Maricopa County, AZ Focus: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Entraps 18 Year Old Kid For Publicity Stunt

I have been hearing about Sheriff Arpaio, America's most disgusting sheriff, for some time. Including accusations of racism, brutality, and the like. I recently watched an Dateline on ID piece on a case where someone seems to have been framed for trying to kill Sheriff Arpaio largely as a PR stunt for the sheriff. There's a rundown on that story here.

This has inspired me to publicize the dark and dirty side of Arpaio.

My first entry covered the issue of police brutality commonly occurring under Arpaio's thuggish, third-world style regime.

My second entry covered the top ten reasons why Arpaio has to be voted or legally removed from office.

In this entry I want to return to the story that got me angry enough to start harping on this creep. The case of the set up of a kid so Arpaio could get some camera time. I saw this on Dateline on ID. And I found this summary of the case on the web:

An 18 year old kid named James Saville is in prison for feebly trying to blow up his school. He has a cellmate who claims that he’s a mobster but is actually a veteran jailhouse snitch, Thomas Morgan (if you’re in a Maricopa Jail reading this, maybe join this Morgan fella in the shower sometime) who snitches to get better treatment behind bars. He’s taped asking James over and over if he’d build a bomb to blow up the sheriff. He coerces him, wakes him up, on and on.

You can tell the kid isn’t interested in it really. But he persists.

They have 126 hours of tape of them talking about it.It’s very clear that the sheriffs office and this snitch cooked up the story that this kid wanted to bomb Sheriff Joe for yet another publicity stunt. After spending 4 years in jail his lawyer, Ulises Ferragut gets a call from a seargent at the same time there’s a technical error disallowing the plea deal from going through. At the last minute, Ferragut withdraws the plea.

They have tapes of people from the Sheriffs Office crafting the story with the snitch. Their undercover agent, “Yancey”, picks up the kid only one day out of jail, drives him to several stores and pays for the bomb parts, then pays him money and unbelievably drives him to a restaurant where sheriff joe’s car is! WHAT?!

Guess who’s waiting to film all of this? Yep, the news. Whew, sherifff joe is so tough on crime that criminals hate him and he narrowly avoided certain death!

Until you see that the Sheriffs office practically invented the entire plot and then coerced some kid into playing the role as assasin and almost sent him to jail for 30 years for a publicity stunt. If you see a picture of the bomb the kid built, its laughable.

Read more about it here: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2004-06-24/news/in-the-crosshairs/

This makes me sick. I’m a Republican but have always been suspicious of this guy.

I hate how our government tries to create criminals to fuel the system they’ve created. This reminds me of how there was a serial killer running around Phoenix during this time and this tough on crime sheriff is too busy getting his hammy face on the fucking news.

What a creep.

If you want to help, you can make a donation to Arpaio.com, which is a site dedictaed to revealing the truth about Arpaio and getting him voted or booted out of office.