Apparently Joe Arpaio was innocent of the charges - after all

[Belk]

Accepting a pardon is not admitting guilt - it is finding a way of escape from an oppressive unhinged left-wing agenda that had finally cornered a Police Chief for daring to enforce immigration laws already passed by congress.

I think I am just stating the obvious here - someone please point out if I have made a mistake.

No mistake. You are not really concerned with the rule of law so you repeat lies about those you disagree with politically. That is not a mistake, it is a deliberate act.

 

[AirPo]

Have not done a lot of research on the topic - but I did see this --

http://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...n-only-way-arpaio-can-find-justice/588392001/

(Almost impossible to find in Google search - but comes up at the top on Yahoo search).



No wonder he was up for a pardon from the President.

Denial is not a defense, it's a coping mechanism.

 

[morningstar2651]

For those of you who are not from Arizona that are defending Arpaio - you really don't know how terrible of a person he was. I've lived in Arizona since 2005 and I've experienced how terrible of a sheriff he was. He wasn't tough on crime or tough on immigration - he flouted the law and abused his power for political gain in his quest for celebrity. Press releases and news crews were an integral part of his "crime suppression raids".

• Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped.
  
• In a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life.
  
• During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. Phoenix New-Times had begun calling it Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.
  • In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement.
  • In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)
• Inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.
  
• He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”
• Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.)
  
• At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the jail, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.
  
• “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”
  
• Arpaio’s approach typically resulted in “the targeting and harassment of Latino drivers rather than the effective enforcement of immigration law,” meaning that it was just racist, without even accomplishing its stated objective. And Latinos who were U.S. citizens also had to live in fear of being suspected by Arpaio’s officers.
  
• Eventually, the federal courts intervened and instructed Arpaio to stop. But he persisted, brazenly flouting the order, leading to the contempt charge for which he has now been pardoned. Instead of listening to the judge, Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife.
  
• A journalistic investigation—one that would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize—revealed that hundreds of reported sex crimes had gone uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office, many of which were child molestation cases. A review of 51 crime reports showed that 43 “had not been worked at all or had minimal follow-up conducted,” even though 90 percent had workable leads. The Arizona Republic found that the office “did not meet basic investigative standards like promptly following up with victims, doing early background checks on suspects, coordinating with other agencies and promptly presenting cases to prosecutors,” and that “the agency lost track of $600,000 to hire child-abuse investigators, and the money was never found.” The MCSO conducted an internal affairs investigation into its mishandling of sex crimes cases, but declined to release the findings, with Arpaio refusing to comment on them. “If there were any victims,” he said, he would apologize to them, while refusing to take any responsibility. But there were victims, and we even know their names.
  
• Arpaio’s MCSO fudged reports to make it appear as if they were clearing more cases than they actually were, with the Justice Department concluding that there was “an increase in violent crime in Maricopa County, and of homicides in particular, during the period of enhanced immigration enforcement.” Clint Bolick, a conservative who is now Associate Justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, released analyses showing that Arpaio was misleading the public about the degree to which his anti-immigration shift had damaged his ability to solve serious crimes.
  
• Arpaio also appeared to spend much of his own time engaging in calculated publicity stunts, such as recruiting an anti-immigrant “posse” including celebrities like Steven Seagal, obtaining a big tank with his name on it, letting Steven Seagal drive said big tank into someone’s house—killing their puppy and bringing on a lawsuit, going on reality television, and deputizing Shaquille O’Neal.
  
• Infamously, after a critical report on him had appeared in the Phoenix New-Times, Arpaio had his deputies stage late-night raids on the homes of the paper’s publishers, arresting them in front of their families.
  
• When the county Board of Supervisors cut Arpaio’s budget, Arpaio and the county attorney conspired to indict board members on dozens of bogus felony charges as an “anti-corruption initiative.” An official who later reviewed the cases against the officials concluded that the “record is littered with behavior so egregious that a reasonable person’s sense of fairness, honesty and integrity would be offended.” The scheme was so transparent that the county attorney ended up getting disbarred over it (and the board members ended up—in a familiar pattern—having to be paid multi-million dollar settlements).
  
