doing my job,” and that saying he is sorry would be a “lie.”

“Judge Donahoe has ordered me to feel something I do not and say something I cannot,” simpered Deputy Stoddard in his pre-incarceration press conference. But the same can truthfully be said by countless innocent people who have been put through the indignity of the “justice” system — from those found guilty of traffic violations on the fraudulent, self-interested testimony of traffic cops, to people who have been blackmailed into accepting plea bargains by devious, unprincipled prosecutors.



In this case, of course, Stoddard had neither facts nor the law on his side -- just a sense of limitless privilege and a petulant frustration that Judge Donahoe refused to accept his puerile fictions. Following his Drama Queen turn in front of the press, Stoddard checked in to the Maricopa County Jail system.



With a finely tuned sense of self-promotion and unhindered by even a rudimentary sense of decency, Arpaio has used his jail system to build a reputation as "America's Toughest Sheriff" by subjecting those incarcerated therein -- most of whom have never been convicted of an actual offense -- to a steady stream of petty indignities.



Male prisoners are required to wear pink underwear; until a lawsuit ended the practice, female detainees were under constant video surveillance, including hidden cameras in the toilet facilities. Inmates are fed green bologna and forced to work in chain gangs. Many are housed in surplus military tents that offer little effective shelter from the elements. After several people charged with non-violent offenses died of culpable abuse or neglect while in Arpaio's custody, the county was forced to pay millions of dollars in legal settlements.

As one of Arpaio's brown-shirted cadres, Adam Stoddard endured none of those indignities. Citing supposed "security" concerns -- "security" being the familiar, all-purpose defense of dictators everywhere -- Arpaio refused to say exactly where Stoddard was being held. If he actually spent time behind bars it was most likely as a guest in a special, detainee-friendly facility referred to as the “Mesa Hilton." Another possibility is that Stoddard simply enjoyed a paid vacation under "house arrest" or in similarly comfortable circumstances.

To hear Stoddard's brown-shirted comrades tell the story, however, the deputy was the a modern Sir Walter Raleigh, unjustly immured in the Tower of London awaiting his grim appointment with the Headsman. Accordingly, on the morning after Stoddard was taken to "jail," twenty intrepid, public-spirited MCSO deputies suddenly called in “sick," thereby throwing the Superior Court into disarray.

Things got even nastier when an anonymous bomb threat was called in -- the first of two that would occur, along with an incident of vandalism involving pepper-spray, during Stoddard's detention. Significantly, no similar acts occurred after Stoddard's vacation-cum-jail sentence ended.

This illegal work stoppage (assuming we can torture the word "work" into describing what the MSCO does) amounted to a criminal conspiracy against the rights of those whose legal hearings were delayed. The bomb threats and pepper spray attack would be investigated as acts of terrorism had they been carried out by common citizens in support of a detainee. But the police union thugs who demanded that Stoddard be released from jail and have his record cleared acted in the serene confidence that they confronted neither personal nor professional consequences.

Tax-feeder tantrum: Maricopa County deputies stage a rally on behalf of their comrade Adam "Sticky-Fingers" Stoddard.

Maricopa County Deputy Sean Pearce, speaking on behalf of the Deputies Law Enforcement Association, didn’t flinch from describing the "sick-out" as a show of support for Stoddard: “I think it sends out a message that this officer has integrity,” Pearce insisted. “Why should he apologize for doing his job?”

The “job” in question, as defined by Pearce and his colleagues, includes stealing proprietary information, violating attorney-client confidentiality, lying about one’s actions, and defying an order to make restitution to the victim.

But Deputy Stoddard is one of the sacred personages who wear a government-issued costume and is invested with the supposed authority to kill other human beings. It’s just not right for members of that privileged elite to be treated like mere mundanes. Hence the collective tantrum thrown by Stoddard’s fellow tax-feeders -- and a serious escalation in Arpaio's unprecedented war on his critics.

As the Los Angeles Times summarizes:

"[Arpaio] recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure.... Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio's immigration enforcement, the Sheriff's Office demanded to see Gordon's e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars. When the police chief in one suburb complained about the [immigration] sweeps [carried out by Arpaio's office], Arpaio's deputies raided that town's City Hall. [There have been] two dozen instances of the sheriff launching investigations of critics, none of which led to convictions. The most notorious case involves county Supervisor Don Stapley, a Republican who has sometimes disagreed with Arpaio's immigration tactics. Last December, deputies arrested Stapley on charges of failing to disclose business interests properly on his statement of economic interest."

In filing that charge against Stapley, Arpaio -- motes-and-beams fashion -- was using the power of his office to misdirect attention from his own misrepresentations in financial disclosure reports, which -- if he and Stapley were treated alike -- would result in more than a dozen criminal counts against the sheriff.

Instead of facing an investigation for his own irregularities, Arpaio -- with the aid of the similarly megalomaniacal Maricopa County prosecutor, Andrew Thomas -- attempted to prosecute and imprison the people who had brought those irregularities to light: The reporters and editorial staff of the independent Phoenix New Times newspaper.

In August 2007, the Maricopa County Prosecutor's Office hit the Phoenix New Times with a grand jury subpoena demanding detailed information, including "Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years" as well as "detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004" as well as every individual "individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad [in the publication] over a period of years."

The pretext for that act of official harassment was that the New Times, in investigating Arpaio's conflicts of interest regarding ownership of commercial properties, had violated state law by disclosing the valiant sheriff's home address.

To their credit, the editorial staff of the New Times went public with the details of that Grand Jury subpoena. That prompted Arpaio to send his Selective Enforcement Unit to arrest Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the owners of the Phoenix New Times on a spurious charge of interfering with the deliberations of a grand jury.

