Apparently Joe Arpaio was innocent of the charges - after all

[tulc]

If the unhinged leftist-trap has already "found you guilty"

uhmmm...you mean he was found guilty.

-- then the "pardon" avenue is the only one the innocent law enforcement officer had left.

If he was found guilty then he wasn't innocent.

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

Too bad we didn't get one who knew how to do the job he got elected to do instead.

I think we can all see that obvious point.

That we all see a point, we can agree on that...although I suspect "the point" pretty much everyone who's not part of President Trumps base see's is much different "point" then the one that they see.
tulc(is going to need more coffee soon)

 

[Maren]

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"????

But that is the entire point, of course INS let him go. The question, and why Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and Sheriff Joe were sued, is why didn't they realize that he should be set free? Again, this wasn't an isolated incident. How much would you complain if you were picked up on suspicion of being here illegally, showed them your driver's license and other papers that show you are a US Citizen, and you had to be turned over to INS before you were let go?

 

[Yonny Costopoulis]

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.

Can see why Trump pardon. He very much reflect Trump stated values.

Remind me of this -
Donald Trump and the Central Park Five | The New Yorker
Central Park Five: Trump rushes to judgment

 

[Nithavela]

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.

Sounds like an all american hero to me.

 

[TLK Valentine]

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.

Is every federal court an "unhinged leftist trap," or just the ones who issue rulings you don't like?

 

[cow451]

Man I didn't know how poisoned this forum is with liberals distortionists..

 

[cow451]

uhmmm...you mean he was found guilty.


If he was found guilty then he wasn't innocent.


Too bad we didn't get one who knew how to do the job he got elected to do instead.


That we all see a point, we can agree on that...although I suspect "the point" pretty much everyone who's not part of President Trumps base see's is much different "point" then the one that they see.
tulc(is going to need more coffee soon)

Cream and sugar?

 

[BobRyan]

Is every federal court an "unhinged leftist trap,"

Is it your argument that "every federal court declares it illegal to enforce immigration laws passed by congress"???

If that has turned out to be the case - then I missed that news item. Please tell us more.

 

[BobRyan]

uhmmm...you mean he was found guilty.

Not by a jury of his peers. Rather he was trapped in a unhinged leftist corner , no jury, no attention whatsoever to the details, witnesses, evidence... no wonder we are all so happy to see him pardoned.

It is still "America" after all.

 

[wing2000]

“It’s not conservative to abuse the Constitution, and to call people heroes who abuse the Constitution and the rights of American citizens,” Woods said. "It's not conservative to applaud the rule of law and then, when judges act on the rule of law, you go after them personally."

Grant Woods,
Former Arizona Attorney General

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news...system-attorneys-stage-lunchtime-protest-trum

 

[Tanj]

I think my fellow lefties should calm down a bit on this anti-Joe stuff. The fact is that over his 20+ year span he has handed to Latinos about 150 million tax payer dollars. Whilst I realise at least half of that have gone to the poor downtrodden lawyers, That still leaves about $3 million a year Joe has handed over to lucky members of the Hispanic community, it's like his own special welfare system.

 

[tulc]

Not by a jury of his peers. Rather he was trapped in a unhinged leftist corner , no jury, no attention whatsoever to the details, witnesses, evidence...

Been here:
Why was Joe Arpaio not given a jury trial?

The court order is document 83. There,

The Court finds that this case is appropriate for a bench trial. This case focuses on the application of facts to the law to determine if Defendant intentionally violated a court order.

Essentially, since there is no right to a jury trial and no compelling reason to grant a jury trial (e.g. the court found no merit to his argument that there would be the appearance of impropriety), the motion for a bench trial was granted.

Hope that helps.

no wonder we are all so happy to see him pardoned.

well...a couple of people were, most everyone who likes the rule of law in America? Not so much.

It is still "America" after all.

To bad neither President Trump or Mr Arpaio like that fact, that's why they went to all the trouble of skipping the parts they feel don't apply to them.
tulc(finishing up some good coffee)

 

[GoldenBoy89]

Not by a jury of his peers. Rather he was trapped in a unhinged leftist corner , no jury, no attention whatsoever to the details, witnesses, evidence... no wonder we are all so happy to see him pardoned.

It is still "America" after all.

Contempt of court is determined by a judge, not a jury.

 

[variant]

I guess we can do away with the notion that Trump supporters are "law and order" conservatives when the President openly supports contempt of court when it suits him or his allies.

 

[Allandavid]

Not by a jury of his peers. Rather he was trapped in a unhinged leftist corner , no jury, no attention whatsoever to the details, witnesses, evidence... no wonder we are all so happy to see him pardoned.

It is still "America" after all.

Justice in "America" need not always be delivered via a jury. I know that and I'm not even a citizen of your country. And one could always complain about the political leanings of various judges and courts. Look at the current make-up of your Supreme Court for example...

 

[Arcangl86]

Not by a jury of his peers. Rather he was trapped in a unhinged leftist corner , no jury, no attention whatsoever to the details, witnesses, evidence... no wonder we are all so happy to see him pardoned.

It is still "America" after all.

And he was in the middle of appealing the conviction on that basis. That's what a law and order loving person does if they feel that the court erred.

 

[Strathos]

Not hardly.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...hat-trump-says-jon-gabriel-column/606012001/#

 

[Goonie]

Is it your argument that "every federal court declares it illegal to enforce immigration laws passed by congress"???

If that has turned out to be the case - then I missed that news item. Please tell us more.

The court did not declare it illegal to enforce immigration laws, that is an out and out falsehood, a demonstrated lie. They declared that the Sheriffs manner of enforcing them was illegal.

 

[AirPo]

Contempt of court is determined by a judge, not a jury.

Some folks don't understand what America is and how she works.

 

[TLK Valentine]

Is it your argument that "every federal court declares it illegal to enforce immigration laws passed by congress"???

If that has turned out to be the case - then I missed that news item. Please tell us more.

Immigration enforcement is a federal matter. Arpaio is -- excuses me, was -- a county-level law enforcement officer, and a thug to boot.

I'm sure he considered shaking down Latinos to be "enforcing immigration laws," and I'm sure you do too, but the courts -- the actual "Law and Order" that both he and Donald pay high and holy lip service to -- said he was doing it wrong.

But of course, thugs have no use for courts, do they?