4 p.m. Kerry Martin, sheriff’s office lawyer, says he can’t put on his case in 20 minutes. It’s a complex law-enforcement issue. Judge Heilman says there’s a simple issue in this case: what transpired on Wednesday and why it transpired. Says Martin has spent a lot of time talking…
2:40 p.m. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Heilman says he wants to wrap this up by 4:30 today. Steve Wetzl takes the stand… Chief Information Officer for Maricopa County. Wetzl says he heard from the sheriff’s office this week and was told the agency was taking control of the ICJIS…
Captain Joel Fox, front man for the shady group of SCA donors, has apparently given up trying to answer our questions. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to comment on our blog. Fox still falsely claims we haven’t identified a possible crime that the SCA has committed: I’ve been…
We finally got a chance to inspect the report from the raid on Mesa city buildings last year by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, months after we requested it. You remember this one — the nighttime raid on the city government that employed Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s law enforcement nemesis, George Gascon,…
As our readers know, we corrected misinformation yesterday about whether the takeover of a computer system by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office gave Arpaio and his minions access to judge’s e-mails they aren’t allowed to have. But someone forgot to send the memo to the Arizona Republic’s editorial writers, who…
Mayor Phil Gordon is to be congratulated for the Elements of Hate panel discussion his office organized, which took place Wednesday at the newly-renovated AE England Building at Civic Space Park in Downtown Phoenix. The event coincided with the visit of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s representative Heidi Beirich. In…
The chief deputy for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office told a judge yesterday he believed intrusion into a law enforcement computer system “was imminent,” the Arizona Republic reported this morning. Apparently, that’s the reason the chief deputy, Dave Hendershott, ordered a dozen armed deputies to take over the system on…
Despite a shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement away from indiscriminate worksite raids nationwide, and despite the fact that Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to thumb his nose at the feds in various ways — taping conversations between ICE and MCSO employees, refusing to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation, etc…
Two-and-a-half hours of this hearing and we’re wondering how much money taxpayers are paying for this. Remember, we’re all paying for the lawyers on both sides. On the sheriff’s side, it seems like even if this password-changing action was legitimate, it didn’t need to be done as some kind of…
2:40 p.m. Back to hearing. Sheriff’s office is turning over info to the Department of Justice that it believes shows court personnel engaged in criminal activity, says the sheriff’s lawyer, Kerry Martin. Martin does not go into detail but apparently it might have had something to do with the ICJIS…
The head of the Maricopa County ICJIS department, the one the sheriff’s office raided yesterday, just told us that databases cannot be accessed through those computers. In other words, our earlier post was mislabeled — we’ll go back and fix it in a minute. The main thing to know…
Issue: The county is seeking a restraining order against the sheriff’s office following yesterday’s raid by deputies on a building containing county computers The courtroom is packed with private lawyers, county officials, reporters and other observers. Barnett Lotstein, a top aide under Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, came to…
The county feud took what is perhaps its ugliest turn yesterday as deputies with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office seized county computers with data a court already ruled the sheriff couldn’t access. UPDATE: We just found out (2:35 p.m.) that the computers seized by the sheriff’s office don’t provide access…
From the broiler of ‘Bama to the desert heat of Ari-bama, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Dr. Heidi Beirich descended on the offices of Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon Wednesday and blasted Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for his associations with neo-Nazi and nativist individuals and organizations. Actually, Beirich had a…
I’ll say one thing about nativist nudniks like William Gheen of ALIPAC, they can sure dish it out when it comes to bashing Mexicans on their little blogs, but boy do they scurry like schoolyard cowards when you call them out. I’m on Facebook, and I believe I became his “friend” a…
Arpaio Twitter Watch: What Arpaio is referring to here is the fact that his anti-illegal-immigrant forces have arrested 93 Mexicans and other Latinos in the past two weeks. Okay, we confess we don’t know for sure that they were all Mexicans and Latinos, but how…
As we’ve mentioned before, if the SCA spokesman, Captain Joel Fox, wants to talk, we’re willing to listen. After we told you about the interesting stuff written on the SCA donation checks, like “Vote for Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” Fox left a message on our blog. His response: “Sorry to spoil…
Shackled and dressed in stripes, Daniel Mahon avoided Don Logan’s eyes in federal court today as the man Mahon’s accused of targeting with a mail bomb spoke to the court, looking over his shoulder from time to time at the defendant as he addressed Judge David Campbell from a lectern…
A report by Maricopa County budgeters critical of the use of overtime at the Sheriff’s Office says nepotism and favoritism appears to play a role in who gets extra cash for extra work. News of the report made a splash on the front page of Sunday’s Arizona Republic and seems to have…
A Guadalupe man claims a deputy who pulled him over for a burned-out brake light ran over him, then assaulted his family as he lay trapped and screaming beneath a squad car. These hair-raising details are found in a notice of claim filed last week against Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and…
Above is Phoenix pro-immigration activist Dennis Gilman’s video of this past Friday’s successful Children’s Walk for Family Unity, organized by Sal Reza’s organization Puente. Despite the fake outrage over the demonstration from radio lunkheads like Mac and Gaydos on local wing-nut station KTAR 92.3 FM, I think you can tell from the…
Save for the implied threat of the nativists, today’s children’s march from Sheriff Joe’s Fourth Avenue Jail in Downtown Phoenix to the Wells Fargo Building, where the MCSO keeps two floors of pricey executive offices, was an inspiring spectacle. About 150 persons, more than half of whom were kids, participated…