• When the wife of the mayor of Mesa criticized Arpaio, he immediately told a deputy: “We gotta raid Mesa again.”
  
• When the mayor of Guadalupe, one of the poorest cities in America, criticized Arpaio for an immigration raid in which he “descended on the town with multiple ‘command centers,’ approximately 100 deputies, and a helicopter,” Arpaio canceled the town’s policing services. When judges ruled against him, he filed racketeering lawsuits against them.
  
• When critical comments were made about Arpaio during the public-comment section of a board of supervisors meetings, audience members who applauded were arrested.
  
• Arpaio would even go after other jurisdictions’ police chiefs, should they dare to cross him.
  
• Settlements over “civil rights violations, conspiracy, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” had cost the county $92 million in court settlements and legal fees. Members of his own department were conceding that MSCO officers had “willfully and intentionally committed criminal acts by attempting to obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses, and destroy evidence.” Arpaio even promoted many of the officers who were known to have been involved in abusive practices.

Current Affairs | Culture & Politics

 

[wing2000]

Agreed - Maricopa resident since 1993.

Any other Sheriff would have been voted out of office long ago....but Arpaio was a shrewd politician...who knew how to exploit people's fears and latch on to the latest right wing talking points. The Trump campaign took a page right out of the Arpaio political playbook.

For those of you who are not from Arizona that are defending Arpaio - you really don't know how terrible of a person he was. I've lived in Arizona since 2005 and I've experienced how terrible of a sheriff he was. He wasn't tough on crime or tough on immigration - he flouted the law and abused his power for political gain in his quest for celebrity. Press releases and news crews were an integral part of his "crime suppression raids".

• Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped.
  
• In a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life.
  
• During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. Phoenix New-Times had begun calling it Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.
  • In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement.
  • In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)
• Inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.
  
• He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”
• Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.)
  
• At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the jail, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.
  
• “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”
  
• Arpaio’s approach typically resulted in “the targeting and harassment of Latino drivers rather than the effective enforcement of immigration law,” meaning that it was just racist, without even accomplishing its stated objective. And Latinos who were U.S. citizens also had to live in fear of being suspected by Arpaio’s officers.
  
• Eventually, the federal courts intervened and instructed Arpaio to stop. But he persisted, brazenly flouting the order, leading to the contempt charge for which he has now been pardoned. Instead of listening to the judge, Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife.
  
• A journalistic investigation—one that would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize—revealed that hundreds of reported sex crimes had gone uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office, many of which were child molestation cases. A review of 51 crime reports showed that 43 “had not been worked at all or had minimal follow-up conducted,” even though 90 percent had workable leads. The Arizona Republic found that the office “did not meet basic investigative standards like promptly following up with victims, doing early background checks on suspects, coordinating with other agencies and promptly presenting cases to prosecutors,” and that “the agency lost track of $600,000 to hire child-abuse investigators, and the money was never found.” The MCSO conducted an internal affairs investigation into its mishandling of sex crimes cases, but declined to release the findings, with Arpaio refusing to comment on them. “If there were any victims,” he said, he would apologize to them, while refusing to take any responsibility. But there were victims, and we even know their names.
  
• Arpaio’s MCSO fudged reports to make it appear as if they were clearing more cases than they actually were, with the Justice Department concluding that there was “an increase in violent crime in Maricopa County, and of homicides in particular, during the period of enhanced immigration enforcement.” Clint Bolick, a conservative who is now Associate Justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, released analyses showing that Arpaio was misleading the public about the degree to which his anti-immigration shift had damaged his ability to solve serious crimes.
  
• Arpaio also appeared to spend much of his own time engaging in calculated publicity stunts, such as recruiting an anti-immigrant “posse” including celebrities like Steven Seagal, obtaining a big tank with his name on it, letting Steven Seagal drive said big tank into someone’s house—killing their puppy and bringing on a lawsuit, going on reality television, and deputizing Shaquille O’Neal.
  