The joint assault by Arpaio and Thomas on freedom of speech and the press provoked a nation-wide paroxysm of outrage that forced Thomas to free Lacey and Larkin and withdraw the charges against them. (It was later revealed that no grand jury had actually been empaneled.)

Chillin' with his homeboys: Sheriff Joe poses for a photo-op with neo-Nazi agitator Vito Lombardi.

Following Stoddard's "incarceration," Arpaio's Enemies List expanded to include Judge Gary Donahoe. County Prosecutor Thomas filed a criminal complaint against Donahoe accusing him of three felonies: Hindering prosecution, obstruction of a criminal investigation, and bribery. In a press conference called to elucidate the charges against Donahoe, Thomas found it impossible to describe a coherent theory of the case. But building a prosecutable case isn't the point in what is a transparent act of retaliation against the judge who sent one of Arpaio's Brownshirts to jail.

Arpaio and Thomas appear to believe -- or at least want the public to believe -- that they alone are untainted by the otherwise ubiquitous political corruption festering in Maricopa County. To that end they have filed a complaint against the entire County government under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, an action that effectively designates the board of county supervisors a criminal syndicate.


With Arpaio dispatching heavily armed jackboots to intimidate and arrest his critics, and Thomas at his back prepared to mount spurious prosecutions when necessary, Maricopa County has descended into what the Goldwater Institute calls a state of "open warfare" among elected officials.


Arpaio is clearly willing to see the entire county government demolished, as long as he can erect a throne on the rubble.


"It's just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships," observes former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, who is representing Donald Stapley. "So many people are of one mind on a single issue -- illegal immigration -- that they are willing to ignore [Arpaio's] misdeeds."

The face of "immigration enforcement" in Maricopa County: How would you like to see this guy busting down your door at the break of dawn?

Arpaio was actually seen by some as a liberal regarding illegal immigration prior to 2005. That year saw two critical changes: First, Arpaio re-cast himself as a crusader for border security, and second, he received a federal 287(g) waiver empowering his deputies to enforce federal immigration laws.


Since then, Arpaio has turned Maricopa County into a literal police state in which anybody who "looks" or "sounds" like an illegal immigrant -- including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents of Mexican ancestry -- can be summarily arrested and detained. While Arpaio's deputies -- who often conduct their raids wearing ski masks -- are focusing their attention on people whose sole offense is to work in Arizona without official permission, more than 70,000 criminal warrants, many of which deal with actual offenses against persons and property, have been left unenforced.


Maricopa County under the reign of Arpaio has become a community in which a mother can be seized from her car at gunpoint by goons in ski masks while her children shriek in terror. In Arpaio's realm, a woman nine months pregnant can be hauled away to jail in handcuffs and leg irons on minor, non-violent charges, forced to deliver her child while chained to a hospital bed, and then kept separated from her newborn for more than two months -- because she is suspected of being an illegal immigrant.


Earlier this year the federal government formally revoked the "authority" provided by the 287(g) waiver and instructed Arpaio that he could no longer use his personnel to enforce federal immigration laws.



The following day, Arpaio conducted one of his notorious "immigration sweeps," an exercise in which deputies "descend on heavily Latino neighborhoods, arrest hundreds of people for violations as minor as a busted headlight and ask them whether they are in the country legally," reported the Los Angeles Times.


"I wanted to show everybody it didn't make a difference," explained Arpaio -- quite redundantly, as it happened, for those who have come to understand that the superannuated dictator of Maricopa County answers only to himself.


A few years ago, in an essay that eventually cost me my job, I warned that the issue of illegal immigration was being exploited by the Regime to consolidate police state powers at both the federal and local levels. My colleagues at the time were of the opinion (candidly expressed by one of them in an e-mail) that it would be acceptable for the U.S. to become a police state within "secure" borders. I wasn't willing to settle for that arrangement, a microcosm of which is being created in Maricopa County under Arpaio.



The slice of the public most obsessed over the issue of illegal immigration -- what I've referred to as the "punitive populist" element of the Republican coalition -- seemed to think it would be possible to expand federal police power selectively: The Regime would build a border fence, dispatch armed enforcement agents to roust people from workplaces, impose new bureaucratic impositions on struggling businesses and new restrictions on travel -- but all of this would target only the "illegals" without threatening the rights of the rest of us.



But to paraphrase Edmund Burke, police-state methods, once tolerated, are soon institutionalized. What do we gain if every illegal immigrant is sent home -- and we end up living under a near-replica of the third world dictatorships those people had fled?



Joe Arpaio is the law enforcement equivalent of the geologic formation called a "terminal moraine" -- a huge mound of accreted debris piled up through the advance of a glacier. A core sample of Arpaio's decades-long long enforcement career would reveal layer upon layer of thuggish presumption, facile corruption, contempt for the Constitution, and indifference to any consideration other than his privileged status.



Arpaio is chiefly a problem for the county that has repeatedly voted him into office since 1992. But the tactics he is employing to retain his position might well engender mimicry in other counties as budgets tighten and political conflicts over dwindling tax revenues grow acute.



With the Feds pouring money and military equipment into "local" law enforcement departments nation-wide, Arpaio's literal war against Maricopa County's political leadership may eventually provide a template for similar putsches elsewhere.

UPDATE: JBS Joins Arpaio's Jackboot Parade

The New American magazine, which once published hard-hitting investigative journalism with an unabashed commitment to preserving individual liberty, has apparently decided to become a press organ for the Mussolini of Maricopa County.


This rip-and-read regurgitation of Arpaio's talking points comes amid news that 77-year-old Arpaio is the preferred choice of Arizona Republicans to run for governor. So it appears that TNA and the management of its sponsoring organization, the John Birch Society, are once again trying to ride a Red State Fascist "wave."


