Homeless in Arizona

Mexican gets 284 days in jail for possession of a pen in Arizona!!!!

Luz Ruiz Rascon a Mexican national who was working in Arizona copped a plea to possession of a forgery device to get out of Sheriff Joe's Tent City gulag.

That forgery device was the pen which she used to fill out her employment papers with.

The racist pigs and prosecutors in Maricopa County claim that despite the fact that the social security number made up by Luz Ruiz Rascon was not assigned to anyone she is still guilty of felony forgery crimes. What rubbish.

The article says that if a White person had committed the same crime they would have received at most 90 days.

Source

After Nine Months in Jail for Working Without Papers, Luz Ruiz Rascon Finally Will Go Free

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, May 23 2013

It took nine months of incarceration in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's notorious Estrella Jail, but what should have happened in August of last year, happened just recently in the case of Luz Ruiz Rascon, mother of two U.S.-citizen children, one of whom suffers from leukemia.

You may recall from my February 7 cover story, "Bill Montgomery Is No Immigration Moderate," that Rascon, 38, was arrested in an Arpaio raid on a GNC warehouse in Phoenix and charged with six class-four felonies involving identity theft and forgery.

Rascon had used a non-existent Social Security number to score work at GNC, though she didn't adopt a false identity. Moreover, for all 11 years that she'd worked at GNC, she filed tax returns using a taxpayer-identification number.

She has no prior criminal history and never had been in jail before.

But because she is undocumented and because the Maricopa County Attorney's Office intentionally overcharged her, she was held non-bondable under the dictates of Proposition 100, an amendment to the Arizona Constitution passed by voters in 2006.

On Monday May 20, after 284 days in custody, Rascon pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of possession of a forgery device in a deal with the MCAO.

The felony counts against her were dropped.

The "forgery device" in question? A pen. You know, the one she used to write the made-up Social Security number.

Before sentencing, Judge Peter Reinstein asked Rascon if she wished to address the court. She said yes, and spoke briefly.

"I would like to apologize for the harm I could have caused," Rascon explained in Spanish, via a court interpreter. "It was never my intent to hurt anybody by working."

She went on to thank the judge and the MCAO for offering the plea deal.

Judge Reinstein gave her a suspended sentence and six months unsupervised probation. She had served more than three times the usual 90 days someone with a class-four felony conviction receives in such cases.

"I don't think you hurt anyone by your actions," Reinstein told Rascon. "I'm glad the state saw fit to offer you this plea agreement. I think it's appropriate."

Afterward, a pink-handcuffed Rascon hugged Delia Salvatierra, one of the three attorneys involved with the case. (Salvatierra's co-counsel is Johnny Sinodis, and their partner in defending the undocumented is Dori Zavala.)

By the time this column went to press, Rascon had yet to be transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Once that happens, it's anticipated that ICE will release her.

Outside court, Salvatierra was pleased that her client soon would be free, but she lamented the obvious.

"I can't even say justice prevailed today," Salvatierra said. "Because she's been detained for nine months. That's a hard sentence for a woman for pre-conviction incarceration, when she didn't harm anybody."

Salvatierra praised her client's heroism in not surrendering. Initially, prosecutors wanted Rascon to plead to the lead. She refused.

If she'd copped to a felony, she would've gotten out of county sooner, but she would have faced deportation, a 10-year bar to legal re-entry and indefinite separation from her kids.

And under the current language of the Gang of Eight's immigration-reform bill, she wouldn't have been eligible for a probationary legal status, like the 11 million or 12 million other mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children who stand to benefit.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery is, in word if not in deed, an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. He even backs a proposal that would carve out an exception in any immigration overhaul for undocumented people convicted of felonies related to identity theft and forgery.

Nevertheless, his office pursues a hard-line policy toward the undocumented, overcharging them, so as to hold them non-bondable in Arpaio's inhumane gulags, thereby coercing them into pleading to a felony that ultimately will cause their removal from the country.

Montgomery denies this, of course. But an ICE PowerPoint I got hold of earlier this year gives the lie to that denial. In it, ICE shows how to charge the undocumented to make certain their deportation. It was part of an ICE seminar for Montgomery's prosecutors at the beginning of 2012.

When I interviewed Montgomery for the cover story, he defended his prosecution of Rascon, claiming he had no choice but to charge the undocumented in the manner he does.

The fact that there was no victim in the Rascon case? Didn't matter, according to Monty.

He claimed the fake Social Security number Rascon used to work at GNC possibly could be assigned down the road to someone, and that person would be Rascon's victim.

Which is ridiculous, but the question remains, what has happened since that January interview to cause this minor dent in Montgomery's inflexible charging policy?

Sure, Salvatierra submitted what's called a deviation request in Rascon's case recently, and the plea deal was a consequence of that letter asking the prosecutor to deviate from the initial charges.

But Salvatierra had submitted a similar deviation request in February, so what gives?

A couple of things. First, since lawyers such as Salvatierra now are taking on these cases, Montgomery's prosecutors have had to start going to trial, rather than counting on the defendant to cave. This means Monty's office has begun to lose.

I've written about some of these cases. One of Rascon's fellow workers at GNC, Rafael Lavallade Gonzalez, a 70-year-old diabetic was found not guilty after a seven-day trial on felony forgery and identity-theft charges. He had spent six months in jail.

In April, Miguel Angel Morales, a worker caught up in Arpaio's raid on United Construction in Glendale, was found not guilty of similar allegations in a five-day trial. He, too, had done six months on charges that usually pull a 90-day sentence.

Also in April, Sol Zenil, received the same deal as Rascon following six months in jail, after arrest by the Arizona Department of Public Safety for working illegally at a retail store.

Zenil, 23, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, but that was just to gain her freedom. The offer was made after the prosecutor admitted to Zenil's attorney that the Social Security number in question was legit, obtained when Zenil was much younger, and when the rules involved were much looser.

But most of the people charged with a class-four simply plead out to a felony to escape lockup in Arpaio's hoosegow.

Recently, 14 of the 23 individuals rounded up in the February raid on Sportex Apparel pleaded guilty to class-six felonies, though they weren't the sort of class-six charges that give an immigration attorney a solid chance at blocking deportation.

My colleagues in the press have been scrutinizing Monty on this issue. And some of the Hispanic organizations that Montgomery had been flirting with now want nothing to do with him.

He was denounced by the Hispanic Bar Association Los Abogados, and the civil rights group Puente demonstrated on the doorsteps of the county building where the MCAO has its offices. Children crying for their jailed mothers and grandmothers often participate.

Until Montgomery changes his policy across the board and deals with each of these cases according to its merits — handing out misdemeanors more often than not — then this issue will remain a problem for him.

I think Montgomery wants it to end. In some ways, he's a prisoner of his own right-wing rhetoric.

But if he takes out his telescope and gives the horizon a look-see, he'll glimpse a future without Arpaio, with immigration reform, and with Hispanics on the rise. That's where Monty wants to go, as long as the weight of his own actions doesn't keep him mired in the recent past.

Court - Sheriff Joe guilty of profiling Mexicans

Judge: Sheriff Arpaio’s agency engaged in racial profiling

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 10:06 PM

A federal judge’s ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos could bring significant changes to the agency’s controversial approach to immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a lengthy ruling that prohibits sheriff’s deputies from using race as a factor in law-enforcement decisions, from detaining people solely for suspected immigration violations and from contacting federal immigration authorities to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes.

The ruling, issued Friday afternoon — more than eight months after the final arguments were heard — brings an end to a case that started with the 2007 arrest near Cave Creek of Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a day laborer.

Snow’s ruling also provides thorough dissection of the constitutional violations that Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement efforts imposed on Latinos in Maricopa County, and it frequently contrasts Arpaio’s own news releases and statements to media with testimony he offered during the trial.

Critics of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement efforts, many of whom have for years accused the Sheriff’s Office of discriminating against Latinos, said they felt vindicated by the ruling.

“It seems like what we have always known, that racial profiling was being done, was brought out by Judge Snow; now I think we all need to look at the remedies,” said Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a longtime critic of the sheriff’s immigration policies.

“In my mind, people have been very abused in our communities,” she said. “We knew racial profiling was taking place and it was very hard to prove it.”

Arpaio’s attorney, Tim Casey, strongly denied that sheriff’s deputies ever engaged in racial profiling and promised to appeal the ruling.

Casey also took a broad view of the issue, drawing on recent court rulings, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, to conclude that the federal government is trying to send a message to local law enforcement.

“It is very clear that when it comes to people in the country unlawfully, that federal law does not want any local law-enforcement participation,” he said.

‘Nothing has changed’

Arpaio’s boast that his office would not change its approach to immigration enforcement after the federal government stripped deputies of that authority in 2009, and his subsequent decision to train deputies based on an inaccurate understanding of immigration law, made plaintiffs’ claims relevant, Snow wrote.

Had the Sheriff’s Office ceased immigration enforcement after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials removed the deputies “287(g)” authority to enforce federal immigration law, the plaintiff’s claims might have been moot, he wrote.

“As was made clear by the testimony of the sheriff and other members of the MCSO command staff at trial, nothing has changed,” Snow wrote.

The case began when Melendres, a Mexican tourist in the United States legally, was stopped outside a church in Cave Creek where day laborers were known to gather. Melendres, the passenger in a car driven by a White driver, claimed that deputies detained him for nine hours and that the detention was unlawful.

Eventually, the case grew to include complaints from two Hispanic siblings from Chicago who felt they were profiled by sheriff’s deputies, and from an assistant to former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon whose Hispanic husband claims he was detained and cited while nearby White motorists were treated differently.

The lawsuit did not seek monetary damages. Instead, plaintiffs asked for the kind of relief the Sheriff’s Office has resisted in the past: a declaration that spells out what deputies may or may not do when stopping potential suspects, and a court-appointed monitor to make sure the agency lives by those rules.

Snow gave each side 20 hours to present their case in a tightly controlled trial that took place in late July and early August last year in the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs took a three-pronged approach, using Arpaio’s own statements about undocumented immigrants along with racially insensitive requests from constituents for immigration enforcement to show what they called the sheriff’s callous attitude toward the rights of Latinos and his agency’s intention to discriminate.

Data showing that Latino drivers were more likely to be stopped during the sheriff’s immigration sweeps, and that those stops were likely to last longer, was designed to show the outcome of that intent. And statements from residents who claimed they were victims of profiling was intended to illustrate the impact of the sheriff’s policies.

Setting policy at the Sheriff’s Office

The ruling indicates that Snow, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2007, agreed with the attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union on many of their points. He frequently cites Arpaio’s statements to the media and his office’s news releases to draw conclusions about Arpaio’s point of view at the time of the immigration sweeps and work-site raids, regardless of what the sheriff said on the witness stand.

At one point, Snow says flatly that the sheriff’s testimony was incorrect when it came to the issue of whether racially insensitive e-mails from constituents motivated some of the sheriff’s saturation patrols, in which deputies would typically flood neighborhoods with high Hispanic populations.

“The evidence demonstrates that on October 4, 2007, the MCSO conducted a small-scale saturation patrol on the corner of Ellsworth and Ocotillo, based on a complaint transmitted to the MCSO on October 2 that Hispanic day laborers congregated there,” Snow wrote.

Cecillia Wang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the ruling supports the ACLU’s claim that the direction in the Sheriff’s Office comes from Arpaio, despite deputies’ attempts during the trial to distance the six-term lawmaker from day-to-day decisions of the office.

“What he says publicly either to constituents in response to their racist e-mails, or what he writes in his book, did set the tone and set policy for the Sheriff’s Office. The evidence showed that the sheriff does set policy. His response to overly racist letters led down the road to these immigration raids,” Wang said. “This is an agency where you saw a classic instance of a law-enforcement culture that led directly to a situation where all the Latino residents of the county who the sheriff swore to protect and serve were victimized by his law enforcement.”

Snow also frequently cited data presented at the trial about the ethnicity of the suspects the sheriff arrests and detains to come to the conclusion that sheriff’s deputies used race as a factor in making law-enforcement decisions. Even if race was not the only factor, as the Sheriff’s Office has contended, the practice resulted in more Latinos being arrested during the sheriff’s sweeps and Latinos being detained longer than non-Latino counterparts during traffic stops.

The practices led to violations of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, Snow wrote.

Snow used the data provided to support his skeptical view that sheriff’s deputies actually engaged in a “zero tolerance” policy requiring them to arrest anyone who violated the law during patrols.

Several deputies testified that bad drivers are so prevalent in Maricopa County it is easy to find moving violations to make traffic stops. [Yea, and even if you aren't a bad drive they will make something up - Look he is weaving 2 nano inches every 2 miles.]

“To accept Deputy (Michael) Kike’s testimony in its entirety would mean that Deputy Kikes spent at least four days on traffic patrol in an environment where so many people commit traffic or equipment infractions it would be impossible to stop them all,” Snow wrote. “And all of that resulted in five arrests over four days, all of which just happened to be of Hispanic persons who were in the country without authorization.”

Monitoring still a sticky issue

The most immediate and visible effect of Snow’s ruling could be his injunction preventing sheriff’s deputies from contacting ICE when they have detained suspected undocumented immigrants who are not accused of violating a state law.

After deputies lost their federal-immigration authority, the Sheriff’s Office enacted a policy that authorized deputies to contact ICE’s law-enforcement agency response team whenever they encounter such immigrants.

The Sheriff’s Office has not had a formal saturation patrol in years, but the agency continues to engage in work-site raids looking for identity theft and fraud suspects. Casey, Arpaio’s attorney, said it was too early to tell what Snow’s ruling would do to those operations.

The stickier issue might come with the role of a court-appointed monitor to ensure the ruling is properly enacted: Arpaio flatly refused to consider the idea in an effort to resolve a racial-profiling complaint the U.S. Justice Department brought against the Sheriff’s Office. That case hasn’t been resolved. [F*** a court monitor. Sheriff Joe needs to be removed from the job and placed in prison for violating our rights!!!]

Casey indicated Arpaio’s feelings have not changed. [Arpaio is a corrupt racist cop who probably will never change]

“I don’t know how there can be a monitor on a constitutionally elected representative,” Casey said. “It will supplant the sheriff’s authority.” [Again, don't monitor Sheriff Joe, put him in prison where he belongs!!!]

Wang declined to provide details on what the ACLU will ask for, but said some oversight would be necessary to correct problems the federal court identified.

Snow set a hearing for mid-June to determine how the Sheriff’s Office will ensure it is adhering to the court’s ruling.

“When you’ve got an agency that is so deeply infected from the top with both a culture and a policy that results in this type of unconstitutional conduct, you need to have concrete provisions to ensure we uproot the problem,” Wang said.

But future hearings have no bearing on the significance of Friday’s ruling, Wang added.

“I want people in the county to know that this is an immediate and permanent injunction,” she said. “Anyone in the county who is discriminated against can immediately go into court and seek relief.”

And if that means more litigation, and more costs to taxpayers, Wilcox, the county supervisor, said the county would have to do whatever is necessary. [Mary "Bullet in the Butt" Rose Wilcox is also corrupt and just as bad as Sheriff Joe. She voted to steal a billion or so for that worthless Bank One Ball Park. Google Larry Naman]

“I hope the county is not having to suffer monetarily because of all this,” Wilcox said. “But whatever it takes to right it, we are going to have to bite the bullet and do what it takes.”

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Posted: Friday, May 24, 2013 5:18 pm | Updated: 7:19 pm, Fri May 24, 2013.

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 4 comments

A federal judge on Friday found the department run by the self-professed "toughest sheriff in America'' was guilty of racial profiling and ordered the agency's practices permanently halted.

In a 140-page ruling, Judge Murray Snow said members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, under the direction of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, were detaining individuals they believed to be in this country illegally without some other reason to arrest them for violating any state laws. Snow said that continued to occur even after the Department of Homeland Security revoked the MCSO's authority to identify and detain those not in the country legally.

RELATED: "Reasonable Doubt" -- The East Valley Tribune's five-part series investigating the hidden costs of the MCSO's immigration enforcement efforts... winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting [See this URL]

"In some instances these policies result in prolonging the traffic stop beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop,'' Snow wrote. And he said that, absent some reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, holding people longer than necessary violates their constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Snow said that entitled Hispanic individuals who sued to an injunction permanently barring the sheriff's department from using Hispanic ancestry or race to determine whether to stop a vehicle. It also prohibits deputies from detaining or arresting Latino vehicle occupants on a belief that they are in this country illegally if race is the only factor they have.

The order also bars the agency from detaining Latino occupants of vehicles stopped for traffic violations any longer than necessary to process the citation unless they have "reasonable suspicion'' that any are committing a federal or state crime.

Arpaio told Capitol Media Services he does not believe his agency engages in racial profiling.

"That's why we're going to appeal it,'' he said.

Byt Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the ruling confirms the allegations that Latinos have been "terrorized'' by MCSO deputies and "forced to endure years of racial harassment and abuse.'' And Pochoda, in a prepared statement, said all that can be laid at the feet of "Arpaio's proven willingness to seek political gain at the expense of public safety and constitutional guarantees.''

