Maricopa County, AZ Focus: Corrupt Sheriff Joe Arpaio

The last couple of weeks I covered the link between right wing nut Sheriff Joe Arpaio and a neo-Nazi. This week I want to remind people of the case that first drew my attention to Arpaio and his corruption.

I first saw this on the TV program Dateline on ID. More recentlyI 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...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.

You can read more about Arpaio on the website Arpaio must go.

More info: The ACLU is suing Arpaio. More here.

There is also a recall effort to get this wanna be Third World generalissimo out of office.