• Infamously, after a critical report on him had appeared in the Phoenix New-Times, Arpaio had his deputies stage late-night raids on the homes of the paper’s publishers, arresting them in front of their families.
  
• When the county Board of Supervisors cut Arpaio’s budget, Arpaio and the county attorney conspired to indict board members on dozens of bogus felony charges as an “anti-corruption initiative.” An official who later reviewed the cases against the officials concluded that the “record is littered with behavior so egregious that a reasonable person’s sense of fairness, honesty and integrity would be offended.” The scheme was so transparent that the county attorney ended up getting disbarred over it (and the board members ended up—in a familiar pattern—having to be paid multi-million dollar settlements).
  
• When the wife of the mayor of Mesa criticized Arpaio, he immediately told a deputy: “We gotta raid Mesa again.”
  
• When the mayor of Guadalupe, one of the poorest cities in America, criticized Arpaio for an immigration raid in which he “descended on the town with multiple ‘command centers,’ approximately 100 deputies, and a helicopter,” Arpaio canceled the town’s policing services. When judges ruled against him, he filed racketeering lawsuits against them.
  
• When critical comments were made about Arpaio during the public-comment section of a board of supervisors meetings, audience members who applauded were arrested.
  
• Arpaio would even go after other jurisdictions’ police chiefs, should they dare to cross him.
  
• Settlements over “civil rights violations, conspiracy, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” had cost the county $92 million in court settlements and legal fees. Members of his own department were conceding that MSCO officers had “willfully and intentionally committed criminal acts by attempting to obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses, and destroy evidence.” Arpaio even promoted many of the officers who were known to have been involved in abusive practices.

 

[lasthero]

For those of you who are not from Arizona that are defending Arpaio - you really don't know how terrible of a person he was. I've lived in Arizona since 2005 and I've experienced how terrible of a sheriff he was. He wasn't tough on crime or tough on immigration - he flouted the law and abused his power for political gain in his quest for celebrity. Press releases and news crews were an integral part of his "crime suppression raids".

• Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped.
  
• In a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life.
  
• During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. Phoenix New-Times had begun calling it Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.
  • In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement.
  • In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)
• Inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.
  
• He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”
• Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.)
  
• At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the jail, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.
  
• “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”
  
• Arpaio’s approach typically resulted in “the targeting and harassment of Latino drivers rather than the effective enforcement of immigration law,” meaning that it was just racist, without even accomplishing its stated objective. And Latinos who were U.S. citizens also had to live in fear of being suspected by Arpaio’s officers.
  
• Eventually, the federal courts intervened and instructed Arpaio to stop. But he persisted, brazenly flouting the order, leading to the contempt charge for which he has now been pardoned. Instead of listening to the judge, Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife.
  
• A journalistic investigation—one that would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize—revealed that hundreds of reported sex crimes had gone uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office, many of which were child molestation cases. A review of 51 crime reports showed that 43 “had not been worked at all or had minimal follow-up conducted,” even though 90 percent had workable leads. The Arizona Republic found that the office “did not meet basic investigative standards like promptly following up with victims, doing early background checks on suspects, coordinating with other agencies and promptly presenting cases to prosecutors,” and that “the agency lost track of $600,000 to hire child-abuse investigators, and the money was never found.” The MCSO conducted an internal affairs investigation into its mishandling of sex crimes cases, but declined to release the findings, with Arpaio refusing to comment on them. “If there were any victims,” he said, he would apologize to them, while refusing to take any responsibility. But there were victims, and we even know their names.
  
• Arpaio’s MCSO fudged reports to make it appear as if they were clearing more cases than they actually were, with the Justice Department concluding that there was “an increase in violent crime in Maricopa County, and of homicides in particular, during the period of enhanced immigration enforcement.” Clint Bolick, a conservative who is now Associate Justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, released analyses showing that Arpaio was misleading the public about the degree to which his anti-immigration shift had damaged his ability to solve serious crimes.
  