Snow said that, at least on paper, the instructions to deputies were that vehicles were not to be stopped based on the race of any subject in a vehicle.

But he said evidence painted a somewhat different picture.

"While officers were prohibited from using race as the only basis to undertake a law enforcement investigation, they were allowed as a matter of policy and instruction to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions in the context of immigration enforcement,'' the judge wrote.

Snow reached his ruling after reviewing years of crime prevention "saturation patrols'' by the department. He said these were far from neutral.

"The MCSO almost always scheduled its day labor and small-scale saturation patrols where Latino day laborers congregated,'' he said. "The same is true for a considerable number of its large-scale saturation patrols.''

And Snow said it is clear that the purpose of these patrols was to enforce immigration laws, citing the news releases issued by the agency's public relations department.

"These news releases either emphasized that the patrols' purpose was immigration enforcement, or prominently featured the number of unauthorized aliens arrested during such operations,'' Snow said. "Most of the time, the reports ignored any other arrests that took place.''

Snow also said the saturation operations were just a pretext to stop vehicles with people who may be in this country illegally.

"During saturation patrols, participating deputies conducted many stops for minor violations of the traffic code, including minor equipment violations,'' the judge said. "This departments from MCSO's traffic enforcement priorities during regular patrols.''

And Snow said that, generally speaking, deputies "had no difficulty in finding a basis to stop any vehicle they wished for a traffic infraction.''

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 6:56 PM

From the beginning, this racial-profiling case clearly had legs.

It was brought against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio by people of Hispanic ancestry with real-life stories to tell.

By Americans from Chicago. By Mexican citizens with a perfectly legitimate right to be in the United States. By people of a darker hue who suffered the indignity of seeing lighter-hued people in the same car treated far, far more kindly by Arpaio’s deputies.

All of those plaintiffs, according to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow, told the same story with clarity: They were targeted in the course of sweeps by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office solely because they were Latino.

Snow ruled on Friday, nearly eight months after the seven-day trial, that Arpaio’s department had engaged in forbidden racial profiling.

The case parallels the still-pending federal case against Arpaio brought by the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights. But while that case — led by President Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Labor, Thomas Perez — appears to rest heavily on expert testimony and statistical analysis, this case stands on evidence closer to the ground.

That evidence included Sheriff Arpaio’s own words.

In addition to weighing the strong, personal stories related by the plaintiffs, Judge Snow also considered Arpaio’s often intemperate observations about his rationale for conducting so-called “crime sweeps” in neighborhoods that just happened to be largely Hispanic.

Hubris and ego have long been hallmarks of America’s Toughest Sheriff. His snarky, smirking, contempt-laden denials that his sweeps profiled Hispanics always pushed the margins of believability. Now, a federal judge has called him on it.

The ruling will be appealed. That was guaranteed, regardless of which way the judge ruled. But Snow’s order that the Sheriff’s Office halt its practice of using Hispanic ancestry as a reason for stopping drivers is only the beginning. In addition to the Justice Department case, Snow indicated that still more remedies may follow his injunction against Arpaio’s practices. The motivation behind Arpaio’s obnoxious sweeps can be traced to a specific incident in 2005, which constituted a political epiphany for the image-conscious sheriff. He saw the public reaction — outrage — when a young veteran was arrested for holding a group of suspected illegal aliens at gunpoint.

From that moment forward, he saw political gold in transforming himself into America’s Toughest Immigration Warrior.

Judge Snow’s decision is evidence that Arpaio’s gold fantasy is finally turning back into lead.

The rise of the fourth branch of government

And at the same time these members of Congress who are doling out pork and cash can deny giving special treatment to the people who gave them campaign contributions by saying "I didn't write those laws. Those laws were created by some unnamed federal bureaucrat in some unnamed federal agency. I am shocked at how those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats are wasting out tax dollars [but of course they never will pass any laws to stop it, because they agree with those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats who are helping them rob us taxpayers blind]"

Government also frequently works like this at the state, county and city levels too. When elected officials can blame unelected bureaucrats for their decisions it makes it a lot easier for them to rob us blind and get reelected at the same time.

Source

The rise of the fourth branch of government

By Jonathan Turley, Published: May 24 E-mail the writer

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency.

It’s a small percentage of agency matters that rise to the level of presidential notice. The rest remain the sole concern of agency discretion.

As the power of the fourth branch has grown, conflicts between the other branches have become more acute. There is no better example than the fights over presidential appointments.

Wielding its power to confirm, block or deny nominees is one of the few remaining ways Congress can influence agency policy and get a window into agency activity. Nominations now commonly trigger congressional demands for explanations of agencies’ decisions and disclosures of their documents. And that commonly leads to standoffs with the White House.

Take the fight over Richard Cordray, nominated to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is highly qualified, but Republican senators oppose the independence of the new bureau and have questions about its jurisdiction and funding. After those senators repeatedly blocked the nomination, Obama used a congressional break in January to make a recess appointment. Since then, two federal appeals courts have ruled that Obama’s recess appointments violated the Constitution and usurped congressional authority. While the fight continues in the Senate, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such conflicts as products of our dysfunctional, partisan times. Today’s political divisions are mild compared with those in the early republic, as when President Thomas Jefferson described his predecessor’s tenure as “the reign of the witches.” Rather, today’s confrontations reflect the serious imbalance in the system.

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

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Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s defense plan detailed

The real problem is government is corrupt to the core. And sure now and then government works doing it's function of being a public servant, but most of the time the only function of government is to enrich the elected officials, the special interest groups that helped get them elected, and of course the unelected government bureaucrats who run their government fiefdoms.

Source

Horne’s defense plan detailed

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 23, 2013 10:17 PM

As the campaign-finance allegations against Attorney General Tom Horne hang in legal limbo, documents obtained by The Arizona Republic offer insights into the case Horne and his co-defendant would make if it goes to court.

An attorney representing Kathleen Winn, Horne’s director of community outreach, argues in the documents that allegations the two illegally coordinated campaign efforts are based on speculation. Attorney Timothy La Sota also questions investigators’ tactics, revealing they not only continued to tail Horne more than a year after the alleged violation, but also followed Winn’s attorney, Larry Debus.

Investigators’ techniques “raise questions of bias and political motives and taint this entire investigation,” La Sota wrote in a letter to the Secretary of State’s Office.

“Despite all the resources poured into this investigation, all the interviews and surveillance ... the FBI and Maricopa County Attorney’s Office have speculation and conjecture, but not hard evidence,” he wrote.

Horne and Winn last year were accused of unlawfully coordinating campaign spending during the 2010 election, when Horne was the Republican candidate for attorney general and Winn was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona, an independent-expenditure committee. Both have denied wrongdoing.

After a 14-month investigation, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery accused Horne and Winn of collaborating to quickly raise more than $500,000 to run negative ads against his Democratic opponent. By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate certain activities with independent-expenditure committees.

Montgomery pursued a civil-enforcement action, but a judge this month ruled the case could not move forward because of legal technicalities and procedural failings by the Secretary of State’s Office, which found reasonable cause exists to believe a campaign-finance violation occurred.

“While we certainly welcomed Mr. La Sota’s submission, it doesn’t change our reasonable cause determination,” said Matt Roberts, Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s spokesman. “It doesn’t sway our opinion at all.”

Montgomery declined to comment on La Sota’s letter.

A spokesman for the FBI also declined to comment.

The judge said the secretary of state must submit the case to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to determine how to proceed. The Attorney General’s Office can send the case to another law-enforcement agency or a private attorney for review, Montgomery has said.

While the case is with the Attorney General’s Office, Horne, Winn “and immediate staff such as executive assistants,” won’t have access to information, discussion, or decisions on the case, according to Horne’s spokeswoman.

In his letter to the secretary of state, La Sota says:

Despite authorities’ “exhaustive” and “expensive” investigation, they were only left with “speculation and conjecture” about coordination.

La Sota wrote that calls between Winn and Horne before the release of an attack ad against Horne’s Democratic rival were tied to a complex real-estate deal — not the ad. Horne never referred anyone to an independent campaign to make a donation, never suggested to Winn the names of people to be solicited for contributions, never spoke to anyone about contributing to an independent campaign, and never weighed in on how an independent campaign’s money should be spent.

A statute that Winn and Horne are accused of violating is unconstitutional.

La Sota argues the Arizona Revised Statute 16-905 “is blatantly unconstitutional” because contribution limits were too low, and therefore violated free speech and equal protection under the U.S. and Arizona constitutions. La Sota points out that the state Legislature this session raised contribution limits partly because “they were ripe for a free-speech challenge.”

La Sota says Montgomery, in testifying before lawmakers, blamed the number of investigations by his office on low contribution limits. An affidavit from an official with the Goldwater Institute declaring current individual contribution limits under current state statutes are unconstitutional is included with La Sota’s letter.

The FBI “came with an agenda and that was to get Tom Horne.”

La Sota questions why the FBI was involved in the investigation. Authorities have said the FBI took the case because Horne was conflicted from investigating himself. La Sota accuses the FBI of attempting to “intimidate witnesses and lie to them in order to get them to say what they wanted.” He accuses the FBI of threatening to use “the ‘Martha Stewart’ treatment”— to send them to prison for lying — to get them to cooperate.

La Sota says the FBI’s undercover surveillance of Horne was “the most unseemly part” of the investigation. “The FBI was following the Arizona Attorney General around years after alleged civil campaign finance violations had been committed, looking for any type of infraction that they might be able to pin on him,” he wrote. “What in the world did this have to do with a civil campaign finance matter?”

During that surveillance, the FBI saw Horne back a borrowed car into a Range Rover and leave without leaving a note. An FBI report states Horne did not leave a note because he was having an extramarital affair with a subordinate who was with him during the accident. Earlier this month, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge stemming from the incident and paid a $300 fine.

Democrats are trying to use Horne’s driving offense — and the FBI report accusing him of an affair — to their advantage as Horne gears up for a re-election campaign. One Democratic senator has called on lawmakers to initiate impeachment hearings against Horne, and this week, the state Democratic Party called on him to explain the circumstances surrounding the accident.

La Sota also takes issue with investigators having a mole in the Attorney General’s Office: “A one point and perhaps still to this day, the FBI had what they call a human asset apparently inside” the agency. La Sota said the mole raises questions about potential “invasions of attorney-client protected relationships to federalism concerns.”

Glendale police chief threatens to "Burn down store" of drug dealer

According to this articles Glendale assistant police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop for selling spice to his son.

If a civilian had done that he would probably be sitting in prison now. Of this piggy thinks his slap on the wrist punishment was too severe and is appealing it.

Spice, the drug in question was legal in Arizona until just recently. I don't know if spice was legal or illegal when Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop.

Source

Former Glendale assistant police chief says he regrets actions

By David Woodfill The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed May 22, 2013 8:27 PM

Glendale’s former assistant police chief who got demoted after accusations that he threatened a local business he thought sold drugs to his son told The Arizona Republic and 12 News Wednesday he regrets his actions, but acted as a concerned father.

Greg Dominguez was demoted one rank to commander, took a $15,000 pay cut and was suspended for a week following some sort of confrontation he had with an employee at Spanky’s Smoke Shop on Bell Road in Peoria.

The police department has disclosed few details from their internal investigation of the incident, but according to a Peoria police report, someone who worked at Spanky’s said Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” if he did not stop selling “stuff” to his son. The worker said threat was made during one of two encounters in February.

Dominguez acknowledged going to the store and using curse words, but said he doesn’t know exactly what he said other than “I asked him to stop selling to my son.”

He said he acted out of fear for his son.

He teared up as he described watching his son destroyed his health. At one point, he said he thought his son had died after he walked into the room and saw him laying perfectly still in his bed.

“Scared,” is how Dominguez described his state of mind when he decided to go into Spanky’s to confront the person he thought was selling the drug.

Dominguez said he doesn’t remember the exact date of his encounter with the employee, but said he knew his son had just gone to the store because he used a smart phone tracking application.

He never identified himself as a police officer, he said. "This was me going to try and save my son."

Dominguez said in hindsight he realized that convincing one person to stop selling his son drugs wasn’t going to help.

“I know different things now,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about addiction, a lot about spice.”

Dominguez said he plans to stay at the Glendale Police Department and was appealing his punishment, which he said was too punitive. [That is 100 percent rubbish!!!! If a civilian had threatened to burn down the business of a police officer who committed a crime against him, the civiilan would almost certainly be convicted of a crime and be sitting for a long time in prison. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez got a slap on the wrist for a serious felony and is now complaning that his punishment is too severe!!!! That is rubbish. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez should be sitting in a prison cell, not running the Glendale Police Department]

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 21

There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on journalist James Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case.

Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?

When Rosen and I covered the Bush White House together a decade ago, I knew him as a scrappy reporter who had a fascination with Watergate trivia. He later wrote a sympathetic biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced attorney general. Now he’s learning just how abusive a Justice Department can be, from an administration that has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.

My Post colleague Ann E. Marimow, who broke the Rosen story, obtained the affidavit by FBI agent Reginald Reyes seeking access to Rosen’s private e-mails. In the affidavit, Reyes stated that “there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the law against national security leaks. The affidavit detailed how the FBI had monitored Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department and tracked his various phone calls with the suspected leaker, analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

The administration snoops had spied on Rosen enough to know of his Watergate hobby: his Gmail address named for the Nixon aide who installed the secret taping system, and Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” (a modern-day version of Bob Woodward’s fabled flowerpot) in which an e-mail containing one asterisk meant Rosen should contact Kim.

Rosen’s supposed crime? Reyes got his evidence from an e-mail from the reporter: “I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc. . . . I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses. . . . In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.”

That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

And how did Rosen commit this crime? Kim told investigators Rosen is a “very convincing, persistent person” who “would tell me I was brilliant and it is possible I succumbed to flattery.”

Only in this Justice Department could flattery get you a prison term.

President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters that there must be a “balance” between a free press and leaks that “can endanger the lives of men and women in uniform and other Americans serving overseas.”

True, but the 2009 reports that prompted the probe confirmed what was already conventional wisdom, that Kim Jong Un was likely to replace his father, Kim Jong Il, as North Korea’s leader, and that there were worries that North Korea would respond to new sanctions by launching a third nuclear test. As it happens, the intelligence was wrong, and Pyongyang didn’t launch another test at the time.

Carney told the White House press corps Tuesday that Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

If Obama really is “a fierce defender of the First Amendment,” as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this. Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Cops/FBI kill bombing suspect during questioning

If Ibragim Todashev had taken the 5th and refused to talk to the FBI he would be alive today!!!!

Any defense lawyer will tell you to ALWAYS take the 5th and refuse to answer any and all police questions.

You are NOT a criminal for taking the rights which the Founders died to give you!!!!

The problem is anything you tell the police will be used against you, and the police routinely take benign things you say and twist them around to make it look like you confessed to a crime.

Taking the Fifth and refusing to submit to police questions will prevent this from happening.

Source

Man tied to Boston bombing suspect killed in confrontation with FBI, others

By Sari Horwitz and Jenna Johnson, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:50 AM E-mail the writers

A Chechen man who was friends with one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was shot and killed in Orlando early Wednesday when an interview with the FBI and other police officers erupted into a violent confrontation, the FBI said.

The victim was identified as Ibragim Todashev, 27, who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev through the world of martial arts.

The FBI said in a statement that Todashev was being questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent, two Massachusetts state police officers and other law enforcement personnel when the witness turned violent. The FBI said that the agent, who was not identified, was injured and that Todashev was shot and killed.

Two federal law enforcement officials said that, during the questioning, Todashev had implicated himself and Tsarnaev in a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., two years ago. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said Todashev brandished a knife and threatened the officers during the interview in his apartment.

Tsarnaev had been identified as a potential suspect in the triple slaying shortly after the bombings.

The FBI statement provided few details about the death in Orlando and did not address the Waltham killings. It said only that Todashev initiated a violent confrontation while being questioned. “During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries,” the statement said.

The FBI has been conducting interviews across the United States and in Russia with associates of Tsarnaev and his brother, Dzhokhar, over the past month to learn whether anyone else was associated with the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

The interviews have focused heavily on people from the northern Caucasus area of Russia, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in 2012. The Tsarnaev family has roots in Chechnya, part of the restive region, and the FBI suspects he might have had contact with Islamic militants there last year.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police four days after the bombing. His brother was captured later that day and faces charges that could carry the death penalty. Before he was charged, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI that no one else was involved in the plot and that he and his brother had acted out of anger over the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A team of officers went to Todashev’s apartment in a residential area near Universal Studios in Orlando to interview him about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Khusen Taramov, who said he was a friend of Todashev, told an Orlando television station that Todashev used to live in Boston and knew Tsarnaev through marital arts circles.

“He was not radical at all,” Taramov told WESH-TV. He added that the FBI had been tracking Todashev since the Boston bombing.

At some point, Todashev moved to Florida. He was arrested for aggravated battery this month, according to police records, after getting into a fight with a man in a parking lot.