I use the term "fascist" here not as a lazy pejorative, but in a specific sense. Arpaio is literally waging war on the rule of law on the assumption that he and his armed minions are the law in Maricopa County. The sloppy French kiss of a "news" item run in TNA promotes the notion that Arpaio must be a good guy, because leftists hate him so passionately -- a trope very closely related to the Dear Leader/Great Man school of authoritarian collectivism.


If The New American were still in the business of investigative journalism -- or critical opinion journalism of any kind -- they would have examined Arpaio's record just a little more carefully, rather than retailing his self-serving bromides. If they were committed to individual liberty protected by law, they would be joining Arpaio's critics, rather than carrying a banner in his torchlight parade.

Second Update, December 18

In a post at the end of the thread dangling from The New American's borderline Brokeback Mountain embrace of Joe Arpaio, a fellow named J.E. Andreasen provides the following invaluable perspective:

"I have been a resident of Maricopa County since 1959, and a freedom activist since 1974. I have taken college instruction under MCSO [Maricopa County Sheriff's Office] senior management personnel. I have had superb personal assistance from MCSO officials [who] later were viciously destroyed for their decency and honor.

Simply put, Joe Arpaio is the worst nightmare for those ancestors who established the office of Sheriff as the top law enforcement official in a given county.

He has used his experience in federal law enforcement to create a private army, answerable to no one, egged on by every Nativist drone and `C-minus' LEO butt-licker in metropolitan Phoenix.

What these sub-genius folks don't yet realize is that he considers EVERY PERSON within his reach to be a "pre-arrested" criminal. His hubris is absolutely without limit, and is only matched by his contempt for human liberty and the constraints of a Constitutional Republic. None are safe from his gaze; not even his praetorian guard."

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Scum Also Rises

Those are supposed to go on beneath your slacks, idiot.

Sewage, like water, seeks its own level. A suitable illustration of this principle is found in the recent agreement between the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division and Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona's Maricopa County.

Doubtless there are many honorable and conscientious people among the deputies who serve under Arpaio, just as there are thousands of dutiful field officers employed by ICE. But Arpaio has become properly notorious for his proprietary brand of arrogance, authoritarianism, self-promotion, and petty corruption, and the agreement with ICE would effectively federalize one of the most scandal-ridden “local” law enforcement agencies in the nation.

Tucson's NBC affiliate KVOA reports:

“Federal immigration officials and the Maricopa County Sheriff's office signed an agreement Monday [February 26] to allow trained deputies to enforce immigration laws. Under the agreement, [ICE officials] will begin training 160 Maricopa County deputies ... to be authorized to detain and arrest suspected illegal immigrants both in the county jail and on the streets.... The agreement that Sheriff Joe Arpaio signed makes Maricopa County's participation the largest one-time addition to the effort.”

Query the first: If the suspected illegal immigrants are already in jail for alleged violations of local laws, why would Sheriff Joe need federal help to “arrest” them on immigration charges?

Query the second: Why can't local police and sheriffs arrest suspected illegal immigrants without federal “permission”? Although border security is a federal responsibility, there are ways that local law enforcement agencies can deal with the issue. For example: Police Chief W. Garrett Chamberlain of New Ipswich, New Hampshire, frustrated with federal inaction, began to arrest illegal immigrants on criminal trespass charges. (Chief Chamberlain appears to be that rarest of specimens, a police chief willing to confront the Feds on behalf of his community over a matter of principle.)

I grant that this is not the optimal way of dealing with the matter. I cite Chief Chamberlain's example simply to illustrate the fact that there are better options than entrenching federal control over “local” law enforcement.

In fact, about a year ago, Sheriff Arpaio – working in tandem with County Prosecutor Andy Thomas, who yields to nobody in his implacable greed for publicity – devised another inventive approach to border security: As the Washington Post recounts, Thomas “issued an interpretation of a new state anti-smuggling law that said illegal immigrants could be arrested if they were party to a deal to smuggle themselves into the United States. Punishment could be up to two years in jail.” Arpaio promptly assembled a posse to sweep up as many illegal immigrants as they could find.

This may or may not be a good idea, but it demonstrates, once again, that federal "permission" is not necessary to deal with the issue of illegal immigration. Yet Arizona -- which is suffering tremendously as a result of the collapse of our southern border -- has been primed for a federal "solution" that will make matters even worse, as all such "solutions" invariably do. (I find myself wondering if this is an outgrowth of Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon's plea last December for additional Homeland Security funding.)

In a report published yesterday (March 1), KVOA observed that four more Arizona police departments “are considering possible deals with the federal government that would give a limited number of local and state officers training in immigration law. If the four departments ultimately get the training, they would join two other agencies in Arizona that have already ... inked agreements with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out certain federal immigration duties.”

Once again, if the federal government were carrying out its duties with respect to border security, the “need” to expand its control over nominally local police agencies. But we must remember that the Feds don't expand their powers to deal with problems – they create or exacerbate problems in order to enhance their powers. This is true whether the “problem” in question is poverty, terrorism, narcotics use, or illegal immigration.

What makes the last issue so dangerous is the fact that the entire conservative movement – from the Bu'ushist media mullahs at Fox to the leaders of the John Birch Society (this fellow being a worthy exception) – has become monomaniacal on the subject of illegal immigration. Most conservatives abandoned their skepticism of federal power in the aftermath of 9-11; too many of those who held out in defense of the Bill of Rights have displayed a willingness to set aside such scruples to deal with the “border crisis.”

Sheriff Arpaio may be the single most appropriate living symbol of the conservative movement's unabashed authoritarianism.

Joe Arpaio, who appointed himself the “Nation's Toughest Sheriff” upon being elected to the position in 1992, spent several decades working for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, both in domestically and in Mexico and Turkey.

