Freelance journalist Nick Martin has an update on Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Deputy Adam Stoddard, who last October was caught on video swiping a file in open court from defense attorney defense attorney Joanne Cuccia.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe held a hearing on the matter, and on Tuesday ordered Stoddard to hold a press conference to apologize. It’s a weak and odd way of admonishing Stoddard for such a brazen trespass on attorney-client privilege (not to mention Stoddard’s arguable violation of a number of other laws, rights, and rules of procedure).
You really have to watch the video. The cop just walks up, starts snooping through her notes, calls over another deputy, pulls stuff out of her folder, hands it to another cop, and he walks out with it.
And, he will most likely get away with it. Time to break out the foam USA fingers. You can’t get justice like that in a Banana Republic! Oh, wait.
dr. bloor
Safe to assume a civil trial will follow. Deputy Stoddard’s going to cost the good citizens of Maricopa County a few bucks before the dust settles.
Kennedy
*sigh* God bless this redneck wingnut haven I call home. I bet stealing the file was ruled legal because it may/may not have lead to arresting and detaining some brown people.
I would like to state for the record, however, that this is excellent news for John McCain.
Josh Huaco
“Marikafka County” made me laugh.
Kryptik
But don’t you see, how else can the force keep us safe from those Dangerous Aliens, with their foreign language and three eyes and tentacles.
….what?
….not those kinds of aliens?…I thought a fence was kind of weak protection against space people. Huh.
MikeJ
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/18/maricopa-deputy-stea.html
Boing Boing is a far, far more reputable outlet than reason.
danimal
This is where having an actual conservative party that cherishes liberty could be really useful. Instead, the GOP will grandstand against anyone that complains, saying they are “anti-cop, pro-crime soshulist commies.” The rights of defendants are for wimps.
Feh.
Chad N Freude
I read the Heat City blog articles here, here, and here. I haven’t seen anything quite like this in years. I think it’s what we used to call … Journalism.
arguingwithsignposts
@MikeJ:
Which is why you don’t see them begging for money.
freelancer
I saw this two weeks ago when Radley did a column on it. I’m never visiting Central AZ.
Brian J
This is the first I’m hearing of this, so perhaps there’s more to it than I realize, but if not, I think this speaks to a larger trend of some cops–repeat, some cops–believing that they can do whatever the hell they want.
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
I was surprised that the attorney for the sheriff’s office could say with a straight face that he’d never heard of someone being held in contempt of court. Did he graduate from Lionel Hutz’s law school?
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry, I just realized I forgot to link to the post quoting the lawyer:
Arpaio to judge: Fat chance of an apology
Eric U.
From the sheriff’s response, it seems like the judge needs to order the guy to jail just to show that he can do it.
Corner Stone
Slightly OT –
Was talking to my dad today who lives in a largely retirement community near Tucson, AZ about 20 miles North of Nogales, MX.
He was telling me that everyone there goes to MX for dental work. All of them go to the border, park and walk to the dentist in MX, who is apparently an American trained at UCLA.
Kind of mind blowing, at least to me. They all rave about the work, service, quality, care, etc.
cmorenc
@danimal
That’s because most GOPers who ardently support law n’order lock-em-up hell with their pantywaist “rights” for criminal defendants see such a galactic-size divide between themselves and the class of scummy low-life people who become criminal defendants. They see themselves as the sort of virtuously worthy citizens who don’t commit criminal acts thereby are apart and immune from becoming vulnerable to prosecution by the criminal system themselves, and see their own connection to it only as possibly in need of redress as victims of bona fide criminals. They simply cannot fathom that it is THEY who might some day turn out to need enforceable Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights against a vindictive, lazy, erroneous, or politically motivated prosecution. Or to the extent they do dimly see some possible need for such, they harbor an untenable distinction: rights are for innocent people like themselves, not for guilty people. They fail to appreciate that the part in “Alice in Wonderland” where the Queen barks: “first the sentence, then the trial”, isn’t simply a funny cartoonish fairy tale, but was intended as wicked hyperbolic satire on some of the worst unjust foibles of the English criminal system.