When the FBI agent and others arrived at his apartment early Wednesday, the law enforcement officials said Todashev initially was cooperative. They said he appeared on the verge of signing a confession to the killings of three people in Waltham in September 2011. They said he had implicated Tsarnaev in the homicides.

But the interview turned violent, the officials said, and Todashev went for a knife. He injured the FBI agent and was shot and killed. The FBI did not say whether he was shot by the agent or one of the other law enforcement officers.

Tsarnaev’s name has surfaced in earlier news reports about the Waltham slayings, which remain unsolved. Stephanie Guyotte, a spokeswoman for Middlesex County’s district attorney’s office, said the investigation is ongoing and refused to say whether Todashev or Tsarnaev was a suspect.

On Sept. 12, 2011, police found three men dead in a well-kept rental house on a short, quiet street in Waltham. The men were identified as Brendan Mess, 25, of Waltham, Erik Weissman, 31, of Cambridge, and Raphael Teken, 37, of Cambridge. The Boston Globe and other news outlets have reported that Tsarnaev was friends with Mess and that the two met through boxing.

A woman who lived next door to the rental house said she home that day and consoled Mess’s distraught girlfriend, who reportedly found the bodies and ran screaming outside. The neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she does not want her name associated with the gruesome slayings, said she was told that the men had their throats slashed and that their bodies were covered with pot.

“She was horrified,” the neighbor said of the girlfriend. “We didn’t hear a thing that night. . . . The fact that all of this attention has come here again is very painful.”

Authorities say that the men died early Sept. 12, but relatives of at least one of the victims insist that the men were killed Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Sept. 11 is the date listed on the tombstone of Weissman, according to photos on an online memorial.

At the time of the killings, Waltham police issued a statement saying that detectives did not think the attack was random and that the victims probably knew their attacker or attackers. The Middlesex district attorney’s office later said in a statement that the men died of “sharp-force injuries of the neck.’’ The Globe reported that the deaths were probably drug-related.

Two friends of Teken and Weissman said they believed the deaths were connected to a massive May 2011 drug bust in nearby Watertown. The bust followed a year-long investigation by federal authorities and resulted in charges against 18 people. Weissman was a founder of a company that produced high-end glass bongs.

Julie Tate and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Source

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Many of the Founders died to give you your Fifth Amendment rights. You should always take it, like Lois Lerner did, who is a 34 year life time employee of the IRS.

Any defense attorney will tell you to NEVER answer police questions. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

One problem with talking to the police is frequently the questions are rigged, and any answer you give will be an admission of committing a crime. Even if you didn't know you were confessing to a crime.

In Arizona one trick question cops use to convict you of DUI or DWI is to ask "On a scale of 1 to 10 how intoxicated are you".

If you give the cop the answer he asked you for, which is a number between 1 and 10 you have admitted to committing the crime of drunk driving.

In Arizona the slightest bit of intoxication is consider to be drunk driving, so if you answer the question with "1", you have admitted to driving while drunk.

Of course the only answer to that question is ZERO, and the cops don't give you that as an option to answer the question with.

Source

Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting

By William Branigin and Ed O’Keefe, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:46 AM E-mail the writers

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.

IRS controversy: Who knew what, and when

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.

Issa excused Lerner anyway “subject to recall” if the committee determines she did not properly invoke her right. He added that he might consult with the Justice Department about giving Lerner “limited immunity” to testify.

Lerner’s attorney informed the Oversight Committee Tuesday that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment, but she was required to appear anyway. She said in her opening statement that she has been a government employee for more than 34 years, moving to the IRS exempt organizations office in 2001 and becoming the director of that unit in 2006. She said she was responsible for 900 employees and the processing of more than 60,000 applications a year.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” Lerner said.

Appearing before the committee along with Lerner were Douglas Shulman, the Bush administration appointee who led the IRS during President Obama’s first term; J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The House hearing was the latest in a series of Capitol Hill grillings of officials in connection with an audit by George’s office, which reported last week that it found inappropriate targeting of groups applying for tax-exempt status based on terms such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their case files.

In opening the hearing, Issa charged that George, who has been largely spared the grillings reserved for other officials in previous hearings, failed to keep Congress informed about his findings as the audit proceeded.

“We must also insist ... that we not wait 10 months to find out that there’s a there there,” Issa said. He called the delay “the greatest failing of an otherwise well-regarded inspector general.”

George reminded the committee that his office conducted an audit, not an investigation. He said the improper practices by an IRS unit in Cincinnati started in 2010 and were “not fully corrected’ until May 2012. “These practices were inappropriate,” he said. “They remained in effect for approximately 18 months.”

In questioning George, Issa said that under the law, “you have a responsibility to keep us continually and ... equally informed.”

George said there are “established procedures for conducting an audit” to ensure fairness and noted that information given to Capitol Hill “sometimes is not retained on the Hill.”

Issa retorted that the Obama administration has been known to leak information, and he charged that the IRS “maliciously leaked” the inspector general’s main finding in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the audit report.

With Lerner having refused to answer questions, lawmakers also turned their focus to Shulman, whose testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday irked some senators as he rebuffed attempts to blame him for the fiasco in which conservative groups were listed separately for special scrutiny.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House panel, criticized Shulman for not correcting his March 2012 testimony after learning that IRS employees had indeed targeted conservative groups.

“It seems to me that you would come back even if it were a phone call or a letter,” Cummings said. “I mean, common sense.”

Cummings also asked Shulman whether he was upset after learning from Steven T. Miller, who worked under Shulman at the time, that the IRS had targeted conservatives, an issue that members of Congress were concerned about.

“I felt comfort that the IG was going to look into this and report back to Congress at the appropriate time,” Shulman said.

Under questioning from Republicans, Shulman said he did not discuss the IRS targeting of conservative groups with the White House during what one GOP lawmaker said were more than 100 visits there in 2010 and 2011.

“It would not have been appropriate to have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the subject of discriminating against conservative groups,” Shulman said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) also asked George to clarify whether officials at the Treasury Department or the White House ever directed IRS employees in the tax-exempt unit to target certain groups.

“We did pose that question,” George replied, adding that “the response was that there was no direction” of that nature from Treasury to the Cincinnati unit or from the unit’s affiliate office in Washington. He said in response to another question that his auditors “didn’t question anyone as to whether or not they’d received any direction from the White House.”

Norton urged George to look into that issue.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, Shulman said he was “saddened” by some of the agency’s actions regarding applications for tax-exempt status during his tenure.

“I certainly am not personally responsible for making a list that had inappropriate criteria on it,” Shulman said, adding: “With that said, this happened on my watch, and I very much regret that this happened on my watch.”

Asked at one point by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) whether he would apologize to Cornyn’s constituents who were unfairly targeted by the IRS, Shulman said that he was not sure what occurred specifically with Texas-based groups and announced his regret that the wrongdoing occurred on his watch.

“Well, I don’t think that qualifies as an apology,” Cornyn said.

The confrontation Tuesday was one more example of the growing acrimony surrounding congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal as the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, his predecessor and the Treasury Department tax watchdog rejected the idea that political partisanship played any role in singling out conservative nonprofits for heightened scrutiny.

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Miller, the acting commissioner who submitted his resignation under pressure last week, sat alongside Shulman, who headed the IRS from March 2008 to November 2012, as each detailed how they first learned of the situation and the steps they took to remedy it.

Testifying for the first time since IRS officials admitted to the situation, Shulman was asked why he did not come forward before to acknowledge the improper screening that occurred before his departure.

“I did not have a full set of facts” before an IRS inspector general’s audit was made public last week, Shulman told the panel. He said he knew “sometime in the spring of 2012” that “there was a list being used” to designate groups for extra scrutiny and that the term “tea party” in a group’s name was a criterion. But he said that he did not know what other words were on the list and “didn’t know the scope and severity of this.”

“I agree that this is an issue that when someone spotted it, they should have brought it up the chain, and they didn’t,” Shulman said under questioning. “Why they didn’t, I don’t know.”

Shulman said several times that he was “dismayed” and “saddened” to read about the agency’s improper actions in the report released last week and said that he had made certain George’s office looked into the matter once he learned about it.

But Shulman refused several times to take personal responsibility for the situation or to explicitly apologize.

After Cornyn asked for an apology, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered Shulman another opportunity: “Are you responsible?”

“I’m deeply regretful,” Shulman said.

“Okay, never mind,” Roberts said, cutting him off. “Let’s just move on.”

Miller, as he had last week, took full responsibility for the agency’s decision to publicly apologize for the targeting by planting a question to raise the issue.

Under questioning, Miller explained that IRS leaders were aware that George was on the verge of releasing his report, so “we thought we should begin talking about this. We’d thought we’d get out an apology.”

Miller said he worked with Lerner, who leads the agency’s tax-exempt unit, to ensure that she would be asked a question about the controversy during a panel discussion at a conference.

“We wanted to reach out to the — to Hill staff about the same time [the report would] come out,” Miller said. But that strategy “did not work out,” he said. “Obviously, the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea.”

At a separate hearing held by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said he would have “advised against” the decision by the IRS to plant the question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association in Washington instead of first notifying lawmakers.

Lew told the committee that he was not involved in the decision to plant the question but that some Treasury and IRS officials discussed the strategy in advance. He emphasized that the management of the matter was up to the IRS’s discretion.

Discussions about the IRS’s plans to apologize began in late April, according to a senior department official. That’s when IRS officials first told the Treasury that Lerner was considering making a speech in which she would make a public apology for inappropriate conduct. Also in late April, the IRS told Treasury that Miller would apologize when asked in forthcoming congressional testimony.

Treasury did not advise the IRS what it should do, the official said.

In both of these cases, Treasury discussed the potential disclosures with the White House and said that the department planned to defer to the IRS.

Finally, Treasury was told ahead of time that Lerner would be asked a question about the controversy at the American Bar Association conference.

Treasury did not tell the White House about the planned disclosure at the ABA conference.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

“It was very important, in our view . . . that we not take any action that could even be seen to create the appearance of intervening in an ongoing investigation like this. In this case, an independent inspector general audit. And so, of course, we did not,” Carney said.

Aaron Blake, Zachary A. Goldfarb, Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Any defense attorney will tell you to NEVER answer police questions. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

One problem with talking to the police is frequently the questions are rigged, and any answer you give will be an admission of committing a crime. Even if you didn't know you were confessing to a crime.

In Arizona one trick question cops use to convict you of DUI or DWI is to ask "On a scale of 1 to 10 how intoxicated are you".

If you give the cop the answer he asked you for, which is a number between 1 and 10 you have admitted to committing the crime of drunk driving.

In Arizona the slightest bit of intoxication is consider to be drunk driving, so if you answer the question with "1", you have admitted to driving while drunk.

Of course the only answer to that question is ZERO, and the cops don't give you that as an option to answer the question with. Source

Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting

By William Branigin and Ed O’Keefe, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:46 AM E-mail the writers

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.

Issa excused Lerner anyway “subject to recall” if the committee determines she did not properly invoke her right. He added that he might consult with the Justice Department about giving Lerner “limited immunity” to testify.

Lerner’s attorney informed the Oversight Committee Tuesday that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment, but she was required to appear anyway. She said in her opening statement that she has been a government employee for more than 34 years, moving to the IRS exempt organizations office in 2001 and becoming the director of that unit in 2006. She said she was responsible for 900 employees and the processing of more than 60,000 applications a year.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” Lerner said.

Appearing before the committee along with Lerner were Douglas Shulman, the Bush administration appointee who led the IRS during President Obama’s first term; J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The House hearing was the latest in a series of Capitol Hill grillings of officials in connection with an audit by George’s office, which reported last week that it found inappropriate targeting of groups applying for tax-exempt status based on terms such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their case files.

In opening the hearing, Issa charged that George, who has been largely spared the grillings reserved for other officials in previous hearings, failed to keep Congress informed about his findings as the audit proceeded.

“We must also insist ... that we not wait 10 months to find out that there’s a there there,” Issa said. He called the delay “the greatest failing of an otherwise well-regarded inspector general.”

George reminded the committee that his office conducted an audit, not an investigation. He said the improper practices by an IRS unit in Cincinnati started in 2010 and were “not fully corrected’ until May 2012. “These practices were inappropriate,” he said. “They remained in effect for approximately 18 months.”

Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

Government bureaucrats do it all the time and so should you.

The real problem is when you are detained by the police the questions are frequently rigged or asked in a manor that any answer you give will be an admission of guilt, and that answer will be used against you in court.

Susan Sanchez, is a public defender for the Maricopa County Attorneys office who used to give "Know Your Rights" talks for Phoenix Copwatch. She tells us that when you pulled over and asked by the cop

"How intoxicated are you on a scale of 1 to 10"

Most people who have had only one beer don't realize that if they say they are only intoxicated at a level of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 are admitting that they are legally drunk.

That is because under Arizona law even if you are slightly intoxicated, you are still guilty of DUI. And saying you are only intoxicated at a level of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 is admitting you are drunk.

The only correct answer to that question is zero, but the cop didn't tell you that you could use zero as an answer. The cop told you to give an answer of 1 to 10, and any of those answers is an admission of guilt - even if you don't know it.

Of course you and I know the question is a bunch of BS, but sadly the prosecutor will take the answer you gave to this BS question and ask the jury to convict you with it.

So it's best to refuse to answer any and all police questions, just like this high level bureaucrat at the IRS is doing.

Source

Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

By Richard Simon and Joseph Tanfani

May 21, 2013, 12:15 p.m.

WASHINGTON – A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, R-Calif. The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

According to an inspector general’s report, Lerner found out in June 2011 that some staff in the nonprofits division in Cincinnati had used terms like “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to select some applications for additional screening of their political activities. She ordered changes.

But neither Lerner nor anyone else at the IRS told Congress, even after repeated queries from several committees, including House Oversight, about whether some groups had been singled out unfairly.

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joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @JTanfani

richard.simon@latimes.com

Twitter: @richardsimon11

Nobody cares about Bakersfield police murder???

When I first read about the murder in the LA Times I thought it would quickly spread across America, making people angry as h*ll.

I was wrong. As of today, I have not even seen an article about the murder in the Arizona Republic.

Ron Paul slams Boston police in Marathon bombing

Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston

by Ron Paul

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

The “shelter in place” command imposed by the governor of Massachusetts was lifted before the suspect was caught. Only after this police state move was ended did the owner of the boat go outside to check on his property, and in so doing discover the suspect.

No, the suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public. He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.

As journalist Tim Carney wrote last week:

“Law enforcement in Boston used cameras to ID the bombing suspects, but not police cameras. Instead, authorities asked the public to submit all photos and videos of the finish-line area to the FBI, just in case any of them had relevant images. The surveillance videos the FBI posted online of the suspects came from private businesses that use surveillance to punish and deter crime on their property.”

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

This is unprecedented and is very dangerous. We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

Source

Ron Paul slams Boston police response to blasts

Catalina Camia, USA TODAY 3:47 p.m. EDT April 29, 2013

Former congressman Ron Paul was no fan of the police presence and manhunt tied to the Boston Marathon bombings.

The libertarian-thinking, former GOP presidential candidate slammed what he called the "military-style takeover" of Boston on April 19, the day Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked residents of Boston and its nearby suburbs to "shelter in place."

"The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city," Paul wrote on the website of Lew Rockwell, a libertarian writer. "This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged in connection with the blasts that left three people dead and more than 260 injured. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a firefight with police hours before Dzhokhar was tracked down.

Paul served in Congress for 23 years, before retiring in January. The Texan was well known for criticizing what he believed was big government intrusion, in everything from tax and financial policy to national security. The scenes in Boston of police going door-to-door, closed businesses and public transportation shut down were more appropriate for "a military coup in a far off banana republic," Paul wrote.

Patrick last week defended the "shelter in place" decision. "I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time," he is quoted as saying in The Boston Globe.

Source

Ron Paul criticizes Marathon bombing response

Globe Staff

April 29, 2013

WASHINGTON — Former US representative Ron Paul has a warning for Americans after the Boston Marathon bombings, and it may come as a surprise.

The prominent libertarian says citizens should perhaps be more frightened by the police response to the attack — which killed three and injured scores more — than by the explosions themselves.

In an article called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston,” the former Republican representative and two-time presidential candidate compares the intense April 19 search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”

“Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties,” Paul writes. “That is what happened in Boston.”

During the search, authorities encouraged residents in the Boston area to stay inside their homes.

It created surreal scenes on the Friday after the attack, with eerily quiet streets.

Governor Deval Patrick last week defended the decision to shut down the Boston area.

“I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time,” Patrick said at a news conference Friday.

— MATT VISER

<SNIP>

Politicians and cops are addicted to Federal pork???

Posted on May 17, 2013 11:27 am

First responders face cutbacks as federal funds dry up

My Turn by SCOTT SOMERS

Once again an American city has been the target of the brutality of terrorism. Our hearts go out to the victims and families affected by the Boston Marathon bombing. [If you ask me the police who flushed the Constitution rights of the people of Boston down the toilet to catch the two Boston bombers were bigger terrorists then the Boston Bombers were.]