From his experience with the DEA -- during which time he was known as "Nickel-Bag Joe" for his habit of running up stats through picayune drug busts -- Arpaio apparently learned how to exploit the “war on drugs.” It's tempting to think that his time in Mexico and Turkey inspired him to create a county jail system that has become infamous for petty corruption, abuse, torture, and lethal mistreatment of non-violent offenders.

Roughly a decade ago, a federal investigation of Arpaio's county jails conducted by Oregon corrections consultant George Sullivan concluded (as summarized by the Phoenix New Times) that “an unwise abundance of stun guns, pepper spray, restraint chairs and the practice of hog-tying, combined with Arpaio's macho rhetoric about getting tough on inmates--70 percent of whom await trial under an assumption of innocence--has led to an environment where Arpaio's employees have made `unprovoked, unnecessary and, consequently, unjustified and excessive' use of force.” Nearly identical findings were reported in a separate federal inquiry two years earlier.

The Sheriff himself has compiled a record heavily laden with odd instances of hypocrisy and casual corruption:

*Five years ago, under the threat of a federal lawsuit, Arpaio was compelled to shut down a live webcast of female inmates using the bathroom.

*During a 2004 Republican primary against former Mesa Police Chief, Daniel Saban, Arpaio leaked unsubstantiated rape allegations against his political rival to a local television station.

*In the course of a prostitution sting four years ago, Arpaio authorized undercover deputies and members of his volunteer “posse” to disrobe and even engage in sexual contact with prostitutes as part of their “investigation” -- conduct that, if carried out by private citizens, would have earned them a stay in Arpaio's tent city. In fact, although most of the 70 people arrested in the “sting” were released without charges, but a handful of customers were prosecuted for conduct more or less identical to that of Arpaio's “investigators.”

Hypocrisy and corruption are good and sufficient reasons for Arpaio to be removed from office. The lethal treatment occasionally handed out by his hired thugs is a more serious matter.

In 1996, a small-time drug offender named Scott Norberg was killed while in the custody of Arpaio's deputies. An investigation by Amnesty International documented that Norberg, who had supposedly “attacked” the deputies, was handcuffed with his face shoved into the floor when he was dragged to a “restraint chair,” where he died of “positional asphyxia.” The County eventually reached an $8 million settlement with Crenshaw's family.

Philip Wilson, who was arrested and sentenced to two months in Tent City on a parole violation, was lethally beaten with a blunt object five days after being incarcerated in July 2003; he died after several months in a coma. His mother Pearl, founder of an advocacy group called “Mothers Against Arpaio,” is a former prison guard who believes – on the basis of her experience and knowledge of Arpaio's facility – that her son was “set up” by camp guards after he had complained about conditions at the jail. According to a lawsuit filed by Pearl, the inmates who killed Philip (with the alleged connivance of guards) beat him so severely by “his blood was sprayed across the tent.”

Just a few weeks ago, the County offered $1.3 million to settle lawsuits filed by Pearl Wilson and the family of Deborah Ann Braillard, a 46-year-old diabetic woman who died of medical neglect in 2005 after being jailed on a drug charge. The lawsuit on behalf of Braillard points out that since she was a repeat offender, Tent City officials knew that she was a diabetic, but they denied her appropriate treatment for two days.

The Arpaio body count also includes Brian Crenshaw, jailed on drug and petty robbery charges, who was beaten into a fatal coma shortly after being put behind bars, and Charles Agster, a mentally handicapped man who was killed in the County Jail shortly after being arrested on misdemeanor loitering charges.

Brian Crenshaw (l.), Charles Agster (r.).

Let me repeat: Arpaio's squad of degenerate bullies killed a mentally handicapped man who had been arrested for loitering.The official story was that Crenshaw somehow suffered his fatal injuries by falling off his bunk.

I am of the opinion that drug use should not be a criminal offense; honorable people can disagree in good faith. Obviously, theft of any sort is a crime. Loitering might be considered an offense against public order, or perhaps a form of harassment in some circumstances. But obviously none of these behaviors merits the equivalent of a death sentence, particularly death through torture.

Over the past decade, Maricopa County has paid more than $13 million in legal settlements arising from incidents of this type.

As the County has absorbed the costs of his maladministration and suffocated beneath the stench of his corruption, Arpaio has withdrawn into a dictatorial cocoon: He created a “Threat Assessment Squad” -- essentially an armed praetorian guard – to insulate himself from the handful of journalists who ask him pointed questions; he has repeatedly refused to comply with requests for information he is compelled to provide under Arizona law; and last December he and his allies threatened the staff of the New Times with felony charges for publishing his home address.

The rationale offered by Arpaio is a familiar one to anyone who understands the significance of the phrase “Reichstag Fire”: The valiant Sheriff insists that his enemies are trying to kill him, as illustrated by a purported attempt to plant a bomb in his car in 1999. As it happens, the alleged bomber, a small-bore street crook named James Saville, was paid $2,000 by an undercover agent to create a dud bomb, and then led by the same undercover agent to the Sheriff's parked car. Saville was acquitted of charges in 2003.

Arpaio has never worked an honest day in his life; every cent he has been paid he has received from the taxpayers. He has been marinated for decades in statist assumptions, and as age-related dementia claims what little rationality he once possessed, he has blossomed into an undisguised megalomaniac.

Given all of this, is it any wonder that Arpaio and his Sheriff's Department would find themselves working hand-in-mailed-fist with the Homeland Security Leviathan?

Just days ago, Mitt Romney – whose presidential bid has received the blessings of the Bush crime family -- appointed Arpaio to his campaign committee in Arizona. Should Romney make it to the White House, it's likely that Arpaio would be given an elevated post – perhaps even more than a sinecure – in the Homeland Security bureaucracy.