Warren Terra
I realize that the judge knows, possibly likes, and relies on these deputies every single day, but her bland response to the incident in the video, and to the deputy’s absurd response when she asks him what he did, is pretty incredible. Frankly, after seeing the video, and especially seeing how she seems uninterested by the incredible event, I’d think she’d have to throw the book at the deputy just to preserve her own reputation.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Eric U.:
__
And who runs the jail in Marikafka (Brilliant!) County?
Comrade Scrutinizer
Huh? How’d that happen?
Sigh. Edit button plz?
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: @Eric U., @Mnemosyne: Sheriff Joe runs his department like a cross between Tony Soprano and The Joker. If the judge does order jail time, there won’t be enough popcorn on the planet.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Warren Terra: There’s a different judge handling the case—not the one in the video.
neff
Yeah, between Arpaio and his buddy the local DA who railroaded some teenage boy onto the sex offender register for sharing a Playboy with his friends, I’m never setting foot in Arizona if I can help it.
Eric U.
the problem I see with the Judge’s order is that it assumes that the deputy is a reasonable person that understands that he can be sent to jail for contempt. Obviously, the law enforcement in that area is so out of control that they don’t see the possibility that they might also be subject to the law. The order should have been to sent him to jail, with the provision that the jailing may be waived if there is a public apology made.
The problem with this whole thing is that they may have severely hurt the case against a fairly reprehensible person. What is wrong with these people?
Warren Terra
Oh, and I just got to the last thirty seconds of the video, in which the prosecutor tries the no harm, no foul approach:
IANAL, but isn’t she also an Officer Of The Court, with attendant duties, and not just another arm of law enforcement? Isn’t the prosecutor’s pimping for the flagrantly transgressing deputy also disreputable?
Chad N Freude
@cmorenc:
Cartoonish? Satire? They believe it’s in the Constitution.
Chad N Freude
@neff:
I hadn’t heard about that. Got a link?
Warren Terra
Oh, and the best paragraph in the Reason post, and the reason for it’s “Marikafka” title, is this:
rs
I’m not an attorney, but it seems to me that such a blatant violation of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights would be grounds for the justice department to investigate, given the unwillingness of the local courts to uphold the Constitution.
parksideq
I’m going to say this as eloquently as I can muster after watching that vid:
Fuck the po-lice. Of Maricopa County, anyways.
Punchy
@Mnemosyne: wow. just fuckin WOW.
par4
I’m sure Holder will look right into it,just like Gov.Siegelman’s case.
Chad N Freude
@Warren Terra: Read the Heat City articles. Links are at Chad N Freude.
rs
@par4: point taken
Comrade Scrutinizer
@rs: The Justice Department already has ongoing investigations of the Sheriff’s Department and Arpaio.
neff
@Chad N Freude: I found out about it from this page which lists ol’ Andy as Arpaio’s “sidekick”…
Chad N Freude
@neff: Thanks. Law and ordure.
Keith
And the worst part is, both the judge and the lawyer involved have to suspect that at some point Arpaio’s foot soldiers will arrive in their offices to arrest folks for God-knows-what.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Keith: For 113 felonies and 18 misdemeanors, say? Followed by another arrest for 93 felonies and 7 misdemeanors when the first charges are dismissed? Whatever else about Arpaio, when he goes in, he goes all in.
Why in the name of Zod do those people keep re-electing him?
arguingwithsignposts
Why does this surprise anyone. The Dead Kennedys predicted it years ago. Also, a 10-year-old (10-year-old!) girl was tasered last week. And yet waterboarding is okay! Welcome to your new overlords!