Watching the news, we were witness to the value of a unified response by federal, state and local authorities. Videos document Boston firefighters, emergency medical personnel and local hospitals working together to treat the wounded. Pictures show FBI and ATF agents standing with Boston police to investigate the crime and apprehend those responsible.

Homeland security continues to be a highly visible, core responsibility for frontline first responders. [The only good thing about all this "homeland security" is that it make most people realized that America has turned into a police state!!!]

Federal, state and local agencies in the Valley have worked diligently to integrate communications and build regional preparedness capabilities. An example is the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. ACTIC was one of the first fusion centers to go into operation and is able to tie together intelligence agencies statewide. This partnership prepares the region to better respond to natural or human-caused disasters or terrorist events.

But critical programs face cuts amid a decline in federal preparedness efforts. [I disagree with that 100 percent. We don't need these wasteful police state pork programs any more then we need a hole in the head!!!]

Urban Area Security Initiative grants have been used by fire departments to improve capabilities to respond to hazardous-materials incidents. Some of these resources were used recently to respond to a suspicious letter containing an oily substance at the Phoenix office of Sen. Jeff Flake. [Yea, and I don't ever remember the cops using these megabucks of Federal pork to ever respond to any real threats. They usually end up blowing up a bag of dirty clothing that somebody forgot at a bus stop. And then claiming that they protected us from some imaginary terrorists]

Police have used UASI grants to increase explosive-ordinance disposal and SWAT and intelligence-analyzing capabilities. This equipment was on display when officers investigated a backpack left near 44th Street and McDowell Road. [I don't remember that incident, but if it was like all the others the cops probably ended up blowing up the backpack only to find out it wasn't a bomb, but a bag of dirty clothing.]

But Phoenix UASI decreased more than 50 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2012. [Thank God!!! We need a lot less of this wasteful government pork that has turned American into a police state]

The region is in jeopardy of losing its funding altogether as Congress continues to call for reductions in the number of regions receiving UASI grants. The president’s 2014 budget proposed consolidating state and local preparedness grants without adequate stakeholder input. [Yea, and lets hope they lose 100 percent of this wasteful police state pork!!!]

The Metropolitan Medical Response System grant was all but eliminated last year. MMRS helped strengthen medical surge capacity, mass vaccinations and treatment, decontamination capabilities and regional collaboration. [Translation, like the insane unconstitutional war on drugs, it's a jobs program for cops!!!]

In March, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, along with council members Daniel Valenzuela of Phoenix and Sammy Chavira of Glendale and myself, met with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security to express concern about the decline in the region’s grant allocation. The issue is under review by DHS. [So it sounds like the author [Scott Sommers], along with Greg Stanton, Mark Mitchell, Daniel Valenzuela, and Sammy Chavira are part of the problem of this wasteful government spending on police state pork and all need to be booted out of office by the voters]

Homeland Security grants are needed to sustain critical capabilities, training and exercises for our first responders and community partners and to continue such successful programs as Terrorism Liaison Officers and Community Emergency Response Teams. These Phoenix regional programs were identified as “innovative best practices” in a 2009 DHS review. [Of course they were. The DHS wants as much government pork as it can get!!!]

Be assured that Valley first responders remain ever vigilant and prepared to prevent and respond to emergencies. But local responders need a committed federal partner to protect our homeland. [That's 100 percent BS. What we need to do is boot the police state politicians who are responsible for this wasteful government spending out of office!!!]

Scott Somers is a Mesa City Council member.

Andrew Walter wants to boot socialist Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema

Normally I would support an atheist running for Congress, but atheist Kyrsten Sinema is probably the worst Congressperson in Washington D.C if you ask me.

Kyrsten Sinema seems to be a socialist who never met a tax she didn't love.

While a member of the Arizona Legislator Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema seemed to be a big time supporter of the police state by introducing a law that would have gutted Arizona's medical marijuana law (Prop 203) by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Kyrsten Sinema is also a gun grabber.

Source

2 join 2014 race for Arizona Congress

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 10:27 PM

Two Republican candidates for Congress are getting an early jump on the midterm election.

Andrew Walter, a former Arizona State University quarterback, and Gabriela Saucedo Mercer, a Tucson activist, have officially launched campaigns for 2014.

Walter, a native of Scottsdale and a political newcomer, is competing for the metro Phoenix district held by freshman Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema. The seat is considered a toss-up.

After college, Walter, 31, spent five years in the NFL, earned a master’s in business administration from ASU, founded a small lending company and worked for MidFirst Bank.

He said his time as a team captain at ASU taught him leadership and teamwork. “That’s exactly what we need today” in Congress, he told The Arizona Republic.

Walter said he is motivated by out-of-control federal spending, a sluggish economic recovery, a poor education system and looming problems associated with implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

“There’s no time to waste on solving any of these issues,” he said. “I don’t think we have that much longer to act.”

Walter doesn’t want to be a “career politician” influenced by “special interests,” he said. When pressed, he said he would term-limit himself and vote for term limits, though he hasn’t decided what length of time a politician should serve. Walter said as far as special-interest donations to political-action committees go, if “it’s individuals or institutions that embrace an economic-freedom agenda, we have a lot to talk about.”

Other Republicans who have filed paperwork to run in District 9 are Wendy Rogers, Vernon Parker and Martin Sepulveda, who all ran last year. Rogers is the only candidate in the race who has raised much campaign cash to date.

But Sinema’s $333,000 haul from January through March has far surpassed the field. [Yes, money is what government is all about!!! And it seems like Kyrsten Sinema will tell you anything to get your vote and your cash!!!]

In southern Arizona, Saucedo Mercer will make a second run at Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat, who defeated her last cycle.

Saucedo Mercer has criticized Grijalva for his 2010 call to boycott Arizona after the state passed the tough immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070.

The district is heavily left-leaning, but Saucedo Mercer said in a written statement that Grijalva can be defeated.

“District 3 can elect a real representative to Congress who will work to bring back jobs, improve our education system, and defend our Constitutional rights,” she said. “Together, we can boycott this career politician, his fat cat political allies and special interest groups that are putting District 3 out of work.”

Kyrsten Sinema becomes a Republican???

Source

Salmon, Sinema agree on key elements of immigration reform

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 3, 2013 10:45 AM

They come from different political perspectives and sit on opposite sides of the aisle, but the Southeast Valley’s two U.S. representatives are in sync on the need for immigration reform.

Matt Salmon, the Republican veteran, and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic freshman, shared the platform Tuesday at the 2013 East Valley Statesperson’s Luncheon in Mesa presented by the East Valley Partnership.

Salmon represents Congressional District 5, which includes east Mesa, Gilbert, Queen Creek and parts of Chandler. He was re-elected in November after a 12-year absence from the U.S. House, where he served three previous terms. Sinema’s District 9 cuts a swath from north-central Phoenix through Tempe, west Mesa and Chandler into Ahwatukee.

“I think something will happen” this year on immigration reform, Salmon said, agreeing with Sinema on key elements of a plan that would improve border security while providing legal ways for foreign nationals to work here.

Sinema said legislation is likely to emerge from the House this month, but the end product will have to mesh with a Senate bill being pushed by the so-called “Gang of Eight,” which includes Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

Salmon and Sinema both said reform will help the economy, and it’s vital to provide ways for highly educated people to stay.

“One of the worst things we’re doing right now is bringing those folks here, training them, educating them, and then sending them back to their country where they are going to compete with us,” Sinema said.

Salmon agreed. “I’d like to see us operate a little more like the National Basketball Association,” Salmon said: If you can play, you can stay.

The lawmakers also talked about federal budget issues, which continue to make headlines as the so-called sequestration budget cuts slice day-to-day federal operations.

Sinema lamented the lack of bipartisanship on budget issues, but Salmon said the problems are more profound than that. [I think Kyrsten Sinema view is a) if it moves tax it b) if it doesn't move tax it too. I don't think Kyrsten Sinema ever met a tax she didn't love. Kyrsten Sinema is famous in Arizona for that 300 percent tax she tried to slap on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law Prop 203 down the toilet!!!]

It’s vital, he said, to find ways to cut the mandatory portions of the budget — now amounting to 65 percent of all federal spending. Those programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and debt service.

Salmon advocates raising the retirement age and other measures to keep future spending in check. “If we don’t, a lot of people are going to get hurt — a lot more than we talk about on the sequestration side,” he said.

Salmon and Sinema also agreed on the need to promote Arizona’s place in the inernational marketplace; Sinema said she has joined a group called the New Democratic Coalition, which includes about a quarter of House Democrats and is specifically interested in promoting global trade. [That's odd, Kyrsten Sinema seems to be your typical Democrat is is back by labor unions and wants to keep foreign workers out of the country. I suspect Kyrsten Sinema plays both sides of this issue in an attempt to grab both the Democratic and Republican votes.]

The biggest threat to that, she said, is America’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks. [Wow!!! Kyrsten Sinema seems to have flipped from an anti-war person to a big fan of the American military. Again I suspect Kyrsten Sinema will say anything to get your vote and is playing both the Democratic and Republican sides of this issue in an attempt to get both the Republican and Democratic votes]

“This is an area that is not talked about very much,” Sinema said, mostly because much of the information is classified. She added:

“But, I will tell you that the threat that our country is facing as a result of cybersecurity breaches is significant. The amount of money that we already have lost as a result of our inability to protect ourselves effectively from cybersecurity threats is literally in the trillions of dollars.”

Hackers in Russia, China and Iran are busily swiping financial data, patents and other sensitive information, Sinema said, and Congress hasn’t done nearly enough to stop them.

Kevin Rogers, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, asked the lawmakers to intervene in the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to force the Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona to install expensive air scrubbers.

The resulting higher costs for electricity, he said, will hurt everyone in Arizona.

“I’m scared to death about the EPA proposals,” Salmon said. “It will dramatically increase the costs of water, and then the cost of everything. ...We’ve got to put our best foot forward to stop this from happening.”

Phones to be further examined for video of Bakersfield man's fatal beating

Normally this is a trivial task, but the cops probably also know how to make it a lot harder to recover the files, since they do this stuff all the time.

Kern County makes lame excuses to justify the murder of David Sal Silva

• "I cannot speculate whether they acted appropriately or not"
• "Baton strikes were used, but what I don't know ... if they ... caused death"
• Youngblood said the baton is a less lethal weapon
• Youngblood noted that no cause of death has been determined

I wonder if Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood would be making these same lame excuses if we had a video of 10 Black men beating up a cop with billy clubs???

Cops who murdered David Silva are the victims????

Well at least in this article it sounds like that is what the cops want us to believe!!!

This is typical when cops are caught committing crimes, they frequently paint themselves as the victim, not the criminal.

The murder of David Silva by the Kern County Sheriff's Office isn't any different. And sadly people frequently believe these fantastic big lies made up the the police.

Cops erase video of police murder in Bakersfield.

Based on my experience with crooked cops this doesn't surprise me the least bit. Every time I am stopped the police I take the 5th and refuse to answer any police questions.

Of course the cops always lie and tell me I don't have any 5th Amendment right to remain silent. And almost always the cops make up threats that bad, bad, bad things will happen to me if I don't answer their questions.

And most of the time the cops illegally search me looking for an ID, since I always refuse to them them my name.

The good news, is that even if the piggies erased the video of the Kern County sheriff's officers beating David Silva to death, frequently the file can be recovered.

Last if the police are so corrupt that they will erase the evidence that is needed to convict the 10 are so cops who beat David Silva to death, don't you think these crooked cops will also commit perjury and lie in court to convict people??? Or plant evidence to frame people???

Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

By Michael Mello, Los Angeles Times

May 24, 2013, 11:17 p.m.

TUCSON — A federal judge has ruled that the immigration enforcement policies of the man who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" violated the Constitution by using racial profiling.

For years, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered his deputies to detain people they suspect of residing in the country illegally and to hold them for federal authorities.

The 142-page ruling issued Friday by Judge G. Murray Snow came as part of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Latino plaintiffs who asserted that race was a major factor in initiating immigration enforcement stops.

Snow wrote that the sheriff's practices did in fact rely heavily on race, violating the Constitution's 4th and 14th amendments. The 4th Amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizure; the 14th Amendment was created to cement the rights of U.S. citizens.

Attorney Tim Casey, who represents the Sheriff's Office, said the agency would comply with the judge's order but pursue an appeal.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office "is disappointed in the decision reached today," Casey said. "The position was and always has been that race is not used to make law enforcement decisions."

He also suggested that if there were problems, they arose from training deputies received from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency. "There was some bad training," he said.

ICE officials could not immediately be reached for comment Friday evening.

Maricopa County is home to Arizona's biggest city, Phoenix, and has significant Latino and immigrant populations.

In his ruling, Snow took issue with many of the six-term sheriff's actions. The judge noted that deputies frequented places where day laborers gather. In four day-labor sweeps he cited, none of the 35 people arrested was detained for violation of state or local laws, and all were passengers in vehicles, not drivers.

Snow issued an order immediately and permanently barring the Sheriff's Office from detaining or arresting Latinos or stopping Latinos in vehicles simply because of a suspicion they may be in the country illegally.

Snow noted that at one time the federal Department of Homeland Security — which oversees enforcement of immigration laws — had authorized the Sheriff's Office to use race as a factor in determining who should be detained. However, Homeland Security officials have since retracted that right, an act that formed the basis for most of Snow's decision.

Friday's ruling was cheered by immigrant rights activists.

"Today's decision vindicates the rights of Latinos in Maricopa County who've been terrorized by discriminatory [Sheriff's Office] practices and have had their communities torn apart," Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said in a statement. "The court recognized that racial profiling within the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is a pervasive and widespread problem that can only be addressed through substantive, meaningful changes to eradicate this egregious practice and begin rebuilding public trust."

nation@latimes.com

Judge rules against 'America's toughest sheriff' in racial profiling lawsuit

Judge rules against 'America's toughest sheriff' in racial profiling lawsuit

Tim Gaynor and David Schwartz Reuters

10:35 a.m. CDT, May 25, 2013

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers in his crackdown on illegal immigration, a federal judge found on Friday, and ordered him to stop using race as a factor in law enforcement decisions.

The ruling against the Maricopa County sheriff came in response to a class-action lawsuit brought by Hispanic drivers that tested whether police can target illegal immigrants without racially profiling U.S. citizens and legal residents of Hispanic origin.

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ruled that the sheriff's policies violated the drivers' constitutional rights and ordered Arpaio's office to cease using race or ancestry as a grounds to stop, detain or hold occupants of vehicles - some of them in crime sweeps dubbed "saturation patrols."

"The great weight of the evidence is that all types of saturation patrols at issue in this case incorporated race as a consideration into their operations," Snow said in a written ruling.

He added that race had factored into which vehicles the deputies decided to stop, and into who they decided to investigate for immigration violations.

The lawsuit contended that Arpaio, who styles himself "America's toughest sheriff," and his officers violated the constitutional rights of both U.S. citizens and legal immigrants alike in their zeal to crack down on people they believe to be in the country illegally.

The ruling came days after a U.S. Senate panel approved a landmark comprehensive immigration legislation that would usher in the biggest changes in immigration policy in a generation if passed by Congress.

The bill would put 11 million immigrants without legal status on a 13-year path to citizenship while further strengthening security along the porous southwestern border with Mexico.

Arpaio declined to comment on the ruling. An attorney representing the sheriff's office said his clients were "deeply disappointed by the ruling" and would lodge an appeal.

"The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has always held the position that they never have used race and never will use race in making a law enforcement decision," attorney Tim Casey told Reuters.

"We do disagree with the findings and my clients do intend to appeal, but at the same time ... we will work with the court and with the opposing counsel to comply fully with the letter and the spirit of this order," he added.

'ILLEGAL AND PLAIN UN-AMERICAN'

Cecillia Wang, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project and plaintiffs' counsel, called the judge's ruling "an important victory that will resound far beyond Maricopa County."

"Singling people out for traffic stops and detentions simply because they're Latino is illegal and just plain un-American," Wang said after the ruling was made public.

"Let this be a warning to anyone who hides behind a badge to wage their own private campaign against Latinos or immigrants that there is no exception in the Constitution for violating people's rights in immigration enforcement."

During testimony in the non-jury trial last year, Arpaio said he was against racial profiling and denied his office arrested people because of the color of their skin.

The sheriff, who won re-election to a sixth term in November, has been a lightning rod for controversy over his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in the state, which borders Mexico, as well as an investigation into the validity of President Barack Obama's U.S. birth certificate.

The lawsuit was brought against Arpaio and his office on behalf of five Hispanic drivers who said they had been stopped by deputies because of their ethnicity.

The plaintiffs, which include the Somos America immigrants' rights coalition and all Latino drivers stopped by the sheriff's office since 2007, were seeking corrective action but not monetary damages.