Obiter dicta

For those who are interested in hearing my interview yesterday on Chris Arzen's program "Iron Sharpens Iron" (thanks, Chris), it is archived at the website of the Christian Liberty Party, here.

The wonderful CLP site has a huge and very valuable audio and video archive well worth your time.

The Prosecutor as Jihadist: Andrew Thomas vs. Justice

Margaret Vitale is a 57-year-old nurse who lives with her daughter Tina in Glendale, Arizona. A while ago, Tina decided to move out, and – concerned for her mother's safety – she urged Margaret to purchase a handgun.

After Margaret tried many different handguns and found them to be unsuitable, her son John suggested that a revolver would be a good choice, and he brought an unloaded one to her apartment. With Tina and John looking on, Margaret dry-fired the revolver several times to see if its action agreed with her. When she had satisfied her concerns, Margaret put the weapon aside and had a brief conversation with Tina.

Inexplicably, John took this opportunity to load the revolver – without telling Margaret that he had done so. This was a potentially lethal violation of rudimentary gun safety protocols. Thankfully, on this occasion the worst didn't happen when – a minute later – Margaret picked up the revolver, pointed it down at a neutral location, and pulled the trigger.

The round Margaret discharged hit an appliance; the ricochet sent it through the fleshy part of Tina's calf, leaving a small but clean exit wound.

As a 20-year veteran nurse, Margaret wanted to take Tina to the hospital, and she knew that the gunshot wound would be reported to the police. So after making sure that her daughter was all right, she called 911. When the policeman arrived, he took statements from Tina (the “victim”), Margaret and John. Satisfied that no crime had been committed, the policeman left without confiscating the firearm. He did, however, write a report, which – at the insistence of the officer's supervisor -- was sent to the County Attorney's office.

That report offered an accurate and detailed account of the accident that took place in Margaret's apartment. No reasonable human being could misunderstand what happened on that occasion, or consider it a crime – particularly in light of the fact that the “victim” wasn't pressing charges, and had told the officer that her immediate concern was for the supposed offender, who suffers from high blood pressure.

Unfortunately, the Maricopa County Attorney's office is headed by the execrable Andrew Peyton Thomas, who is among the most zealous practitioners of the Republican Party's proprietary brand of paternalistic totalitarianism. Like the Grand and Glorious Decider who leads the GOP, Thomas is determined to rip up “evil” by the roots. Unlike Bush, however, Thomas has been brutally candid about what this would mean.

“The root of our crime problem,” wrote Thomas about a decade ago, “is a rights-happy radical individualism.” The solution to crime, therefore, would be to destroy individual rights – and to the extent he has been given power to do so, Thomas has made remarkable progress in that direction. His most effective weapon in the war against individualism has been to overcharge criminal defendants and use the threat of mandatory sentences to extort draconian plea bargains.

“They're overcharging for felonies that should be misdemeanors,” observes Tempe defense attorney David Cantor of Thomas's office. “Then [defendants] plead to the lead charge, but their lead charge is too stiff. This means everything goes to trial” -- unless defendants simply give up and take a deal.

This approach has been politically profitable for Thomas and his clique, and financially lucrative for defense attorneys. It has been a disaster for individual rights, of course – but then again, Thomas insists that individual rights are the enemy of the orderly society he seeks to create.

Thus when the Maricopa County Attorney's office was informed of the incident involving Margaret and Tina Vitale, it filed -- “per policy,” as one of Thomas's drones insisted – a charge of “dangerous disorderly conduct” against the 57-year-old nurse, who had done nothing wrong. This charge is a felony that would involve a mandatory prison term.

The only option offered by Thomas's office – once again, “per policy” -- was for Margaret to plead to a “designated felony” that would involve probation and a time in the County Jail system, which is operated by the squalid, senile publicity whore Joe Arpaio. Since it's not uncommon for non-violent offenders to die in Arpaio's jails, Margaret might be safer in state prison.

No crime was committed here. Margaret and Tina were involved in a bizarre accident that, thankfully, involved nothing more than a trivial flesh wound – until the State became involved.

Recounting this episode with Margaret and Tina on the Charles Goyette radio program (listen here), defense attorney Marc Victor pointed out that “Not every wrong needs to be a crime.” This is obvious for those of us who understand and cherish individual rights. Andrew Thomas, once again, is not found in that number.

Thomas's totalitarian impulses were displayed to good effect just three days ago (April 3) when his office filed terrorism charges against a 14-year-old middle school student from Mesa who allegedly pulled a knife on a female class. After being threatened, the girl ran home and called the police. When the alleged assailant didn't show up at school the next morning, the police visited his home, reportedly finding a backpack containing a handgun, chains, and a rope.

The police recommended that the youth be tried as an adult on charges of kidnapping (attempted kidnapping would be a more plausible charge, given that the girl wasn't actually abducted) and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Surely this would be sufficient to address this outrage against the person and individual rights of the traumatized young girl.

But remember – individual rights are the problem, from Thomas's perspective. Order is all that matters. And under Section 802 of the PATRIOT [sic] Act, any act of kidnapping can be defined as a form of domestic terrorism. All that was necessary to do so in this case was utter shamelessness and degenerate ambition. Andrew Thomas was up to that challenge.

Thomas is obviously a depraved fanatic. But he's also something of a pioneer: He has created what could be a self-perpetuating lawyers' cartel in Maricopa County.

“Business for Valley defense attorneys is booming,” reported the February 18 East Valley Tribune. “Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has been cracking down on criminals since 2004, and public defenders have scrambled to keep up as prison populations have swelled.” As Phoenix criminal defense attorney Larry Debus points out: “We charge 50 percent higher fees because we have to go to trial, and trials are expensive.... I say he's a great county attorney. We charge higher fees and we go to trial more, which is what we do best.”