• Arpaio also appeared to spend much of his own time engaging in calculated publicity stunts, such as recruiting an anti-immigrant “posse” including celebrities like Steven Seagal, obtaining a big tank with his name on it, letting Steven Seagal drive said big tank into someone’s house—killing their puppy and bringing on a lawsuit, going on reality television, and deputizing Shaquille O’Neal.
  
• Infamously, after a critical report on him had appeared in the Phoenix New-Times, Arpaio had his deputies stage late-night raids on the homes of the paper’s publishers, arresting them in front of their families.
  
• When the county Board of Supervisors cut Arpaio’s budget, Arpaio and the county attorney conspired to indict board members on dozens of bogus felony charges as an “anti-corruption initiative.” An official who later reviewed the cases against the officials concluded that the “record is littered with behavior so egregious that a reasonable person’s sense of fairness, honesty and integrity would be offended.” The scheme was so transparent that the county attorney ended up getting disbarred over it (and the board members ended up—in a familiar pattern—having to be paid multi-million dollar settlements).
  
• When the wife of the mayor of Mesa criticized Arpaio, he immediately told a deputy: “We gotta raid Mesa again.”
  
• When the mayor of Guadalupe, one of the poorest cities in America, criticized Arpaio for an immigration raid in which he “descended on the town with multiple ‘command centers,’ approximately 100 deputies, and a helicopter,” Arpaio canceled the town’s policing services. When judges ruled against him, he filed racketeering lawsuits against them.
  
• When critical comments were made about Arpaio during the public-comment section of a board of supervisors meetings, audience members who applauded were arrested.
  
• Arpaio would even go after other jurisdictions’ police chiefs, should they dare to cross him.
  
• Settlements over “civil rights violations, conspiracy, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” had cost the county $92 million in court settlements and legal fees. Members of his own department were conceding that MSCO officers had “willfully and intentionally committed criminal acts by attempting to obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses, and destroy evidence.” Arpaio even promoted many of the officers who were known to have been involved in abusive practices.

...are you serious? This cannot all be true. It can't.

I refuse to believe I live in a reality where such a man can get a presidential pardon.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

...are you serious? This cannot all be true. It can't.

I refuse to believe I live in a reality where such a man can get a presidential pardon.

Consider the president doing the pardoning.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

For those of you who are not from Arizona that are defending Arpaio - you really don't know how terrible of a person he was. I've lived in Arizona since 2005 and I've experienced how terrible of a sheriff he was. He wasn't tough on crime or tough on immigration - he flouted the law and abused his power for political gain in his quest for celebrity. Press releases and news crews were an integral part of his "crime suppression raids".

• Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped.
  
• In a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life.
  
• During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. Phoenix New-Times had begun calling it Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.
  • In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement.
  • In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)
• Inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.
  
• He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”
• Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.)
  
• At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the jail, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.
  
• “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”
  
• Arpaio’s approach typically resulted in “the targeting and harassment of Latino drivers rather than the effective enforcement of immigration law,” meaning that it was just racist, without even accomplishing its stated objective. And Latinos who were U.S. citizens also had to live in fear of being suspected by Arpaio’s officers.
  
• Eventually, the federal courts intervened and instructed Arpaio to stop. But he persisted, brazenly flouting the order, leading to the contempt charge for which he has now been pardoned. Instead of listening to the judge, Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife.
  
• A journalistic investigation—one that would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize—revealed that hundreds of reported sex crimes had gone uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office, many of which were child molestation cases. A review of 51 crime reports showed that 43 “had not been worked at all or had minimal follow-up conducted,” even though 90 percent had workable leads. The Arizona Republic found that the office “did not meet basic investigative standards like promptly following up with victims, doing early background checks on suspects, coordinating with other agencies and promptly presenting cases to prosecutors,” and that “the agency lost track of $600,000 to hire child-abuse investigators, and the money was never found.” The MCSO conducted an internal affairs investigation into its mishandling of sex crimes cases, but declined to release the findings, with Arpaio refusing to comment on them. “If there were any victims,” he said, he would apologize to them, while refusing to take any responsibility. But there were victims, and we even know their names.
  