Anne Laurie
Isn’t Arpaio the ‘make th’ convicts wear pink’ grandstander? Aren’t the few remaining sane people in his fiefdom already trying to get him called to account on a long history of crap like this and worse?
kuvasz
people ought to note that the prosecutors saw the entire episode and as “officers of the court” had an obligation to inform the judge of the uniformed officer’s actions.
so while that cop abused the fourth amendment of the defendent over illegal searches and seizures, the prosecutors who remained silent about the cop’s actions ought to be reprimanded as well.
my wife is a tenured law professor and i had her watch the video and she could not believe that the prosecuting attorney just sat there and did nothing.
demimondian
@Anne Laurie: Yup, that’s the one.
And as to why — well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to fear.
AMIRITE?
Comrade Scrutinizer
@arguingwithsignposts: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Around here, Sheriff Brown’s deputies were well known for having friendly discussions in the jail elevator with too-curious reporters back to the late 1930’s.
Will
For anyone interested in learning more about Arpaio, this New Yorker profile is a must-read:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/20/090720fa_fact_finnegan
Jager
Sheriff Joe gets reelected because just before the election he goes out to all the retirement villages and scares the livin’ shit out old people. A few years ago he sent a swat team out to serve a civil warrant, ended up burning down a house with a dog in it because his deputies refused to believe the guy wasn’t home so they fired tear gas into the house. For back-up they had Joe’s tank come out and while it was parked on the street the brakes failed and it crushed a Toyota. Arpaio has cost the county millions and millions of dollar in settlements and lawsuits. The crime rate goes up and of course the “tough and rough” Arpaio uses that as an excuse to ‘crack down even more. BTW he has an upscale jail that VIPs do their time. Maricopa County is nazi germany and everybody is a jew! But it is good news for John McCaine as usual!
Roger Moore
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Because he’s doing what they want and has a good sense of PR. The average voter isn’t afraid of this kind of outrageous behavior because they never expect to attract the attention of the law outside of the occasional traffic ticket. So they don’t care about niceties of procedure and respect for suspects’ rights. Instead, they see his cheap theatrics- and occasional gross illegality- as proof that he’s tough on crime.
Morbo
@arguingwithsignposts: Tasered because she refused to take a shower, no less. What the fuck? Seriosuly, abbreviation just doesn’t cut it for that.
Desert Rat
@dr. bloor:
Sadly, as a resident of Maricopa County, you could pave the streets with gold with all the money Arpaio has cost the taxpayers in lawsuits over the last quarter-centry.
And the assclown voters who live in this county keep putting him back into office with large majorities.
Desert Rat
@Anne Laurie:
I live in the Southwest suburbs of Phoenix. I bought a house out here in 2002. The previous owner was a Republican. In the Spring of 2004, I had one of the more illuminating conversations I ever had. A Republican canvasser (probably a precinct chair) knocked on the door, thinking I was the previous owner. I informed her I wasn’t, but out of curiosity asked what or who she was canvassing for. It was one of Arpaio’s former deputies, who ran as a Republican primary candidate against him in 2004 (he ran against him a second time last year as a Democrat, but lost both times).
We talked about Arpaio, and even though I doubt I would have agreed on much with this gray-haired Republican lady, we had at least enough common ground to realize how much Arpaio was costing the County in tax dollars to defend and pay all his lawsuits, and what harm he was doing to prisoners.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that people who pay close attention to what he is actually doing despise him. Civil libertarians like myself because of the way he treats the inmates. Fiscal conservatives because of the way that treatment leads to lawsuits, many of which he has lost.
But he’s great at PR, He’s never met a TV camera he wouldn’t fellate, and his grandstanding is popular with the hoi polloi.
Sadly, there are a lot more people who like the myth of Joe Arpaio, instead of the hideous reality.
mooring packs
Arpaio is quoted as saying: “All these people that come over, they could come with disease. There’s no control, no health checks or anything. They check fruits and vegetables, how come they don’t check people? No one talks about that! They’re all dirty. I sent out 200 inmates into the desert, they picked up 18 tons of garbage that they bring in—the baby diapers and all that. Where’s everybody who wants to preserve the desert?”