Marc Victor, who is representing Margaret Vitale, offers a much different view: “Andrew Thomas has been good for business, but bad for justice.” Noting that he can charge $15,000 for the same services for which his brother, a defense attorney in Massachusetts, can charge $2,500, Victor declares: “I would prefer to make less money and have more justice.”

But for Thomas, justice – the effort to vindicate individual rights – isn't the point; the point, rather, is to expand the power of the State and to uphold the interests of the political class. This is demonstrated not only by his perverse, sadistic insistence on overcharging petty criminals or – as with Margaret Vitale – manufacturing “crimes” where none exist, but also by one case in which his zeal for prosecution mysteriously evaporated.

In mid-March, Thomas announced that he was discontinuing the prosecution of the “Glendale Four,” three City Council members and a county clerk accused of felonious misconduct by falsifying some public records and destroying others in order to conceal suspected financial misconduct.

This was an authentic crime against public order of the kind only government officials can commit. Which is precisely why Thomas had no interest in the case. He is indecently eager to send innocent 57-year-old nurses to prison, and to threaten concupiscent teenage boys with life in prison for the purported crime of looking at dirty pictures. But criminals who misuse the power of the State? Well, here the totalitarian Thomas would agree with the constitutionalist Marc Victor: "Not every wrong needs to be a crime."

The Bipartisan Homeland Security State

For two years, Bart McIntyre was deeply involved in the insignificant, thinly populated white supremacist movement.


Though it may be difficult to believe, this actually represented something of an improvement in McIntyre's social circle, since his paying job was a position in one of our country's most repellent criminal syndicates, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Persecution of Unsanctioned Political and Religious Minorities (or ATF, for the sake of convenience).



Unsavory as their personal beliefs may be, most adherents of the white supremacist movement actually work for a living, unlike the tax-engorged parasites of the ATF. Tiny though that sub-population is, I'll bet that less than one of every 1,000 white supremacists ever commits a crime against the person or property of another human being. The core mission of the ATF, on the other hand, is to commit various kinds of aggression against gun owners and other harmless people, and the agency is indelibly tainted by its role in the 1993 mass murder at Mt. Carmel.



But this is simply the predictable fruit of a very evil tree. The ATF's progenitors were the properly despised 18th Century "Revenuers" whose haughty impositions helped precipitate the Whiskey Rebellion; the agency also played a key federal enforcement role during the demented quasi-puritanical social experiment called "Prohibition." In that role the agency's immediate ancestor was an appendage of the federal Bureau of Internal Revenue, as the IRS was known at the time.


It was only with the enactment of the Nazi-derived U.S. Gun Control Act of1968 (the German National Socialist pedigree of that measure has been capably documented by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) that the ATF blundered into its present role as chief persecutor of law-abiding gun owners and firearms dealers. So it was in his day job as an ATF Special Agent, rather than his part-time deployment undercover in the white supremacist milieu, that McIntyre forged his connections with those devoted to keeping Nazi ideals alive.



As he prepares to retire, McIntyre has taken the opportunity to warn that the ongoing economic collapse may re-invigorate the moribund white supremacist movement. "In society, you have a very small number of people who are going to push the envelope and take it to the next step" beyond grievance and intemperate talk and into criminal violence.



This is emerging as a standard narrative among federal law enforcement agencies: A plummeting economy + the election of a black president = a racist renaissance and a surging tide of hate crimes. The Regime's publicity arm has already treated the public to several variations on that theme, even though the evidence to support it is thin to the point of translucency.
The point of all this is not to address a plausible threat, of course, but rather to provide a the proper reductionist framing device so that any tremor of organized resistance to Obama's Neo-New Deal can be interpreted in terms of racial resentments.

















Sic semper tyrannis: ATF agents, after staging an illegal raid of a peaceful church fellowship and getting their asses kicked, retreat in shame. The Branch Davidians were within their moral and legal rights to gun down every single one of the ATF assailants, but to their considerable credit they displayed the Christian trait of mercy, permitting the criminals to gather the bodies of their dead and retrieve their wounded comrades. The Regime displayed no similar leniency in dealing with the Davidians' justified resistance, eventually immolating nearly all of them.


Give the prominence of federal informant/provocateurs among white supremacist groups it's quite likely that federal seed money is the only thing keeping that movement alive; it's simply too useful an antagonist for the Feds to permit it to die outright.


The political conquest of America by white supremacist ideology is about as likely a prospect as a winning streak by the Washington Generals. This doesn't prevent collectivists of a certain ilk -- Philip Roth being a suitably loathsome exemplar -- from peddling the notion that America must always be caught up in a foreign war or similar undertaking in order to domesticate the white population's resilient racism and direct it outward, rather than letting it coalesce into an American Reich. People preoccupied with such concerns don't object to the mechanisms of fascist rule; they simply prefer that those mechanisms be controlled by, and for the benefit of, their faction.


Ironically, or perhaps not, the incipient Obama Regime seems prepared to consolidate many of the fascist-flavored innovations of its predecessor. One very interesting illustration of this continuity is the apparent selection of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve as the next Commissar for Homeland Security.



Napolitano, who first attracted public attention in 1991 as a legal adviser to Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, is widely perceived as a mildly "progressive" Democrat. But in her career in Arizona, first as a federal attorney and then as Governor, she has displayed an uncanny ability to exploit the racially charged issue of immigration for her political advantage.



Michael Lacey, publisher of the Phoenix New Times, refers to Napolitano's career as a "cocktail of mediocrity," made up of roughly equal parts of incompetence and "rank opportunism." As a state bordering Mexico, Arizona has a very large population of immigrants, both those who arrived through legal channels and those who didn't. It also has a very large and politically organized constituency for immigration reform.