Arpaio has been the subject of other probes and lawsuits. In August, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona said it had closed a criminal investigation into accusations of financial misconduct by Arpaio, and it declined to bring charges.

A separate U.S. Justice Department investigation and lawsuit relating to accusations of civil rights abuses by Arpaio's office is ongoing.

Arizona has been at the heart of a bitter national debate over immigration since Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed a 2010 crackdown on illegal immigration.

The federal government challenged the crackdown in court and said the U.S. Constitution gives it sole authority over immigration policy. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has allowed to stand the part of the law permitting police to question people they stop about their immigration status.

Snow scheduled a hearing in the case for June 14 at 9:30 a.m. at the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Federal Courthouse in Phoenix.

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor and David Schwartz; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Eric Walsh, Toni Reinhold)

Judge Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff Joe

Judge Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: May 24, 2013

PHOENIX — A federal judge ruled on Friday that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos by targeting them during raids and traffic stops here and throughout Maricopa County.

With his ruling, Judge G. Murray Snow of United States District Court delivered the most decisive defeat so far to Sheriff Arpaio, who has come to symbolize Arizona’s strict approach to immigration enforcement by making it the leading mission for many of the 800 deputies under his command at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

At 142 pages, the decision is peppered with stinging criticism of the policies and practices espoused by Sheriff Arpaio, who Judge Snow said had turned much of his focus to arresting immigrants who were in the country illegally, in most cases civil violations, at the expense of fighting crimes.

He said the sheriff relied on racial profiling and illegal detentions to target Latinos, using their ethnicity as the main basis for suspecting they were in the country illegally. Many of the people targeted were American citizens or legal residents.

“In an immigration enforcement context,” Judge Snow ruled, the sheriff’s office “did not believe that it constituted racial profiling to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions.” In fact, he said its plans and policies confirmed that, “in the context of immigration enforcement,” deputies “could consider race as one factor among others.”

The ruling prohibits the sheriff’s office from using “race or Latino ancestry” as a factor in deciding to stop any vehicle with Latino occupants, or as a factor in deciding whether they may be in the country without authorization.

It also prohibits deputies from reporting a vehicle’s Latino occupants to federal immigration authorities or detaining, holding or arresting them, unless there is more than just a “reasonable belief” that they are in the country illegally. To detain them, the ruling said, the deputies must also have reasonable suspicion that the occupants are violating the state’s human-trafficking and employment laws or committing other crimes.

Tim Casey, a lawyer for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said the office intended to appeal, but in the meantime it would “comply with the letter and spirit of the court’s decision.”

He said the office’s position is that it “has never used race and never will use race to make any law enforcement decision.”

The office relied on training from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, he said, adding, “It’s obvious it received bad training from the federal government.”

The ruling is a result of a federal civil trial last summer in which Sheriff Arpaio and his office were accused in a class-action lawsuit of singling out Latinos for stops, questioning and detention. It says deputies considered the prevalence of Latinos when deciding where to carry out enforcement operations, in many cases in response to complaints based solely on assumptions that Latinos or “Mexicans,” as some complainants put it, were necessarily illegal immigrants.

Regardless of the type of enforcement — workplace raids, traffic stops or targeted patrols in areas frequented by day laborers — Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies were required to keep track of the number of people arrested on federal immigration violations, as well as state charges, Judge Snow said. In news releases, Sheriff Arpaio’s office often referred to the operations as integral parts of the sheriff’s “illegal immigrant stance.”

Cecillia Wang, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit, said, “Let this be a warning to anyone who hides behind a badge to wage their own private campaign against Latinos or immigrants that there is no exception in the Constitution for violating people’s rights in immigration enforcement.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from New York

Judge: Ariz. sheriff's office profiles Latinos

Judge: Ariz. sheriff's office profiles Latinos

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and WALTER BERRY Associated Press

Posted: 05/25/2013 01:28:35 AM PDT

PHOENIX—A federal judge has ruled that the office of America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Murray Snow in Phoenix backs up years of allegations from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's critics who say his officers violate the constitutional rights of Latinos in relying on race in their immigration enforcement.

Snow, whose ruling Friday came more than eight months after a seven-day, non-jury trial, also ruled Arpaio's deputies unreasonably prolonged the detentions of people who were pulled over.

The ruling marks a thorough repudiation of the immigration patrols that made Arpaio a national political figure, and it represents a victory for those who pushed the lawsuit.

"For too long the sheriff has been victimizing the people he's meant to serve with his discriminatory policy," said Cecillia D. Wang, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Right Project. "Today we're seeing justice for everyone in the county."

Monetary damages weren't sought in the lawsuit but rather a declaration that Arpaio's office engages in racial profiling and an order that requires it to make policy changes.

Stanley Young, the lead lawyer who argued the case against Arpaio, said Snow set a hearing for June 14 where he will hear from the two sides on how to make sure the orders in the ruling are carried out.

The sheriff, who has repeatedly denied the allegations, won't face jail time as a result of Friday's ruling.

Tim Casey, Arapio's lead attorney in the case, said an appeal was planned in the next 30 days.

"In the meantime, we will meet with the court and comply with the letter and spirit of the order," he said.

A small group of Latinos alleged in their lawsuit that Arpaio's deputies pulled over some vehicles only to make immigration status checks. The group asked Snow to issue injunctions barring the sheriff's office from discriminatory policing and the judge ruled that more remedies could be ordered in the future.

The group also accused the sheriff of ordering some immigration patrols not based on reports of crime but rather on letters and emails from Arizonans who complained about people with dark skin congregating in an area or speaking Spanish. The group's attorneys noted Arpaio sent thank-you notes to some who wrote the complaints.

The sheriff said his deputies only stop people when they think a crime has been committed and that he wasn't the person who picked the location of the patrols. His lawyers said there was nothing wrong with the thank-you notes.

Young, the group's lawyer, said he was still reading the decision Friday but noted it contained "very detailed findings of discriminatory intent and effect."

Casey said that MCSO's position "is that it has never used race and will never use race in its law-enforcement decisions." He added the sheriff's office relied on "bad training" from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A call to ICE officials in Phoenix for comment wasn't immediately returned Friday evening.

Arpaio, who turns 81 next month, was elected in November to his sixth consecutive term as sheriff in Arizona's most populous county.

Known for jailing inmates in tents and making prisoners wear pink underwear, Arpaio started doing immigration enforcement in 2006 amid Arizona voter frustration with the state's role as the nation's busiest illegal entryway.

Snow wrote that "in the absence of further facts that would give rise to reasonable suspicion or probable cause that a violation of either federal criminal law or applicable state law is occurring," Arpaio's office now is enjoined from enforcing its policy "on checking the immigration status of people detained without state charges, using Hispanic ancestry or race as any factor in making law enforcement decisions pertaining to whether a person is authorized to be in the country, and unconstitutionally lengthening stops."

Snow added "the evidence introduced at trial establishes that, in the past, the MCSO has aggressively protected its right to engage in immigration and immigration-related enforcement operations even when it had no accurate legal basis for doing so."

The trial that ended Aug. 2 focused on Latinos who were stopped during both routine traffic patrols and special immigration patrols known as "sweeps."

During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city—in some cases, heavily Latino areas—over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Immigrants who were in the country illegally accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office.

At trial, plaintiffs' lawyers drew testimony from witnesses who broke down in tears as they described encounters with authorities, saying they were pulled over because they were Hispanic and officers wanted to check their immigration status, not because they had committed an infraction. The sheriff's attorneys disputed such characterizations, typically working to show that officers had probable cause to stop the drivers based on a traffic violation.

Plaintiffs' lawyers also presented statistics to show Latinos are more likely to be stopped on days of immigration patrols and showed emails containing offensive jokes about people of Mexican heritage that were circulated among sheriff's department employees, including a supervisor in Arpaio's immigrant smuggling squad.

Defense lawyers disputed the statistical findings and said officers who circulated offensive jokes were disciplined. They also denied the complaint letters prompted patrols with a discriminatory motive.

The ruling used Arpaio's own words in interviews, news conferences and press releases against him as he trumpeted his efforts in cracking down on immigrants. When it came to making traffic stops, Arpaio said in 2007 that deputies are not bound by state laws in finding a reason to stop immigrants.

"Ours is an operation, whether it's the state law or the federal, to go after illegals, not the crime first, that they happen to be illegals," the ruling quoted Arpaio as saying. "My program, my philosophy is a pure program. You go after illegals. I'm not afraid to say that. And you go after them and you lock them up."

Some immigrant traffic stops were made "purely on the observation of the undercover officers that the vehicles had picked up Hispanic day laborers from sites where Latino day laborers were known to gather," the ruling said.

The judge also said the sheriff's office declared on many occasions that racial profiling is strictly prohibited and not tolerated, while witnesses said it was appropriate to consider race as a factor in rounding up immigrants.

"This is a blow to" the sheriff's office, said David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studied racial profiling and wrote a book on the subject.

Arpaio's lawyers will have "an uphill climb" in the appeals process because of all "the gross statistical evidence," he said.

NYPD street stops called profiling, big change sought

The legal definition of arrest is when the police detain a person for any reason and that person is not free to leave or go. If a cop stops you to write a traffic ticket under this definition you have been arrested while the cop wrote you the traffic ticket.

I was taught that it was illegal for the police to detain a person or arrest a person unless they had either "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion".

While lawyers and judges can argue for weeks about what these terms mean in a nutshell "probable cause" means a cop saw you commit a crime and thus can arrest or detain you for that crime.

"Reasonable suspicion" means that you match the description of a person who just committed a crime and a cop can arrest or detain you to determine if you are the person that committed the crime.

So with that in mind it is illegal for the police to stop and detain a person simply because they look suspicious.

My understanding of the Fourth Amendment is that it is illegal for the police to search anyone, unless the the police have a search warrant, or the person is arrested for a crime.

There is one exception to that from the case of Terry v Ohio, in which the Supreme Court said it is legal for the police to give a person a pat down search on their outer garments looking for weapons, if the police want to question the person.

Source

NYPD street stops called profiling, big change sought

By Colleen Long Associated Press Sat May 25, 2013 9:08 AM

NEW YORK — It once was an accepted tactic as old as policing itself and, according to the New York Police Department, a key to the city’s dramatic drop in crime: patrol officers stopping young men on the street to see if they’re up to no good. [What what I have read all of this would be illegal in Arizona]

But thanks to rising concerns about racial profiling, a lawsuit and a 10-week trial with testimony ending May 20, the tool the NYPD calls stop, question and frisk has been scrutinized like never before. A judge could rule to change the way the department makes the stops to better protect civil rights. But skeptics warn the changes could come with a price. [Yea, we could go from being a police state in NYC to a free country!]

“It’s hard to see how a cop will be able to leave the station house without some potential adverse impact on his personnel folder if it all goes into effect,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The public may suffer, too — what officer would want to engage someone on the street if he’s looking over his shoulder all the time?” [If a police officer is afraid of someone looking over his shoulder he is probably doing something illegal and shouldn't be a police officer]

The men who sued the NYPD because they believe they were stopped solely for being minorities want across-the-board reforms that include more supervision from department superiors, more comprehensive training and stricter discipline for officers who make illegal stops. They also want a court-appointed monitor to oversee the reforms. [I think that is 100 percent BS. The police should be forbidden from stopping anybody, unless the person is committing a crime.]

Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminology professor and expert in police policy working pro bono for the plaintiffs, proposed a database where information on an officer — complaints, days on patrol, stop and frisks, and arrests made — would be collected and analyzed to catch potential problem officers. Right now there is no centralized database. [If a police officer is violating somebody's constitutional rights he should be fired, not entered in some silly database.]

He said sergeants and other supervisors must review officer conduct, not solely their enforcement numbers, and they should be reviewing officers quarterly, not annually. He suggested more training for officers on racial profiling and stop and frisk at the police academy and on the job.

Community input on how to implement the changes through phone surveys, mailings and calls to people who have reported incidents with police should be included.

“A comprehensive approach is absolutely essential because if any one of the components is absent or weak and ineffective, the entire accountability system begins to collapse,” Walker said.

The reforms are necessary, lawyers say, because they believe the policy has created a culture of fear in minority communities. The tactic has existed in some form for decades, but the volume of stops increased dramatically under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and about 5 million stop and frisks have been made during the past decade.

U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin is not being asked to ban the tactic, which has already been found to be legal. Her options are to leave it as is or order reforms, which appear likely since she’s ruled previously on related cases that changes are needed. [I think she should ban the activity! Period!!!]

Mid-trial, city lawmakers said they’d reached broad agreement on a proposal to create an inspector general to oversee the department in part because of stop and frisk and a series of stories by The Associated Press on the monitoring of Muslims. The inspector general would function on a macro level weighing in on policy, while the court monitor would enforce nuts-and-bolts changes related to the stop-and-frisk policy.

But morale is already low among the rank-and-file and such changes might make it worse for them, O’Donnell said. [Any cop who's moral is low because they are not allowed to stop and search anybody they want to stop should be fired!!!]

“This will all rain down on the cops,” he said. “The mayor is bullet proof. All the policy makers who formulate or acquiesce to this strategy will be held harmless.”

But O’Donnell, and other experts not related to the case, say some reforms are necessary.

“A court has recognized that while stops and frisk are a legal tactic, what we have going on here is way too much of a good thing,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who is an expert on street stops.

“Crime has gone down, down, down and especially in minority communities. And still there is a fair degree of alienation and anger. What is happening is that they’re glad there’s less crime than there used to be, but does it have to be done like this? Is there another way?” [If you ask me I would rather live with more crime, then live in a police state where I am shaken down by police criminals]

The city’s expert witness, James Stewart, the director for the Law Enforcement and Justice Policy at the Center for Naval Analysis, said the department already does much of what the lawsuit seeks. Officers receive extensive training at the academy, a training officer is assigned to police precincts and the department has beefed up safeguards to the stop-and-frisk policy.

To add unnecessary oversight would create additional work and heap more stress on officers who perform an already difficult, dangerous job, the city experts said. Stewart referred to cameras worn by officers in another city, and the judge seized on it, wondering whether it should be used in the NYPD on an experimental basis. [That's 100 percent BS. From what I have read most of this stop and frisk nonsense is done to find people who have marijuana and are certainly not dangerous criminals]

“I’m intrigued by it,” Scheindlin said. “It seems to me it would solve a lot of problems.”

Police and city officials question why — in a city that has seen a precipitous drop in crime — they’re under fire. [Duh!!! Because the police are now criminals who are terrorizing the people they pretend to protect!!!]

“The attacks most often come from those who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe, but rather view their jobs as pointing fingers from the steps of City Hall,” Bloomberg said in a recent speech to police. “Some of them scream that they know better than you how to run the department.” [No these attacks come from people who are tired of living in a police state and would like to return to a normal world where we are assumed innocent until proven guilty, not the current NYC police state of being guilty until you prove you are innocent]

Sex-offender data is used to collect money and intimidate

I have always disliked the governments requirement that sex offenders are required to register with the government and have their personal information placed in online databases that anybody can view on the internet.

I think the governments intent is to humiliate, belittle and intimidate the alleged sex offenders and it doesn't serve any legitimate function of protecting public.

Last the term "sex offender" is misleading. If you get arrested for taking a leak in an alley under Arizona's laws you are considered a "sex offender" and required to register under this stupid law.

Goldwater Institute threatens suit over Phoenix practice of ‘spiking’ pensions

From this article it sure sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a liar who will say anything to get elected.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton Stanton lied to the public when he had campaigned and said he would end this practice in this article.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton also lied to the public when he campaigned and said he would end the temporary Phoenix sales tax, which mostly goes to the Phoenix police and fire departments.

It sure looks like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton doesn't support the people that elected him, but rather is owned by the special interest groups in the Phoenix Police and Phoenix Fire Department unions.

I suspect those 2,400 retired Phoenix cops and firefighters vote for Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton because he supports their government pork.

Source

Goldwater Institute threatens suit over Phoenix practice of ‘spiking’ pensions

By Craig Harris The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 28, 2013 11:23 PM

The Goldwater Institute has threatened to sue Phoenix if the city does not end a legally questionable policy that allows police officers and firefighters to increase the amount of their pensions by cashing in unused sick leave, vacation and other benefits.

The Phoenix-based conservative watchdog group, which has a history of winning suits against municipalities, sent a letter late last week to Mayor Greg Stanton, saying state law is clear that the practice of “spiking” pensions is illegal. The letter also said “attempts to evade the obvious meaning of this law are, at best, erroneous, at worst, dishonest.”

Stanton, who had campaigned on pension reform but has taken no action to end pension spiking by public-safety officers, declined an interview request. [Just like he also campaigned and promised to remove the temporary sales tax which he didn't.]

His spokeswoman, Sarah Muench, issued a statement saying Stanton “will ask for a meeting to bring together the Goldwater Institute and our City Attorney.” [Sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is just shoveling the BS to keep the reporters and public at bay for a little bit longer]

“He looks forward to discussing it. He has no further comment at this time,” Muench said.