Linkmeister
Speaking of Law n’ Order, check out the chart Kevin Drum had at Mother Jones earlier today: it tracks tuition fees & corrections expenses. It’s almost eerie; as corrections costs go up, so do fees for students at California’s formerly top-ranked schools of higher ed.
Californians seem to want to pay as much to lock people up as to educate other people.
(Yeah, yeah, causation /= correlation and all that, but still)
Yutsano
@Linkmeister: It couldn’t have anything to do with California’s budgeting system being a fucking mess could it? Could it?
Linkmeister
Of course it does. That’s not the point. The point is that Californians seem to have their priorities skewed.
I was born there, back when their Universities were the envy of the world. Now there are kids rioting at UCLA because their tuition is jumping $2,500 from this year to next.
Carlyle Moulton
The USA, a banana republic with nuclear weapons.
Yutsano
@Linkmeister: They should be rioting, then they should be screaming all the way to Sacramento and camping out on Ahnold’s yard until he pulls his head out of his ass and figures out what the fuck made California such a economic powerhouse in the first place. Here’s a hint: it wasn’t the penal system.
cmorenc
I’m a a retired lawyer who’s practiced in various criminal and civil courts, and after WATCHING THE VIDEO of this incident, the densely inept response of the female JUDGE within whose plain direct sight the deputy walked up and began rifling through defense attorney Cuccia’s legal case file (on the defense table directly behind Cuccia’s back)…is just as repulsively astonishing as the deputy’s own actions. The courtroom is set up similar to the way many hundreds of courtrooms are set up all across the country, with the Judge sitting behind a raised dias/desk (aka “the bench”) facing out to two tables separated by a narrow aisle, the deputy D.A. at one table, the defense cousel at the other, and NOTHING is ever on the defense cousel table except the defense counsel’s briefcase and/or legal files and papers.
There is NEVER ANY VALID REASON for a courtroom sheriff’s deputy to touch, let alone sift through papers or files on the defense cousel’s table. About the ONLY valid excuse for a deputy to approach that table on his own initiative (except perhaps to briefly pass by e.g.g on his way to the stand as a witness) would be if he had seen a firearm or other imminently dangerous contraband in plain sight, and if so upon arrival at the table he’d immediately communicate to the judge what the problem was that needed to be dealt with, rather than rifle through defense counsel’s papers on his own initiative.
ANY JUDGE WITH A MINIMUM OF COMPETENT control and situational awareness of his or her courtroom would have, within the first five seconds, interrupted the proceedings in front of her on his or her *own* initiative to stop the deputy cold in his tracks with a curt, firm WHAT ARE YOU DOING DEPUTY? inquiry, and not permitted the deputy to do anything further unless and until the deputy stated a compellingly urgent reason for needing to investigate the material on defense cousel’s table. I cannot fathom what possible adequate excuse to convince a competend judge a deputy could come up with for rifling through defense cousel’s legal papers and reading them.
GEEZ, if the Arizona State Bar doesn’t discipline this JUDGE for massively clueless incompetence, I’ve lost total respect for the Arizona Bar, not just the local judicial system and sheriff’s office.
cmorenc
One further thing about the Judge(s) involved that should be distinguished: The female judge (shown in the video) in front of whom the deputy rifled through defense attorney Cuccia’s files, is NOT the same judge as the (male) Judge Gary Donahue, before whom a hearing was held to determine whether Deputy Stoddard ahd violated the attorney-client privilege of Cuccia’s client, and thereby whether he should be held in contempt of court. That hearing before Judge Donahue is of itself an astonishing outrage (can’t decide whether Stoddard violated the privilige without waiving the privilige)…but that’s an entirely SEPARATE outrage that merely compounds the outrageous cluelessness and ineptitude of the original trial court judge in front of whom the actual incident in question unfolded.