Most -- actually, nearly all -- Arizonans concerned about unchecked immigration are entirely innocent of racial prejudice. A handful are entirely consumed by it. And the state's most successful politician has ruthlessly capitalized on the issue as a way to deflect public attention from his spectacular incompetence and unvarnished corruption, and the cost those attributes have imposed on the taxpayers. The politician in question is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who would likely be in prison were it not for a favor done long ago by Janet Napolitano.



As the elected head of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), Arpaio has cultivated a media image as "America's Toughest Sheriff." He has made himself famous by creating and maintaining a county detention system in which various forms of petty belittlement -- such as forcing male inmates to wear pink underwear and eat green bologna -- are inflicted on the inmates, most of whom have yet to be convicted of an actual crime.



Both male and female detainees are forced to work on chain gangs, and those consigned to Arpaio's "Tent City" are deliberately exposed to extremes of climate, which in Arizona can mean temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. (Arpaio seems to take a perverse pleasure in making life especially difficult for female inmates: Until a federal lawsuit forced him to stop, he maintained a jail netcam broadcasting female detainees using the toilet. That fact provides a certain nauseating subtext to Arpaio's publicly expressed desire to have authorities in L.A. extradite Paris Hilton to Arizona to serve out her jail term for DUI-related offenses.)



During the past decade, while Arpaio has labored to make himself a household name, people have been dying in the custody of his deputies. Lawsuits resulting from the death of inmates at the hands of Arpaio's brown-shirted homeboys have cost the county more than $13 million in legal settlements, and a five-fold increase in insurance premiums. Last September, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care revoked its accreditation of the MCSO jails owing to Arpaio's refusal to provide adequate health care to inmates. The following month, U.S. District Judge Neal Wake (a George W. Bush appointee), ruled that the MCSO detention system violated legal standards of inmate treatment. Both the revocation and Judge Neal's ruling will probably result in additional lawsuits.


In 1996, four years after Arpaio was first elected and while Janet Napolitano served as a Clinton-appointed federal prosecutor in Arizona, a petty drug offender named Scott Norberg was attacked and beaten to death by nearly a dozen county correctional officers. Much of the lethal violence was committed while Norberg was shackled to a torture device called a "restraint chair": Bound and unable to defend himself, Norberg was beaten by the brave men of the MCSO until he died.


Arpaio didn't order the murder of Scott Norberg, but he was deeply involved in the cover-up. "Notes taken the night of the killing were destroyed," writes Phoenix New Times' Michael Lacey. "Critical X-Rays were destroyed. County authorities, under the watchful eye of the sheriff, hid the fact that Norberg's larynx was fractured." What evidence did exist was forwarded to the FBI. The Norberg family's attorney, Michael Manning, provided Napolitano -- by way of her assistant US attorneys -- with much of the evidence that had been suppressed by the MCSO.


And that's where the case died.


Before the investigation found traction, Napolitano was dismissive of Arpaio's critics, insisting that he ran "a strict jail but a safe one."

Arpaio's "progressive" ally Janet Napolitano, soon to be Commissarina of Homeland Security.

The Justice Department's final report, which was issued two years after Napolitano punted on the issue, fleshed out the skeletal term "strict" in interesting ways, noting that excessive and abusive use of force was common and often involved unjustified use of restraint chairs, hog-tying and beating of inmates, and other forms of deadly restraint.


The report likewise scored Arpaio's staffing decisions, which left the jail "below levels needed for safety and human operations." The Justice Department, as former Arizona Republic reporter Tom Zoellner pointed out in Slate, "filed suit and settled with the sheriff the same day" in exchange for promises of various reforms.


Napolitano was at Arpaio's side when the sheriff called a press conference to call the settlement a personal vindication. Napolitano, recall, had been handed clear evidence of murder committed under Arpaio's authority, and a criminal conspiracy led by his office cover up that crime; she simply threw it out and refused to prosecute.


The Sheriff would eventually reciprocate by crossing party lines to support Napolitano's subsequent politicall career, first endorsing her bi to become state attorney general and, in 2002, throwing his support to her in a gubernatorial race that was decided by a handful of votes. But this was the least Arpaio could do for the woman whose malfeasance of office not only saved his career, but probably kept him out of prison.


In 2005, Napolitano became the first governor to sign what is called a 287(g) aggreement with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) -- the component of the Homeland Security Department in charge of border enforcement. Agreements of that kind permit state and local law enforcement agencies to take the lead in border enforcement.


And this handed Arpaio a new use for his Tent City: It could now hold immigrants collected during high-profile sweeps conducted by Arpaio's office, in which people of Mexican ancestry -- citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants alike -- are subject to pretext stops and searches by MCSO deputies. These anti-immigrant sweeps are hugely popular with a large segment of Arizona's electorate. It's likely that the popularity of the sweeps would suffer somewhat were the public adequately informed of one very troubling cost incurred by them.


Overkill, cubed: Some of Arpaio's arsenal (left, and below right).



A recent study by the Goldwater Institute entitled "Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office" documents that Arpaio's project of turning the MCSO into an immigration control agency has effectively crippled it as a law enforcement entity.


"MCSO's massive diversion of resources into policing illegal immigration ... coincides with growing rates of violent crimes, plummeting arrest rates, and increased response time to citizens' calls for help," notes the report. "At the same time, [an investigation done by the Arizona Republic newspaper] found that crime rates in areas that were the subject of saturation [immigration] raids were largely unchanged after the sweeps."


Arpaio's office is the depository for all warrants issued to law-enforcement agencies in Maricopa County. As of September 2008, 77,949 warrants were outstanding, including 42,297 felony warrants. Many, perhaps most, of the felony charges dealt with violent crimes against persons and property.