One Fire Department captain, meanwhile, said Goldwater would be wasting taxpayer funds if it forced Phoenix to defend itself in court. [Of course the only people that benefit from this practice are members of the Phoenix Fire Department and Phoenix Police Department]

If a lawsuit is filed, Goldwater likely will seek a judgment declaring the practice illegal.

In the face of such a judgment, the statewide Public Safety Personnel Retirement System would have no choice but to seek refunds from retired police officers and firefighters who received enhanced pension benefits because of pay spiking, system administrator Jared Smout said.

“We would have to figure out what their pension should have been, and any overpayment, and collect that,” Smout said. “The way we typically collect is by reducing pensions. ... This potentially would affect a large amount of people.”

The city could avoid a legal judgment by voluntarily agreeing to change its policy.

In that case, it is unclear whether the retirement system would try to recoup past overpayments, because it could face a lawsuit by retirees. [Who have been stealing our tax dollars and want to keep the stolen loot]

Smout said the retirement system would prefer to have a court ruling in advance so that whatever steps it takes to recoup overpayments are legally binding and less vulnerable to litigation.

It is unknown how many Phoenix retirees could be affected, but such repayments could be significant.

For example, in one instance, a former assistant fire chief increased his lump-sum retirement check by roughly a quarter of a million dollars, to $795,983, and he increased his annual pension benefits by more than $40,000 — to $130,046 a year.

There are approximately 2,400 Phoenix retirees receiving benefits from the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System. Rank-and-file officers say they have been unfairly criticized by the public as greedy because a few high-ranking executives have significantly enhanced their pensions through spiking. [Have to disagree with that. The retired rank and file police officers and firemen screw the taxpayers just as much as the high ranking ones]

However, there has been no organized movement to curb abuses in the pension system.

Smout said the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, of which Phoenix is the largest member, has requested information from the city on its justification for allowing police officers and firefighters to spike their pensions.

The pension fund has taken no action against the city and has stated that pension spiking by Phoenix only hurts the city because it results in a larger bill the city must pay to the state pension trust for retirement benefits.

Phoenix budgeted $109 million this fiscal year for public-safety pension costs, and that figure will increase by $20 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1. In fiscal 2003, the city paid $7.2 million.

Pension spiking accounts for only a portion of the increased payment. Substantial investment losses by the pension trust, and other factors such as highly paid and experienced public-safety officers, account for the city’s increased payments.

An inquiry by the state pension system, and Goldwater’s legal threat, come after The Arizona Republic earlier this month reported the city’s pension-spiking policy, which has allowed a few retirees to become millionaires shortly after retirement.

The newspaper also found that the spiking policy allowed a few police officers and firefighters to make more in retirement than when they worked.

The average public-safety pension for a Phoenix retiree is $59,341, about $10,000 more than the statewide average. There are 153 Phoenix public-safety retirees who receive pensions greater than $88,000 — more than two times the average income in Arizona.

The Republic initially reported that pension spiking occurs because the city allows public-safety officers to cash in unused sick leave, vacation and deferred compensation to calculate their pensions.

The Republic has since learned that the city also counts compensation paid for emergency shifts, bonuses and vehicle and cellphone allowances to be calculated into salary totals that determine pension benefits.

State law says “unused sick leave, payment in lieu of vacation, payment for unused compensatory time or payment for any fringe benefits” cannot be used as compensation to compute retirement benefits.

State law also says that only “base salary, overtime pay, shift differential pay, military differential wage pay, compensatory time used by an employee in lieu of overtime not otherwise paid by an employer and holiday pay” may be used to calculate pension benefits.

Final compensation and length of service are the key components in determining the amount of a public pension in Arizona. The more a person makes at the end of a career, the higher the lifetime pension. Salary spiking, therefore, increases pensions and the long-term costs for taxpayers.

The city issued a statement Tuesday saying that its public-safety employees have bargained for fewer vacation and sick days in exchange for a higher salary. It also said that, in certain circumstances, an employee can quit accruing sick and vacation leave in return for additional salary.

The statement also said “whether a public- safety employee’s compensation is pensionable under state statute is a decision to be made by the PSPRS administrators.”

Smout and other public-safety administrators said they do not have the resources to determine whether an employee’s compensation is “pensionable.” Instead, they say, they rely upon the accuracy and honesty of governments that are part of the system to report the accurate compensation of public-safety officers.

Jon Riches, an attorney from Goldwater, said the demand letter was intended to put the city on notice.

“Hopefully, they will take action to change these policies. If the policy remains as it is, it’s difficult to imagine a situation where a lawsuit wouldn’t occur,” Riches said. “Hopefully, Phoenix does the right thing and changes a policy that is abusive and illegal.”

City Councilman Sal DiCiccio, an outspoken critic of the costs of public pensions, agreed.

“Under the best case scenario, the city of Phoenix is purposely circumventing the law. In the worst case, which is the current situation, the city is breaking the law,” he said.

But John Teffy, a Phoenix Fire Department captain, said Goldwater should stand down.

“It seems to me that if the Goldwater Institute took the time to understand how the city works and how contracts work, they would know there is a much simpler way to address this than with (threats of) frivolous lawsuits,” Teffy said.

Police: Scottsdale chef found with marijuana

I suspect the pot was found when the police were in the process of stealing his car. In Arizona if you are stopped by the police and don't have a valid car registration or insurance we have some silly draconian police state laws that allow the police to steal your car until you "prove your innocent". These laws don't serve any valid purpose other then allowing the police to raise money for themselves by legally stealing cars from people.

Source

Police: Scottsdale chef found with marijuana, suspended license

By Matthew Longdon The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed May 29, 2013 6:31 AM

Chef Eddie Matney was recently arrested on charges of drug possession and driving on a suspended license, Scottsdale police say.

Matney, owner and executive chef at Eddie’s House in Scottsdale, was stopped last week by Scottsdale police near 68th Street and Camelback Road because of an obscured license plate, according to police.

They say a subsequent check showed Matney’s registration and driving privileges had been suspended. While waiting for a tow truck, police officers say they found marijuana in Matney’s vehicle. [In Arizona if you don't have a valid car registration the police are allowed to steal your car, and hold it hostage till you prove your innocent of the crime. The bottom line is this practice is just a form of legalize theft used by the police to raise money]

In a statement Tuesday night, Matney said “a very small amount of marijuana was found with fishing equipment.”

The same day, Matney told 12 News he doesn’t smoke marijuana and doesn’t know why it was in the vehicle. He also said he didn’t know his license was suspended.

Innocent man freed from prison gets master’s degree

Source

Innocent man freed from prison gets master’s degree

By Jonathan Bandler (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News Wed May 29, 2013 7:02 AM

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - When he last donned a cap and gown, Jeffrey Deskovic was a 20-year-old convict getting an associate degree at an upstate prison.

That was in 1994. It took 12 more years for him to prove he had been wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a Peekskill schoolmate and get out of prison.

On Tuesday, he marched near the front of the procession at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice graduation ceremony as he received his master’s degree.

It was an important milestone for the 39-year-old exoneree, who sat in the front row during the ceremony at the Javits Center in Manhattan and was recognized in the school president’s remarks.

“I got a bit emotional there because it was surreal thinking about how far I’ve come,” he said. “I had a real sense of accomplishment and it touched me to walk across that stage and hear the cheers.”

He was 17 when convicted in the 1989 slaying of 15-year-old Angela Correa, even though the jury knew his DNA didn’t match the evidence. He had been arrested after giving a false confession to police after hours of interrogation. [The police probably used a technique called the "9 Step Reid Method" to get the confession. The "9 Step Reid Method" replaced the old technique of beating people with physical rubber hoses to get confessions by using psychological rubbers hoses to mentally beat confessions out of them]

He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison and spent years trying to get the DNA evidence retested.

After the Innocence Project got involved, the evidence was retested and the real killer, Steven Cunningham, was identified. Deskovic was released in September 2006, nearly 16 years into his prison term.

He has so far received $8.3 million from New York state and Westchester County, and his federal lawsuit against Peekskill and Putnam County is still pending. He used $1.5 million of his compensation money last year to start The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which fights wrongful convictions and assists those exonerated.

At the graduation, honorary degrees went to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, co-founders of the Innocence Project, which has helped win exoneration for 307 people through DNA testing.

Scheck said Deskovic’s case was emblematic of the work of freeing the innocent.

“We were able to learn a lot of lessons about what went wrong with the criminal-justice system and how to fix it,” Scheck told the crowd, adding that Deskovic is “carrying on that mission.”

The work for Deskovic seems never-ending. From the foundation’s Rye Brook, N.Y., office, he oversees a staff of four, plus interns.

They have received more than 800 requests and have taken on 12 cases, 10 murder convictions, an assault and an arson. Each accepted case has to have two things -- a plausible claim of innocence, “not just a hunch,” Deskovic says -- and a concrete direction to go in. They are paying close attention to cases from Brooklyn as the District Attorney’s Office reviews 50 convictions linked to a homicide detective whose handling of witnesses has come under scrutiny.

Deskovic meets with potential donors, speaks at conferences and lends his voice at protests. He has stood outside courthouses in White Plains and New York City, handing out the foundation’s Thinking Juror’s Handbook. It offers his story, a primer on wrongful convictions and a heavy pitch for unswayed jurors to hold their ground.

He even found time to learn Spanish and guest-host a WVOX radio show.

But there are constant frustrations. He still struggles socially. And he wants to help everyone but knows he can’t.

There was an “awkward moment” Thursday while speaking with people at The Castle, the Fortune Society’s halfway house for ex-cons in Harlem, as some in the audience tried to get his help on convictions they claimed were bogus.

“People think I have this super-large staff and we can take on anything,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that and it bothers me.”

Although waiting for a big success to spur fundraising, the foundation did play a role this year in the release of William Lopez, who served more than 22 years for the 1989 murder of a Brooklyn drug dealer. The foundation helped track down a witness in the Dominican Republic. He testified by video earlier this year, insisting that Lopez was not the killer.

Once freed, Lopez got help from the foundation with temporary housing and finding a therapist. And when Lopez moved into a new apartment last week, Deskovic took to Facebook with an appeal for some of the furniture, appliances and other items Lopez needed to fill it.

“He’s been awesome, everything he’s done to help me acclimate,” Lopez said Tuesday afternoon. “You hear people who say ‘When I get out I’m going to do this and this to help people,’ but not many of them do. Jeffrey keeps doing it. He means business.”

Deskovic’s thesis on wrongful convictions offered a dozen causes for innocent people ending up in prison and remedies for each. One of his thesis advisers at John Jay, Andrew Karmen, called Deskovic an “inspiration.”

“He’s resilient, someone who went through an unfathomable, unbelievable experience losing all those years of his life who can now speak with authority on these issues,” said Karmen, who serves on the foundation’s board. “He sees injustice and he wants to prevent it from happening to other people.”

Deskovic doesn’t rule out more education, maybe even law school. But it won’t be immediate. He has too much on his plate.

“I enjoy school, I wish I was going back in the fall,” he said. “But until the foundation takes off, how can I?”

Judge: Joe Arpaio heeded his supporters, not the law

Source

Judge: Joe Arpaio heeded his supporters, not the law

With just hours left in the drive to recall Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, campaign organizers are scrambling to grab the manna as it floats down from heaven.

Or in this case, from a federal judge.

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ruled late on Friday afternoon that Arpaio and his deputies have been and are unconstitutionally targeting Latinos in the sheriff’s six-year-old campaign to rid the county of people here illegally.

The 142-page ruling is detailed and devastating as it outlines a rogue agency that stopped cars specifically because they had brown people in them and continued arresting Latinos for suspected immigration violations even after it lost the authority to do so.

This, because of a sheriff who opted to do the popular thing rather than the constitutional one.

And perhaps worst of all for Arpaio, the ruling was written by a conservative judge appointed by George W. Bush.

Naturally, the sheriff plans to appeal, contending through his lawyer that no racial profiling occurred.

I suspect the Go-Joe crowd – what’s left of them — will rally ‘round.

“There are so many people who don’t care that he violates the Constitution,” retired lawyer-turned-Episcopal priest Glenn Jenks told me. “All they know is he gets the bad guys and that’s what they want.”

Rev. Jenks was the rector at Good Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church in Cave Creek when the church’s day-labor operation became Arpaio’s first target in September 2007.

“He just showed up one morning with deputies parked outside the church and we were getting word deputies were stopping any person that went out with a brown person in the car, dismissing the driver immediately and investigating … the worker,” Jenks said.

It was there that Arpaio’s deputies managed to bag a Mexican man and hold him for eight hours for a suspected immigration violation. This, despite the visa in the man’s wallet.

Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres sued on behalf of himself and other Latinos targeted. Sadly, it’s taken more than five years and two election cycles to sort out what happened here.

In his ruling, Judge Snow noted that MCSO would station undercover detectives at Good Shepherd and other day-labor centers then radio patrol officers to stop any driver who left with Latinos in the car on the pretext of a traffic violation. The driver then would get a warning or at most a citation while the passengers’ immigration status was investigated based solely on the fact that they were Latino – a constitutional no-no.

Ditto for the sheriff’s saturation patrols that were ostensibly intended to pick up anyone in a designated area for any violation yet remarkably seemed to focus on Latino drivers.

“The great weight of the evidence is that all types of saturation patrols at issue in this case incorporated race as a consideration into their operations, both in design and execution, the vehicles the deputies decided to stop, and in the decisions made as to whom to investigate for immigration violations,” Snow wrote.

He wrote a lot of other things as well. About an agency that engages in a “institutionalized consideration of race in MCSO operations.” About “its failure to observe normal standards of police conduct.”

About a sheriff who is “aggressively responsive to the wishes of a significant portion of the Maricopa County electorate” but not so much to the constitution that he has sworn to uphold — the one that protects all people.

Arpaio’s critics hailed the judge’s ruling.

“In the long run, the office of sheriff is being de-legitimized,” attorney Josh Nunez told me.

“If he really had the people’s best interests at heart, he would resign and acknowledge that people no longer trust his department and he is not the person to clean it up,” said Lilia Alvarez, manager of the Arpaio-recall campaign.

Knowing that’ll never happen, she and other recall organizers have set up Camp Recall Arpaio at 2nd Avenue and Jefferson, hoping for a last-minute surge in support. The four-month campaign has been hampered by a lack of funding, largely because organizers didn’t wait to give voters a chance to want to reconsider their November vote.

Now the group has until 5 p.m. Thursday to turn in the valid signatures of 335,317 voters. Alvarez on Tuesday estimated the group has about 300,000 signatures and needs another 70,000 to ensure an adequate cushion.

Double that cushion and maybe there’s a chance.

OK, with less than 48 hours to go, there’s no chance.

And that, given Judge Snow’s ruling, is a shame.

If a cop doesn't think he will get a fair trial what chance does a civilian have???

Vindication for an LAPD officer who was fired from the force

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

May 27, 2013, 9:14 p.m.

Just 11 months into his job as a Los Angeles police officer, Sergio Arreola had a choice to make: resign or be fired.

The day before, April 11, 2012, he had been handcuffed and booked by Pomona police for allegedly assaulting them during a traffic accident investigation and resisting arrest. Arreola's captain had issued the ultimatum after getting word of the incident from Pomona officials.

The 25-year-old Marine veteran, who had dreamed about becoming an LAPD cop, felt his world crumbling around him.

For a moment, the young officer considered resigning. Doing so, the captain told him, would spare him the black mark of being fired and give him a chance at finding another job. But Arreola dismissed the idea just as quickly. Resigning would signal that he had done something wrong.

He told the captain that he hadn't done any of the things the Pomona officers alleged. Arreola asked the captain to investigate the situation before signing the paper that would boot him from the force. He offered the captain the phone number for a tow truck driver who had witnessed the incident and told him that at least one other witness, his brother-in-law, had recorded a video of it.

"With all due respect, I have done a lot for this country and I've worked really hard to get here — to get to this position as a police officer," Arreola said. "I'm not going to resign. If you want to terminate me, go ahead."

The captain was unmoved. The Pomona officers' description of the incident made it clear that Arreola was not LAPD material.

Arreola turned in his equipment and left the station for what he assumed would be the last time. Once out of earshot in the parking garage, he dialed his wife.

"He fired me," Arreola told her, tears streaming down his face.

Arreola had been on the way to his in-law's house in Pomona after having finished an overnight shift when his wife called. A relative had gotten into a minor traffic accident nearby, she told him. She gave Arreola the location and asked him to meet her there.

Pomona police Officer Eric Hamilton, who first responded to the call of a single car accident in a quiet neighborhood, said in his arrest report that Arreola immediately was aggressive and belligerent when he arrived, refusing to obey Hamilton's commands.

When Arreola identified himself as an off-duty LAPD officer, Hamilton demanded to see his badge. Arreola went to his trunk to pull out the rain jacket where he had pinned his badge and lifted it up for the officer to see. Hamilton had an audio recording device running. [Why do cops always tell the cop that stopped them they are cops??? Is it to get special treatment??? I wonder if it would do any good to show the cop that pulled me over to show him my employment badge that shows I work at Wennie World, the finest hot dog stand in the world!!!]