• Arpaio’s MCSO fudged reports to make it appear as if they were clearing more cases than they actually were, with the Justice Department concluding that there was “an increase in violent crime in Maricopa County, and of homicides in particular, during the period of enhanced immigration enforcement.” Clint Bolick, a conservative who is now Associate Justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, released analyses showing that Arpaio was misleading the public about the degree to which his anti-immigration shift had damaged his ability to solve serious crimes.
  
• Arpaio also appeared to spend much of his own time engaging in calculated publicity stunts, such as recruiting an anti-immigrant “posse” including celebrities like Steven Seagal, obtaining a big tank with his name on it, letting Steven Seagal drive said big tank into someone’s house—killing their puppy and bringing on a lawsuit, going on reality television, and deputizing Shaquille O’Neal.
  
• Infamously, after a critical report on him had appeared in the Phoenix New-Times, Arpaio had his deputies stage late-night raids on the homes of the paper’s publishers, arresting them in front of their families.
  
• When the county Board of Supervisors cut Arpaio’s budget, Arpaio and the county attorney conspired to indict board members on dozens of bogus felony charges as an “anti-corruption initiative.” An official who later reviewed the cases against the officials concluded that the “record is littered with behavior so egregious that a reasonable person’s sense of fairness, honesty and integrity would be offended.” The scheme was so transparent that the county attorney ended up getting disbarred over it (and the board members ended up—in a familiar pattern—having to be paid multi-million dollar settlements).
  
• When the wife of the mayor of Mesa criticized Arpaio, he immediately told a deputy: “We gotta raid Mesa again.”
  
• When the mayor of Guadalupe, one of the poorest cities in America, criticized Arpaio for an immigration raid in which he “descended on the town with multiple ‘command centers,’ approximately 100 deputies, and a helicopter,” Arpaio canceled the town’s policing services. When judges ruled against him, he filed racketeering lawsuits against them.
  
• When critical comments were made about Arpaio during the public-comment section of a board of supervisors meetings, audience members who applauded were arrested.
  
• Arpaio would even go after other jurisdictions’ police chiefs, should they dare to cross him.
  
• Settlements over “civil rights violations, conspiracy, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” had cost the county $92 million in court settlements and legal fees. Members of his own department were conceding that MSCO officers had “willfully and intentionally committed criminal acts by attempting to obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses, and destroy evidence.” Arpaio even promoted many of the officers who were known to have been involved in abusive practices.

Makes sense why the side with Nazis in their fold support this guy.

 

[BobRyan]

Yes it is. If someone is not guilty, then they do not need a pardon.

Instead of taking this to an appeal, the former Sheriff admitted guilt to get out of jail free.

A lot to be said for an innocent man getting out of jail.

However "in real life" there was no "guilty plea" what there was is a leftist unhinged agenda "finding Arpaio" guilty.

 

[BobRyan]

Do you realize when this trial started? Or even why it started? The reason for the case is because the Maricopa Sherriff's Department, which was run by Arapio, detained a Mexican National traveling on a legal tourist visa. The man had the visa with him, showed it to the officers but they still detained him. He was released 9 hours later after the sheriff's office turned the man over to the INS.

Sounds like a great "story" - what is it that law enforcement thinks INS does with someone who "has a legal tourist visa that has not expired"????

 

[Goonie]

A lot to be said for an innocent man getting out of jail.

However "in real life" there was no "guilty plea" what there was is a leftist unhinged agenda "finding Arpaio" guilty.

No. A judge found him guilty. Your absolute support for someone who has demonstrated his absolute disdain for the Rule of Law is noted.

 

[cow451]

Consider the president doing the pardoning.

Ouch!

 

[cow451]

A lot to be said for an innocent man getting out of jail.