The soi-disant "toughest sheriff" in the land boldly sends his deputies to drag Mexican mothers from their cars while their children scream in terror, and deploys paramilitary units to seize janitors fromwhile their children scream in terror, or their jobs at Mesa City Library or City Hall.


Meanwhile, actual violent criminals remain free and the crime rate continues to climb -- and Arpaio capitalizes on that latter fact by describing it as a product of unrestricted immigration, rather than a reflection of his own politically opportunistic priorities.


Two recent developments prompted Arpaio to discover, however tardily, the merit of enforcing felony warrants. The first was Napolitano's grudging decision to withhold some state funding from the MCSO until something was done to address the backlog of outstanding warrants. The second was the development of a "reality television program" featuring the MCSO entitled "Smile! You're Under Arrest."


The program -- a product the Fox network, natch -- features people subject to felony warrants (involving non-violent offenses for the most part) being "punk'd" through elaborate on-camera ruses before being arrested. The process is long, expensive, needlessly complicated, and self-indulgent. To Arpaio, an insatiable publicity whore who cannot resist an opportunity to thrust his unsightly mug in front of a camera, the opportunity to star in his own television show outweighed any practical liabilities.


Endlessly vain and incurably power-intoxicated, Arpaio doesn't venture out in public without being surrounded by a phalanx of grim-faced bodyguards. This is supposedly made necessary because of purported death threats received by the sherriff, at least one of which was a "bomb threat" that was actually contrived by the Sheriff's Office itself.


In October 2007, Arpaio sent his Selective Enforcement Unit to arrest Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the owners of the Phoenix New Times, which has produced a steady stream of critical stories examining the sheriff's empire of authoritarian corruption. Lacey and Larkin were charged with publicizing secret grand jury proceedings by publicizing a subponea they had received from the local prosecutor, a priggish authoritarian and Arpaio ally named Andrew Thomas, that demanded, inter alia, "Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years" as well as "detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004" as well as every individual "individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad [in the publication] over a period of years."


All of this was part of a campaign of official harassment and intimidation provoked by a New Times investigation into Arpaio's personal real estate holdings. One story published by the paper gave Arpaio's home address, thereby supposedly posing "a serious and imminent threat" to his personal safety. The charges against Lacey and Larkin were dropped, and the New Times is pursuing a lawsuit against the rogue sheriff and his ally in the County Prosecutor's office.



Arpaio continues to use the powers of his office to punish and intmidate his critics, whether this involves threatening to arrest reporters for seeking public records about the MCSO or arresting citizens who politely applaud his critics during meetings of the County Board of Supervisors. (People who applauded other speakers at the same event were left unmolested by Arpaio's minions.) Arpaio's preferred tactic is to file "disorderly conduct" charges against people who confront or criticize him or his office; in fact, he's been captured on video trying to provoke a citizen into some act, gesture, or vocal inflection that could be construed as "disorderly":

*** ***


Just as "progressives" of a certain kind support the exercise of draconian powers against "hate criminals" and peaceful gun owners, conservatives of the Hannity/Savage/Beck variety regard Arpaio to be something of a folk hero. Oh, sure, he's a bit uncouth, they'll admit; he lacks rudimentary social graces and looks as if he combs his hair with buttered toast -- but at least he's doing something to battle the Brown Peril.


There is something of a dialectic at work in the consolidation of the Homeland Security apparatus. During the Clinton era, the embryonic Homeland Security Department focused most of its attention on "home-grown" extremists; this had the useful effect of provoking conservative concerns about due process, the Bill of Rights, and abuses of government power.


During Duhbya's reign, the focus has been on the dreaded "other" -- particularly Muslims and dusky-skinned immigrants from south of the border. This catalyzed resistance among left-leaning civil liberties groups, even as most of the conservative movement embraced many of the same measures they found intolerable under Clinton.


Now, in the name of bipartisanship and national unity under the rule of the Sainted One, even His Holiness Barack Obama, we're likely to see a synthesis of the worst elements from both the Bush and Clinton eras.


As Attorney General, Eric Holder, an unabashed proponent of civilian disarmament and the prosecution of "hate crimes," we can expect to see the ATF will let off its leash and a cascade of federal initiatives targeting "hate groups."


Under Commissarina Napolitano, the Homeland Security Department will continue to militarize and federalize law enforcement, cultivating ties with Joe Arpaio wannabes nation-wide and turning them into squalid little satellite despotisms in the service of Washington. (Incidentally, like Arpaio, the Homeland Security Department now has its own television show.)


Although it is almost certainly too much to hope for, but it would be a substantial blessing were a bipartisan -- or, better yet, trans-partisan -- synthesis to emerge among opponents of government power, with conservatives taking alarm over police state measures being used to enforce immigration laws and liberals loudly defending the rights of the rural gunowners Obama has referred to so contemptuously. What is necessary is for people to decide that they love liberty more than they despise their political enemies, which is a direct reversal of the way politics almost always operates.


A personal note --

I wish to apologize, yet again, for another unscheduled hiatus. Everybody in my house has been sick, myself included.


Korrin, as many of you have learned, is expecting again, a blessed circumstance complicated somewhat by her long-term chronic health problems. Both mother and baby are doing well, but are in need of an exceptional level of paternal attention. That, plus Isaiah's appendicitis scare (it turned out to be something else), plus my own ongoing bout of the flu, have kept me occupied away from my keyboard.


To those who noted the oblique announcement in the header to this blog, and offered congratulations, I extend sincere thanks. The new member of the Grigg Clan will arrive on the third of next month; he's a boy, and we're always open for those who wish to suggest what to name him.



On sale now!












Dum spiro, pugno!