On the recording, a copy of which The Times has obtained, Hamilton is heard telling other officers after the arrest that he was so suspicious of Arreola that he "broke leather" — cop lingo for unclasping the safety lock on his gun holster — as he saw Arreola move toward the trunk and kept a grip on his gun in case he needed to draw it quickly.

Worried that he was losing control of the situation, Hamilton put out a call over the radio, asking for assistance to deal with a combative LAPD officer. Officer Chris Tucker heard the call and rushed to the scene. Both officers described Arreola's demeanor as "extremely angry," and, within minutes of arriving, Tucker attempted to handcuff Arreola. He tackled him to the ground when Arreola "began to twist and tense up, pulling his arms from our grasp," Tucker said in his report. Hamilton quickly came over to assist. The officers alleged that Arreola tried to punch Hamilton in the face as they restrained him.

But, according to Arreola, it was Hamilton who was hostile from the outset. As he approached the intersection, Arreola recalled seeing Hamilton yelling at this wife. Confused, Arreola said he got out of his car and, from about 30 feet away, called out to his wife, "What's going on, Erika? Let's go."

Hamilton responded angrily, swearing at Arreola and telling his wife to "shut up" while pulling her back by the elbow, Arreola recounted in his official account of the incident to LAPD officials. Arreola acknowledged that he told Hamilton a few times that he shouldn't be talking to his wife "like a criminal" over something as minor as a one-car traffic accident. Hamilton, he said, responded with more profanities and threatened to arrest Arreola. At that point, Arreola said, he asked Hamilton to call for his supervisor.

Arreola denied ever resisting the officers. Tucker, he said, intentionally pulled him off balance while he was being frisked and, when Arreola stumbled, the officer used it as an excuse to take him to the ground.

On Hamilton's recording, the officer is heard telling Arreola repeatedly to "stop resisting" and Arreola saying that he is not resisting. Arreola is also heard pleading with onlookers to record the scene. Once on the ground, Arreola said, the officers punched him repeatedly. Hamilton, he said, bent his left arm back violently and Tucker attempted to subdue him by using a choke hold.

Through the head of the union that represents Pomona police, both Hamilton and Tucker declined to be interviewed for this article. The union official cited an ongoing internal investigation by the Pomona department into the officers' conduct, which he said bars them from speaking publicly.

Based on the officers' account of Arreola's behavior, prosecutors in the L.A. County district attorney's office charged Arreola with three misdemeanors for resisting arrest, assaulting Hamilton and obstructing the officers' work. Although they eventually dropped the assault charge, Robert Rico, Arreola's attorney in the criminal trial, said prosecutors refused to discuss any sort of deal on the other two accusations. Their only concession, Rico said, was to spare Arreola time in jail if he pleaded guilty to the charges.

The hard line that prosecutors took was moot, since Arreola wouldn't consider a deal. "They've ruined my life, they've ruined my name," he recalled saying when Rico gave him the option to plead guilty. "What's the worst they can do? Send me to jail?"

In the months leading up to his trial, Arreola struggled to keep himself and his wife afloat. He ran his credit card to its limit and refinanced his house and car loans. He borrowed money from his wife's father to keep them going while he studied at a local college hoping for a degree that would help him land a new job. Peter Casey, an LAPD lieutenant who had supervised him, wrote a check to help cover his legal fees.

Arreola's chances at trial appeared bleak. The tow truck driver did not testify, telling Rico he had been harassed by a Pomona detective, the attorney said. [So cops do threaten people with physical harm to prevent them from testifying, just like the Mafia does???] And Pomona police claimed they found no video of the arrest on the brother-in-law's phone, despite his insistence that he recorded it, according to Rico. [I'm sure the Pomona cops will deny erasing the video, like the Bakersfield and Kern County Sheriff's office denied erasing the video of a man beaten to death by Kern County Sheriff's officers in Bakersfield] But several of Arreola's supervisors and old partners testified on his behalf, describing him as soft spoken and respectful. Arreola himself took the unusual step of testifying. And, at one point, the judge told the jury to disregard the testimony of a Pomona sergeant because it was factually wrong.

Rico said he used the audio recording to show that Arreola had followed the officer's orders and not been combative. On the recording, jurors heard Arreola telling Hamilton, "You know I didn't do anything," and Hamilton retorting by calling Arreola "a fool."

Later in the recording, as Hamilton tells Arreola's wife that he's arresting her as well, Hamilton said, "I'm going to make sure your husband is never a police officer in the state of California again. I'll talk to Chief Beck myself personally," referring to the LAPD chief.

And jurors listened as Hamilton and Tucker recounted the arrest for other officers. "I just about broke his left arm. I wanted to break his arm," Hamilton said.

"I had my arm around him to choke his ass out," Tucker said.

The jury found Arreola not guilty.

The acquittal was important, but it wasn't everything.

Earlier this month, Arreola once again was summoned into the captain's office where he had been told his career with the LAPD was over. This time, the captain, who declined to be interviewed, wanted to welcome Arreola back to the force — a result of months of negotiations between department officials and Matthew McNicholas, an attorney representing Arreola in a lawsuit against Hamilton, Tucker and the Pomona Police Department.

"It feels good," Arreola said of returning to the job. "I want to show the LAPD that the people who supported me and believed in me were right all along."

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Ruling prompts changes at MCSO

Source

Ruling prompts changes at MCSO

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 29, 2013 10:32 PM

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office human-smuggling unit no longer patrols county highways looking for undocumented immigrants, and any plans for work-site enforcement operations have been put on hold following a federal judge’s ruling that found the agency discriminated against Latinos.

The ramifications of last week’s landmark federal-court decision have started to appear in the day-to-day operations at the Sheriff’s Office, but experts said the ruling will likely have a broader impact on other police departments around the country that relied on the same legal advice as MCSO to pursue similar immigration-enforcement policing methods.

Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California-Davis, said the judge’s ruling that Arpaio’s office engaged in racial profiling has put other police departments that followed the guidance of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach on notice that their methods are flawed.

Johnson said that U.S. District Judge Murray Snow’s ruling Friday was a clear rebuke of the way sheriff’s deputies had been trained and called into question Kobach’s legal interpretation that local police have inherent authority to be involved in immigration enforcement, which MCSO and other agencies had relied on.

“It seems to me that police departments across the country are on notice that maybe Kris Kobach is not the best person you want to put together a program that is going to withstand legal scrutiny,” Johnson said.

But Kobach, a professor of law and an architect of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070, defended his interpretation of federal law.

And he said it was Snow’s analysis of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures, that was flawed and inconsistent with legal precedent. [Yea, the tyrants that support the police state always say the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to them. How silly of us to think the 4th Amendment means what it says. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"]

“The judge has written his opinion in a way that doesn’t respect the inherent authority of local law enforcement,” Kobach said. [Translation - I got a gun and a badge and can do anything I want. F* the Constitution, I got a gun and a badge]

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement program was, in his words, a “pure program … you go after illegals.”

Those words came back to bite Arpaio in Snow’s 142-page ruling that settled long-standing racial-profiling allegations against the Sheriff’s Office in favor of a group of citizens that grew to include every Latino stopped by deputies since 2007.

The judge drew heavily from Arpaio’s news releases and media statements to illustrate the sharp contrasts between what the sheriff and his deputies said on the witness stand vs. what they said when immigration-enforcement efforts were at their peak.

Part of the controversy over the program came from the use of traffic stops to engage in immigration enforcement. The relatively routine stops for minor traffic violations gave deputies an opening to come into contact with drivers and passengers. If the deputies became suspicious that vehicle occupants were in the country without authorization, based on factors like language, appearance and ethnicity, the deputies could ask their immigration status.

That practice, driven by political considerations and public perceptions, Snow ruled, led to more Latino drivers being stopped during certain sheriff’s operations and longer detention times for Latinos while they waited for deputies to confirm their immigration status, which Snow found to be in violation of the Constitution.

Snow found flawed training that the Sheriff’s Office offered its deputies compounded the errors.

“This training erroneously instructed MCSO deputies that a person within the country without authorization was necessarily committing a federal crime, and they thus maintained the authority to detain them for criminal violations,” Snow wrote.

Much of the sheriff’s ability to enforce federal immigration law is rooted in a theory that gives local police “inherent authority” to administer federal statutes.

Before 2009, that authority was bolstered by an agreement with the federal government that gave 160 deputies training to enforce federal immigration law. After the Department of Homeland Security rescinded that agreement with the Sheriff’s Office in October 2009, the Sheriff’s Office contracted with Kobach to offer training for all of Arpaio’s deputies.

Kobach, who was paid $300 per hour for his work with the Sheriff’s Office, opens the training videos with a primer on the legal basis of “inherent authority.” [Wow! He gets paid $300 an hour to help Sheriff Joe flush our rights down the toilet!!!]

Snow spent a good portion of his ruling dismantling that argument. Experts said the federal judge’s position should serve as a cautionary sign to other agencies that have incorporated Kobach’s line of reasoning into their enforcement practices.

“Here you have a fairly clear rebuke by a federal court of what officers were being trained in and what they were doing,” said Johnson, the UC-Davis law-school dean.

“(Snow) is a conservative in the way that respects the rule of the law, and he took some offense to the fact that Sheriff Arpaio can say things like, ‘They took away my 287(g) agreement, but I can do what I want anyway,’ ” Johnson said.

“This claim of inherent authority and ability to do whatever the heck the head of the Sheriff’s Office wants to do was something that stuck in Judge Snow’s craw. This is a nation ruled by laws, and I think this judge takes the rule of law seriously.” [Somebody needs to tell Judge Snow that if you got a gun and a badge you are above the law!!! Or at least that's what Sheriff Joe would like]

Kobach first appeared in Arizona when he was a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He agreed to help the state defend its employer-sanctions law, which gives prosecutors the power to revoke the business license of an employer found to have knowingly hired an illegal immigrant, and later made a name for himself as an author of SB 1070.

Kobach’s stance on immigration enforcement stems from his work in the U.S. Justice Department, which in 2002 issued an opinion that gave local police the inherent authority to enforce immigration law.

Kobach said Snow’s ruling was inconsistent with legal precedent, including last year’s Supreme Court decision that struck down much of SB 1070.

“There are a number of elements of the injunction that are really dramatic and go way beyond what the law allows,” Kobach said. “This injunction suggests that holding a person for a few extra minutes while they (local police) make that phone call (to federal agencies) is prohibited.”

The ruling is sound in its stance against targeting motorists and passengers because of their race, Kobach said, but Snow’s view of the inherent powers of local police is wrong. [yea, some how Judge Snow doesn't realize that if you have a gun and a badge you can do anything you want and you are above the Constitution!!!! Well at least that's how Sheriff Joe thinks.]

“At that point, the judge starts making mistakes. The judge has written his opinion in a way that doesn’t respect the inherent authority of local law enforcement,” Kobach said. “This opinion could potentially cripple state and federal cooperation on enforcement of immigration law.” [And we certainly wouldn't want every cop in America to think he had to obey the law. Hey any cop knows when you have a gun and a badge you are above the law. As Tempe Police Sergeant Chuck Schoville said on the Tempe government propaganda TV channel Tempe StreetBeat - “You know why you say I’m right? Because I’ve got a gun and a badge. I’m always right.” ]

Arpaio has promised to adhere to the ruling, though he disagrees with it, and pulling the members of the human-smuggling unit off Maricopa County highways was part of that plan, he said. [Give Sheriff Joe 30 days and he will be telling the media he ain't going to let some stinking judge tell him how to do his job. Hey, he's got a gun and a badge and will do what he feels like]

The 16 deputies in that unit, along with six assigned to investigate work-site violations, will all continue to investigate and follow up on suspects charged with violating Arizona law, Arpaio said.

“As sheriff, I uphold the law. The court’s order is now clear: we will no longer detain persons believed to be in the country without authorization whom we cannot arrest on state charges. I have already so instructed my deputies,” Arpaio said in a statement.

Snow’s ruling can be read as another step in the ongoing definition of state and federal roles when it comes to immigration enforcement, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh professor and national expert on racial profiling.

Arpaio and Arizona both rose to the national forefront of the immigration-enforcement movement, he said, and the Supreme Court ruling on SB 1070 and the District Court ruling on the sheriff’s enforcement tactics have helped paint a complete picture for observers nationwide.

“To the extent that people said, ‘Hey, they did it in Arizona, and it’s working there,’ they may also now say, ‘A federal court has said, This is wrong, it’s unconstitutional and it’s going to stop,’ ” Harris said. “In the formal sense, the ruling doesn’t reach beyond Arizona, but it will have a wide ripple effect across the country because Arizona was the first state to try this type of enforcement.”

Arpaio’s attorneys have vowed to appeal Snow’s order, and Lyle Mann, executive director of the Arizona police standards board, said it will take an Appeals Court ruling to set the kind of precedent that could require Arizona officials to offer police new training.

Kobach anticipates an appeal against Snow’s ruling. “The ruling is legally weak,” he said. “The final word on this particular case is still coming.”

Some IED incidents I was involved in????

Sure nobody was hurt and no property was damaged but I suspect the police officers at the Homeland Security wouldn't want to let that get into their way of bragging that they are heroes who saved the country and the world from phoney baloney alleged terrorists like me.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

His prank, if we can believe what the police said is putting some dry ice in a pop bottle and letting the bottle pop when the dry ice turned to gas and forced the top off of the pop bottle.

Back in the old days when 16 ounce pop bottles were made out of glass I had bought a 16 ounce bottle of Coke on my trip to the grocery store.

When I got home I unloaded my groceries and took them inside, but I forgot about the unopened 16 ounce bottle of soda pop and left it on the roof of my VW.

I heard a small explosion or pop while I was inside my house, but I didn't think anything of it.

It wasn't until later that I went outside and saw that the sun had heated up my pop bottle causing it to explode.

I thought I was lucky, because if I had been out side when the bottle of Coke had exploded I might have been injured by flying glass.

I cleaned up the glass and didn't think anything about it.

Of course I am lucky it happened 20 years ago and not now.

If it had happened now, I probably would be arrested for having an illegal explosive device which would probably get me 20 years in prison. Yea, don't tell the goons at Homeland Security that a 16 ounce bottle of Coke is not an IED because that might get in their way of making themselves look like heroes by arresting me for being a terrorist who is endangering the whole American way of life.

I probably would also be charged with a terrorist bombing attack and attempted murder of everybody who lived on my street.

Of course don't try to use and logic and reason and tell the goons at Homeland Security that this wasn't a bombing attack nor was it was an attempted mass murder. I just forgot to bring my Coke inside and it blew up in the hot Arizona sun.

Of course they could care less about the facts if it gets in the way of arresting me and pretending that they saved America from another terrorist attack and that they are heroes for arresting some smuck who left his Coke in the Arizona sun.

Here is another incident that happened years ago and involved IED or Improvised Explosive Devices as the cops and Homeland like to call them. I guess us normal people don't call them IEDs or improvised explosive devices like the cops do, but bottles of soda pop.

Again I suspect that if the goons at Homeland Security had been around when this had happened I would also h ave been arrested and put in prison for many years over this incident which involved a bottle of soda pop.

I was at work and me and a co-worker were walking to Circle K to get some junk food.

My friend had a two liter bottle of soda pop and for some reason he tossed it up into the air.

When the bottle hit the ground it burst open and took off like a rocket flying thru the air. It was pretty cool. I suspect all the carbon dioxide gas it the soda pop provided the energy.

And we were both lucky that the 2 liter bottle of pop didn't hit either of us. It could have caused some serious damage.

Again we didn't think anything of the incident, other then that the pop bottle looked pretty cool when it took off like a rocket.

We told our other co-workers about the incident when we got back from our junk food run to Circle K.

Of course if that had happened today we both probably would have been arrested and charged with possession of explosive devices, IEDs or improvised explosives devices as the goons at Homeland Security love to call them.

Of course that sounds so much more dangerous then calling the bottles of soda pop.

And of course the goons from Homeland Security would probably be laughed out of court if they tried to tell the judge they were arresting us for possession of a soda pop bottle. So that probably why they love to say IEDs instead of 2 liter bottles of soda pop.

Of course my friend, who thru the bottle of soda pop would have been arrested for attempted murder. Attempted murder of me.

And since I was there I probably would have also been arrested on a charge of being an accessory to attempted murder. Yea, the attempted murder of myself. How silly!!!!

But it's not silly to the cops who would be using this bogus incident in an attempt to make themselves look like heroes that saved the world from a phoney baloney terrorists like me and my friend.

Judge Snow's Decision Damns Not Just Arpaio, but All of Maricopa County

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Judge Snow's Decision Damns Not Just Arpaio, but All of Maricopa County

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, May 30 2013

Shortly after the release of U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow's 142-page ruling in the 5 1/2-year-long civil rights lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio, members of the Hispanic and activist communities gathered at Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox's El Portal restaurant for an impromptu press conference.

