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Donald Trump, Elizabeth Williamson, Huffington Post, Joe Arpaio, New York Times, Phoenix New Times
If you woke up thinking maybe the country can recover from all the nonsense that’s taken place, think again, sucker (“Joe Arpaio’s Latest Offense—Running for Senate,” New York Times, 1/9/2018):
Of course he is. Life with no media attention isn’t worth living for the 85-year-old, race-baiting former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Mr. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in 2017, after he spent years flagrantly ignoring a court order to stop profiling and detaining people he suspected were undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump pardoned him in August.
The writer, Elizabeth Williamson, documents some of Arpaio’s offenses:
Mr. Arpaio made his name by mistreating Latino immigrants and petty criminals, whom he imprisoned in a “Tent City”where temperatures reached 120 degrees and Mr. Arpaio devised a menu of cruelties ranging from making them wear pink underwear to serving them miserable food.
After the Maricopa County sheriff’s office detained a Latino man with a valid visa for nine hours in 2007, a class-action lawsuit led to an injunction requiring Mr. Arpaio’s office to end its immigration-related stops. Mr. Arpaio defied the injunction for years, boasting about it to the news media. He was convicted and facing a potential six-month jail sentence when he was pardoned.
There are some other heinous acts that Arpaio is infamous for. His men went to the wrong house in a drug bust, burning it down and driving a dog back into the inferno, laughing when the dog’s owner broke down:
• Just after the tear gas canisters were shot, a fire erupted and destroyed a $250,000 home plus all the contents inside. (The home’s occupants believe the tear gas canisters caused the fire. Phoenix fire officials say the blaze was probably started by a lighted candle that was knocked onto a bed during the confusion.)
• The armored personnel carrier careened down the street and smashed into a parked car after its brakes failed.
• And in the ultimate display of cruelty, a SWAT team member drove a dog trying to flee the home back into the inferno, where it met an agonizing death.
Arpaio’s office was also found to have staged an assassination attempt against the sheriff, placing the blame on a 19-year-old who they then subsequently arrested and tried:
On July 9, 1999, police arrested 18-year-old James Saville with bomb-making parts in the parking lot of a Phoenix restaurant where Arpaio was dining. Television cameras had been tipped off in advance, Arpaio gave on-camera interviews, and the alleged plot on his life led the news.
At his trial, Saville’s lawyers argued that the young man was a victim of entrapment. It was a risky strategy. Defense lawyers had to prove that the crime originated with law enforcement officers, that the officers induced Saville to commit the crime, and that he wouldn’t have otherwise done it without their coercion. Essentially, Saville’s lawyers had to convince the jury that the sheriff’s office cooked up an assassination plot and framed a teenager for it.
Which they did. Jurors heard Saville, who was in prison for vandalizing his high school, was set up by a prison informant working on behalf of the sheriff’s office. A former sergeant in the sheriff’s office came forward to testify, horrified by the department’s treatment of the young man.
“I stayed up nights just thinking about Saville,” Wayne Scoville told journalist Jana Bommersbach. “I got to the point I was more worried that he not go to jail than I was about my safety—it was just so wrong what they did.”
And he’s reported to have forced a woman in his custody to give birth while she was shackled:
Now, Telemundo 52 is reporting on the case of a woman named Alma Minerva Chacon, who says she was detained while nine months pregnant and forced to give birth while shackled to a bed. Chacon said she was not allowed to hold her baby and was told that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, the baby would be turned over to state custody.
In case anyone has forgotten, this is the man Donald Trump chose to pardon. This is the GOP.