Yutsano
Just watched the video. That defense attorney should have thrown an absolute conniption at the fact the deputy was anywhere NEAR her desk much less took a paper. An apology shouldn’t cut it, that’s blatant contempt of court right there. That deputy should be massively explaining himself to the judge and that defendant better be moving for a mistrial at the very least.
Batocchio
The judge not noticing, and then chiding the defense attorney, is hard to take. These guys, and the taser-happy crew, need to get some sort of punishment or this crap will just continue.
cmorenc
@Yutsano
The rifling by the deputy went on for quite an extended time behind the defense attorney’s back (she was standing at a lecturn in front of the defense table addressing the judge at the time), which is why she didn’t realize for some time that there was anything going on the object TO.
THE JUDGE OTOH was looking directly at the defense attorney and the deputy as he was going through defense cousel’s papers. WHY THE HELL WASN’T THE JUDGE STOPPING THE DEPUTY IN HIS TRACKS TO FIND OUT WHAT THE HELL HE THOUGHT HE WAS UP TO RIFLING THROUGH DEFENSE COUSEL’S PAPERS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE JUDGE’S NOSE? That’s the sort of thing any judge having competent awareness and control of their courtroom would have immediately noticed and demanded immediate explaination, without defense counsel needing to raise the matter before the judge. Not that the defense counsel wouldn’t be entitled to make some valid objections and motions regarding what had just happened, but for the Judge herself to not have taken the intitiative under these circumstances is reprehensibly incompetent.
Yutsano
I have zero doubt this defense attorney is now making as many appeals as she can, not only for her client but for the integrity of the Arizona courts. And there is gross incompetence or the sobering fact that the judge simply did NOT object to the deputy’s actions on its face. That possibility to me is even more disturbing, and the state and federal courts better be paying attention to this. This could possibly raise the specter of incompetence to the level that every single decision this judge has made is now suspect, and that’s a Gordian knot that will be rather complicated to untie.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Linkmeister:
—
No. causation ==correlation. It’s the other way around that doesn’t work.
wilfred
After starting an unnecessary war through deception and manipulation, after a long series of abuses against human beings – inlcuding rendition, surveillance and torture – and after conceding Imperial authority to a handful of people did anyone think we would end up with Periclean Athens in our own country?
As above, below. Not enough people cared about what we did elsewhere, they won’t care what happens at home, either.
ET
You know what is most problematic? The fact that it is quite likely that that that deputy jeopardized the prosecutions case and increased the likelihood that if that went to trial and the defendant was found guilty, that the verdict is in jeopardy solely based on his actions.
twiffer
@Morbo: man, i thought DC metro police arresting a kid for eating a french fry was the height of idiocy. this is far worse.
Randy P
Am I the only one who keeps thinking of the evil sheriff in Stephen King’s Desperation?
Scott de B.
“Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon…”
Erik Vanderhoff
Safe to assume a civil trial will follow.
Dude, it’s Maricopa County. It’s safe to assume that that deputy got a hooker paid for by Arpaio’s county credit card.
DMG
The said thing is that this isn’t particularly shocking to people who live here and pay attention. Even less so for people who work in the court system. Joe gets dinged plenty for the stuff people know about (last count was something in the neighborhood of $42 million that he’s cost the County in settlements), but there’s plenty more that nobody ever catches.
mai naem
The Phoenix New Times has done a bunch of reporting on Arpaio going years back. A good part of Arpaio’s votes come from the “those Mexican wetbacks are taking over my city and I am scaaarrredd” folks. Ofcourse these are the same people who live in newer houses built by those “Mexican wetbacks” , get their yardwork done by those “Mexican wetbacks” ,get their houses cleaned by those “Mexican wetbacks”, get their Depends changed by those “Mexican wetbacks” , get their early bird dinner plates and wine glasses washed by those “Mexican wetbacks.” And they aren’t willing to pay a penny extra to hire a different colored person.