However "in real life" there was no "guilty plea" what there was is a leftist unhinged agenda "finding Arpaio" guilty.

I'm confused. If he wasn't determined guilty by a legal process, why would he need to be pardoned.

 

[FreeinChrist]

For those of you who are not from Arizona that are defending Arpaio - you really don't know how terrible of a person he was. I've lived in Arizona since 2005 and I've experienced how terrible of a sheriff he was. He wasn't tough on crime or tough on immigration - he flouted the law and abused his power for political gain in his quest for celebrity. Press releases and news crews were an integral part of his "crime suppression raids".

• Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped.
  
• In a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life.
  
• During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. Phoenix New-Times had begun calling it Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.
  • In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement.
  • In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)
• Inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.
  
• He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”
• Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.)
  
• At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the jail, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.
  
• “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”
  
• Arpaio’s approach typically resulted in “the targeting and harassment of Latino drivers rather than the effective enforcement of immigration law,” meaning that it was just racist, without even accomplishing its stated objective. And Latinos who were U.S. citizens also had to live in fear of being suspected by Arpaio’s officers.
  
• Eventually, the federal courts intervened and instructed Arpaio to stop. But he persisted, brazenly flouting the order, leading to the contempt charge for which he has now been pardoned. Instead of listening to the judge, Arpaio hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife.
  
• A journalistic investigation—one that would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize—revealed that hundreds of reported sex crimes had gone uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office, many of which were child molestation cases. A review of 51 crime reports showed that 43 “had not been worked at all or had minimal follow-up conducted,” even though 90 percent had workable leads. The Arizona Republic found that the office “did not meet basic investigative standards like promptly following up with victims, doing early background checks on suspects, coordinating with other agencies and promptly presenting cases to prosecutors,” and that “the agency lost track of $600,000 to hire child-abuse investigators, and the money was never found.” The MCSO conducted an internal affairs investigation into its mishandling of sex crimes cases, but declined to release the findings, with Arpaio refusing to comment on them. “If there were any victims,” he said, he would apologize to them, while refusing to take any responsibility. But there were victims, and we even know their names.
  
• Arpaio’s MCSO fudged reports to make it appear as if they were clearing more cases than they actually were, with the Justice Department concluding that there was “an increase in violent crime in Maricopa County, and of homicides in particular, during the period of enhanced immigration enforcement.” Clint Bolick, a conservative who is now Associate Justice on the Arizona Supreme Court, released analyses showing that Arpaio was misleading the public about the degree to which his anti-immigration shift had damaged his ability to solve serious crimes.
  
• Arpaio also appeared to spend much of his own time engaging in calculated publicity stunts, such as recruiting an anti-immigrant “posse” including celebrities like Steven Seagal, obtaining a big tank with his name on it, letting Steven Seagal drive said big tank into someone’s house—killing their puppy and bringing on a lawsuit, going on reality television, and deputizing Shaquille O’Neal.
  
• Infamously, after a critical report on him had appeared in the Phoenix New-Times, Arpaio had his deputies stage late-night raids on the homes of the paper’s publishers, arresting them in front of their families.
  
• When the county Board of Supervisors cut Arpaio’s budget, Arpaio and the county attorney conspired to indict board members on dozens of bogus felony charges as an “anti-corruption initiative.” An official who later reviewed the cases against the officials concluded that the “record is littered with behavior so egregious that a reasonable person’s sense of fairness, honesty and integrity would be offended.” The scheme was so transparent that the county attorney ended up getting disbarred over it (and the board members ended up—in a familiar pattern—having to be paid multi-million dollar settlements).
  
• When the wife of the mayor of Mesa criticized Arpaio, he immediately told a deputy: “We gotta raid Mesa again.”
  
• When the mayor of Guadalupe, one of the poorest cities in America, criticized Arpaio for an immigration raid in which he “descended on the town with multiple ‘command centers,’ approximately 100 deputies, and a helicopter,” Arpaio canceled the town’s policing services. When judges ruled against him, he filed racketeering lawsuits against them.
  