Essentially, Snow found that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under Joe Arpaio had engaged for years in a pattern and practice of discriminatory policing aimed at Latinos.

He issued a broad injunctive order forbidding the use of "race or Latino ancestry" by the MCSO for law enforcement functions, including stopping vehicles, detaining those vehicles' occupants, and investigating them for violations of federal immigration law, in addition to state laws such as the human-smuggling and employer-sanctions laws.

Snow's decision was a long time coming. The original lawsuit was filed in late 2007 and finally went to trial before Snow last summer. In that time, Arpaio twice was re-elected, using Hispanic-hunting sweeps and employer raids to bolster his popularity with a majority of Maricopa County's electorate.

Several of the community leaders attending the El Portal press conference called on Arpaio to resign and praised Snow's detailed and unambiguous analysis of the evidence presented at trial and of the testimonies of Arpaio, his henchmen, and his deputies.

Others expressed the desire for Snow to appoint a monitor over the MCSO to ensure that Arpaio's office complies. This would be a smart move, considering that the MCSO was found to have destroyed evidence in the case and that the MCSO already violated a previous injunctive order from Snow.

The general mood at Wilcox's restaurant was one of vindication. After all, everyone present was intimately familiar with Arpaio's harassment and terrorizing of Maricopa County's Latino community.

Not that Arpaio has ever kept secret the bigoted nature of his law enforcement priorities. Snow often uses Arpaio's own words and the language in his agency's press releases to illustrate the MCSO's malicious intent.

Of all the speakers, veteran criminal attorney and civil rights activists Antonio Bustamante made the most salient point.

"The majority of people in Maricopa County allowed this to happen," he told the news media. "We have that kind of majority, that kind of community. That is the greatest outrage. Because that is to whom Arpaio was playing. That was his audience."

In fact, it is safe to say that Arpaio would not have turned the MCSO into an immigration-enforcement agency without the approval of the county's electorate.

To be sure, Arpaio's corruption and brutality precedes the wave of post-9/11 nativism that engulfed this state. But Arpaio's embrace of bigotry as a guiding principle of law enforcement did not create the wave. He just rode it.

In 2005, when his deputies arrested nativist wacko Patrick Haab for holding seven Mexicans at gunpoint at a Valley rest stop, Arpaio decried Haab as a vigilante.

"You don't go around pulling guns on people," Arpaio said of Haab at the time. "Being illegal is not a serious crime. You can't go to jail for being an illegal alien . . . You can only be deported."

Arpaio was behind the curve. The Minuteman Project was ongoing at the border, already drawing extremists and opportunists such as neo-Nazi and eventual baby-killer J.T. Ready and minutewoman and future murderess Shawna Forde, among others.

Up 'til that point, Arpaio's shtick had been cruelty toward the incarcerated. Even though more than 70 percent of those in his jails were pre-trial detainees, the idea of punishment before trial was popular with the electorate, even when it involved guards choking people to death in restraint chairs or denying a diabetic her medication until she slipped into a coma and died.

Keeping his vast incarceration complex a harsh and occasionally fatal one guaranteed Arpaio a high approval rating. On the Haab incident, however, he faced backlash from angry whites, while a relative newcomer, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas (later to be disbarred and disgraced), earned cheers for refusing to charge Haab.

A cunning and adept politician, Arpaio took note and began to act accordingly. The MCSO created a Human Smuggling Unit in 2006 and began to take advantage of Thomas' interpretation of a new state anti-human-smuggling statute, in which Thomas asserted that the average migrant could be prosecuted for helping to smuggle himself or herself into the country.

"I'm going to catch as many [illegal immigrants] as I can and throw them in my jail," Arpaio told the Associated Press in 2006 while announcing a new 250-member anti-immigration posse. "And the jails are not that nice."

And what about the efforts of pro-immigration advocates and civil libertarians to stop him in court?

"I get sued when I go to the toilet," he harrumphed. "If they think I'm going to slow down because of these threats, I've got news for them — I'm not going to slow down. I'll do more of it."

It was just this sort of bluster that Joe's fans loved. And, interestingly, it was just the sort of bluster absent on Friday when Snow's ruling was published.

In the recent past, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a letter finding that the MCSO engages in discriminatory policing or when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement jerked its grant of immigration authority to Arpaio's gendarmes under the so-called 287(g) program, Arpaio used such incidents as an opportunity for a chest-thumping news conference, a media stunt, or both.

This time, the MCSO's reply came from Arpaio attorney Tim Casey, promising an appeal and offering the conflicting assertions that the MCSO does not engage in racial profiling and that whatever the MCSO did was ICE's fault because it was ICE that trained the MCSO on immigration to begin with.

That last bit from Casey ignored ICE's removing the MCSO's 287(g) field authority in 2009, in large part because the Sheriff's Office was running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution with its large-scale anti-immigrant sweeps.

Arpaio's office knew it was going to lose its 287(g) authority before it actually was taken way. So, as Snow recounts in his ruling, Deputy Chief Brian Sands asked Human Smuggling Unit Sergeant Brett Palmer to "conduct legal research into whether the MCSO had authority to enforce immigration law absent the authorization of the Department of Homeland Security."

Palmer is not a lawyer, and if you've ever seen him interviewed, you might assume that Walmart wasn't hiring security guards the day he applied to be a deputy sheriff.

Still, after an Internet search, Palmer reported back to Sands that local cops do have authority "to investigate and arrest violators of federal immigration statutes," without the knowledge of the feds. He even cited a federal law to this effect.

There was one big problem, however: The law didn't exist. This didn't stop Arpaio from citing it during an interview with right-wing TV pundit Glenn Beck not long after his losing 287(g) field authority.

Palmer, his colleagues, Arpaio, and a large portion of the public also were under the delusion that all undocumented persons were guilty of a federal criminal offense.

Snow disabuses them of this misconception, in part, by quoting from the U.S. Supreme Court's Senate Bill 1070 ruling in Arizona vs. United States.

"As a general rule," the Supreme Court wrote, "it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. If the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent."

Casey's contention that it was ICE that trained the MCSO to racially profile has an element of truth to it. Deputies testified that ICE taught them that race could be used as a factor, if not the sole factor, in detaining people and inquiring into their immigration status.

But Snow finds that this belief is a misinterpretation of a Supreme Court decision, one rejected by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that "in locations where a significant portion of the legal resident population is of Hispanic ancestry, Hispanic descent was not a permissible factor to consider, either alone or in conjunction with other factors, in forming reasonable suspicion justifying the detention of a suspect based on his or her unauthorized presence."

No doubt, the 287(g) program, dusted off and proliferated by the administration of President George W. Bush as part of the response to the 9/11 attacks, was fatally flawed.

Nevertheless, when then-Governor Janet Napolitano and the Bush administration conspired in 2007 to bring the 287(g) program to Arizona and give Napolitano's political pal Arpaio the largest 287(g) force in the nation, they were handing a dangerous new law enforcement tool to a bad actor engaged in persistent violations of civil rights.

Napolitano and the Bush administration also were introducing 287(g) to Arizona at a time when anti-Mexican animus was reaching a fever pitch. That a power-mad egomaniac like Arpaio would go nuclear with his new toy was predictable.

But the complicity of ICE and Napolitano (currently Homeland Defense secretary) does not alleviate any of the MCSO's guilt or the guilt of the majority of a public that applauded Arpaio's every racist deed and action.

The MCSO simply assumed it did not engage in racial profiling, and as long as it had a legitimate reason to stop a vehicle or person, MCSO satraps figured they were off the hook.

But Snow observes that several deputies testified that they could develop probable cause to pull over any vehicle after just following it for a couple of minutes.

With this in mind, the MCSO's poorly defined "zero tolerance" policy became a license to racially profile, since the MCSO made it clear before, during, and after its sweeps that the purpose of these "crime-suppression operations" was the arrest of as many illegal immigrants as possible.

The court found credible expert testimony that Latinos were far more likely to be stopped, detained, and arrested during the sweeps, in some cases 54 percent more likely.

This was backed up by a study of MCSO records — at least those the MCSO did not destroy — and by anecdotal evidence as well, such as one Hispanic driver whose ID was checked while that of his non-Hispanic wife was never asked for, an unusual occurrence considering that MCSO deputies were known for checking the ID of all Latinos in a vehicle.

Perhaps the most egregious example comes from the arrest of the lead plaintiff in the case, Manuel de Jesus Ortega-Melendres, who, in 2007, was a passenger in a vehicle driven by an Anglo.

The deputy who pulled over the car was ordered by the Human Smuggling Unit to follow it and develop probable cause to stop it. This after Melendres, a day laborer, got into the driver's truck. (Note: Another bit of Archie Bunker-like bigotry by the MCSO was that it equated day laborers with illegal immigrants, something Snow remarks upon.)

The driver was pulled over for speeding and got off with a warning. Though Melendres was authorized to be in the country, and had the proof on him, the MCSO turned him over to ICE nonetheless. ICE eventually cut him loose after examining his documents.

I and other witnesses to Arpaio's sweeps have seen human suffering and fear on a grand scale: crying children separated from their mothers, Latinos afraid to take to the roads, pedestrians stopped and forced to identify themselves, Hispanic kids menaced by black and gold MCSO cars, and deputies patrolling the streets in ski masks.

There were many in the county who fought back — an army of volunteers led by Phoenix Copwatch dogged MCSO vehicles during the sweeeps. Human rights activist Lydia Guzman of Respect/Respeto helped lawyers with first-person accounts of profiling she culled from those who contacted her.

Attorneys from the ACLU of Arizona, like Annie Lai and Dan Pochoda, spent countless hours researching and investigating the sweeps. Pochoda was even wrongly arrested during one of the MCSO's first large-scale actions, at Pruitt's Furniture in Phoenix.

Activists such as Sal Reza and Carlos Garcia organized the community and documented the racism overwhelming us all. Many, including Reza, were arrested in acts of civil disobedience, and Reza also was targeted by the MCSO and wrongfully arrested in retaliation.

There were the plaintiffs like Melendres, brave enough to come forward and submit themselves to scrutiny, and the many lawyers who worked on the lawsuit, including those who argued for the plaintiffs in front of Snow, such as Cecillia Wang of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project and Stanley Young of the firm Covington & Burling LLP.

When this era of American history is written, future generations will look at Arizona as the repository of the sort of ugliness the Deep South was during the civil rights struggle.

They'll look at the photos and videos of the moms in handcuffs, the lines of arrestees, a self-inflated sheriff, high on his own authority, and they'll wonder, "What did you do to stop it?"

And if you don't have an answer, well, that is your own unique form of punishment.

Not that you're alone in Maricopa County.

Will Arpaio finally become a sheriff?

Will Arpaio finally become a sheriff?

Joe Arpaio has never been a sheriff, but he has played one on TV.

His five terms in office represent the longest running drama/sit-com/soap opera/cartoon in Arizona history.

From the moment he was elected for the first time in 1992 Arpaio scripted a role for himself that was much more colorful, much more controversial and much more filmable than that of an actual sheriff. Since then he has starred in his own movie, a tragicomic cowboy fantasy that those of us in the media willing put on video and that was transformed by audiences throughout the world into a personal and political blockbuster for Arpaio.

He declared himself the “toughest sheriff in America” and for the past 20 years much of America (and a majority of voters in Maricopa County) actually took that claim seriously.

But things have changed.

Even though the recall effort against him will not end up forcing an election it has managed to force an element of the real world into the Arpaio fairy tale.

And the storyline is straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Perhaps, finally, the Arpaio story will morph into a reality show.

I was here in 1993 when the newly elected sheriff announced that he wanted to “surround the county” with roadblocks so that his deputies could check every vehicle for drugs.

The county attorney at the time, Rick Romley, gently reminded the sheriff of a little thing called the U.S. Constitution, which conflicted with that particular episode of the Joe Arpaio show.

So he scripted a new story line.

Arpaio became an instant folk hero by opening Tent City and forcing inmates to wear pink underwear and black- and white-striped uniforms.

His publicity stunts not only attracted world-wide attention and thrilled local voters, but generated more interest than local news reports about inmates who died in the jail of abusive treatment.

Lawsuits filed against his office didn’t get nearly the attention than, say, the introduction of chain gangs.

Or the purchase of an armored vehicle.

When Arpaio joined the anti-immigrant crusade of disbarred former county attorney Andrew Thomas the sheriff’s star temporarily shone even brighter.

A few years ago then-Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon urged a gathering of the national press to investigate the sheriff immigration sweeps.

“Come to Phoenix and stop this madness,” Gordon said. “Let’s turn the eyes of the nation on this.”

Arpaio scoffed.

“He doesn’t have to call (on the media), because they’re here every day,” the sheriff said. “I’ve been on 3,000 national shows as sheriff.”

He got tremendous exposure for his Tea Party-instigated investigation into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate at a time there were reports of hundreds of sexual-abuse cases involving children that were not properly handled by his department.

He announced (then decided against it) that he would parade a chain-gang of DUI offenders who were not legal citizens outside Chase Field during Major League Baseball’s all-star weekend.

And yet he seemed puzzled by those who called his antics and policies racist.

On the night of his last re-election Arpaio told me, “My job hasn’t changed at all. I still have the same policies. Illegal immigration was a big change five years ago. I didn’t know it would be that controversial. I would like to get together with the Latino community, but they scream at ya.”

It wasn’t the screaming that finally got to him, however.

It was the quiet, reasoned decision of U.S. District Judge Murray Snow, who issued a 142-page ruling that found Arpaio’s office has engaged in racial profiling.

Because of this the sheriff’s deputies are banned from using race as a factor in detaining people for suspected immigration violations and from arresting suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes.

The sheriff said he will appeal the judge’s decision.

That’s too bad.

While he awaits another ruling, however, Arpaio could occupy his time by overseeing the operation of the county jails, the enforcement of warrants, the protection of the courts and the policing of unincorporated areas in the county.

In other words, the sheriff might temporarily give up his acting career in order to become a sheriff.

AZ Governor Jan Brewer drug war hypocrite!!!!!!

What a lying hypocrite. At the same time Jan Brewer is trying to send people who commit the victimless crime of using medical marijuana to prison she pretends she is happy because Mexico released another victimless drug war criminal.

Source

Gov. Jan Brewer 'thrilled' by mother's release from Mexico jail

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 31, 2013 12:53 PM

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said today she is “thrilled” Yanira Maldonado, the Goodyear mother who was detained for nine days in a Mexico jail on suspicion of marijuana smuggling, has been released and is on her way home.

During a news conference at the state capitol, the governor said she has tried to reach Maldonado’s family but the line has been busy.

“What’s most important this morning is that Yanira is back in Arizona, home safely with her family and her friends who love her,” Brewer said. “As Americans, we all know that our precious constitutional rights don’t extend beyond our nation’s border. It’s this kind of case that once again illustrates how blessed we are in this country. [Of course Jan Brewer seems to forget she is trying to flush both the Arizona Constitution and the US Constitution down the toilet with her frivolous lawsuits trying to nullify Arizona's medical law, which is Prop 203!!!]

“Most of all, I’m so happy for the family, that they can now put this chapter of their life behind us,” she said.

Brewer is scheduled to make a previously scheduled appearance today with Sonora Governor Guillermo Padrés Elías at the 2013 AMC Manufacturer of the Year Summit and Awards Luncheon in downtown Phoenix. Brewer said she expects to speak with Padrés Elías about the Maldonado case.

Asked by The Arizona Republic if she is concerned how the Maldonado case might affect tourism between Arizona and Sonora, Brewer said it’s important Arizonans exercise caution while traveling abroad.

Mexico is Arizona’s largest trade partner, with visitors from Mexico spending an average of $7.3 million a day in Arizona stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, according to recent figures from the Arizona-Mexico Commission.

During Maldonado’s ordeal, Brewer said her staff was in contact with Mexican and American authorities. Brewer said she does not know if Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had a role in Maldonado’s release.

“I tried to reach out to her family this morning … the phone is really busy and so we either can’t get through or I can’t leave a message,” the governor said.

Maldonado, 42, was in Mexico with her husband for a funeral and was detained after soldiers found 12 pounds of marijuana taped under her seat on a bus she was taking back to the United States. She was detained on drug charges last week and was released just before midnight Thursday, after a judge reviewed security footage that showed her boarding the bus carrying only blankets, bottles of water and her purse.

Maldonado has said she believes drug smugglers were responsible for hiding the marijuana found under her bus seat and she just happened to be the unlucky passenger who sat there.

Following her Friday morning news conference, Brewer told The Republic she could not assess how Mexican authorities handled Maldonado’s case.

“It’s always a difficult thing to say because you’re not down there, and you get all your information from staff and third hand, or from the news,” Brewer said. “My heart was breaking for her and her family. Today, I think we’re just all rejoicing that it worked out great for them. Unfortunately, she had to spend nine days down there, but she’s home safely now and she can go on with her family and her life.”

Previous Articles about Sheriff Joe

And here are even some more articles on Sheriff Joe and this thugs in Phoenix, Arizona and Maricopa County, Arizona.