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…

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…

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…

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…

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)…