• When critical comments were made about Arpaio during the public-comment section of a board of supervisors meetings, audience members who applauded were arrested.
  
• Arpaio would even go after other jurisdictions’ police chiefs, should they dare to cross him.
  
• Settlements over “civil rights violations, conspiracy, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” had cost the county $92 million in court settlements and legal fees. Members of his own department were conceding that MSCO officers had “willfully and intentionally committed criminal acts by attempting to obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses, and destroy evidence.” Arpaio even promoted many of the officers who were known to have been involved in abusive practices.

QFT - lived in AZ from 1981 til 2014 and part time since. He cost Maricopa citizens a bunch of money for his egotistical grand standing and failing his job. I know a number of deputies who were not happy with him.

 

[cow451]

QFT - lived in AZ from 1981 til 2014 and part time since. He cost Maricopa citizens a bunch of money for his egotistical grand standing and failing his job. I know a number of deputies who were not happy with him.

You only lived there 33 years. What makes you such an expert?

 

[RocksInMyHead]

A lot to be said for an innocent man getting out of jail.

However "in real life" there was no "guilty plea" what there was is a leftist unhinged agenda "finding Arpaio" guilty.

It is not necessary to plead guilty to be found guilty by the courts, and there is no so-called "leftist agenda" here. Arpaio was found guilty by a court of law. And even if he wasn't, I'll again quote the text of the Supreme Court's decision in Burdick vs. United States (1915):

This brings us to the differences between legislative immunity and a pardon. They are substantial. The latter carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it. The former has no such imputation or confession. It is tantamount to the silence of the witness. It is noncommittal. It is the unobtrusive act of the law given protection against a sinister use of his testimony, not like a pardon, requiring him to confess his guilt in order to avoid a conviction of it.

Sounds like a great "story" - what is it that law enforcement thinks INS does with someone who "has a legal tourist visa that has not expired"????

What does this even mean?

 

[GoldenBoy89]

A lot to be said for an innocent man getting out of jail.

However "in real life" there was no "guilty plea" what there was is a leftist unhinged agenda "finding Arpaio" guilty.

Please, continue supporting this man and tell all your friends too! You're helping the democrats with their "liberal agenda" in more ways than you can imagine.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I remember the early news stories about Joe. They painted him as a standup guy who had these huge money saving ideas. When one looks into it more deeply he has caused unnecessary loss of life, cost the area millions in dollars in lawsuits, violated the rights of those of Latino descent (but I guess their rights do not matter) . . . I was at first surprised when I heard of the charges against him, but there was no hidden agenda. That man is a first rate creep and he did deserve at least six months in his jail.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

I remember the early news stories about Joe. They painted him as a standup guy who had these huge money saving ideas. When one looks into it more deeply he has caused unnecessary loss of life, cost the area millions in dollars in lawsuits, violated the rights of those of Latino descent (but I guess their rights do not matter) . . . I was at first surprised when I heard of the charges against him, but there was no hidden agenda. That man is a first rate creep and he did deserve at least six months in his jail.

Specifically in his own jail and under the conditions he liked to put his inmates through.

 

[AirPo]

I remember the early news stories about Joe. They painted him as a standup guy who had these huge money saving ideas. When one looks into it more deeply he has caused unnecessary loss of life, cost the area millions in dollars in lawsuits, violated the rights of those of Latino descent (but I guess their rights do not matter) . . . I was at first surprised when I heard of the charges against him, but there was no hidden agenda. That man is a first rate creep and he did deserve at least six months in his jail.

Reminds me of Warden Norton.

 

[BobRyan]

Yes it is. If someone is not guilty, then they do not need a pardon.

If the unhinged leftist-trap has already "found you guilty" -- then the "pardon" avenue is the only one the innocent law enforcement officer had left.

Good thing he had a President that would not pander-to-the-left to avoid-political-risk.

I think we can all see that obvious point.