Sheriff Joe Arpaio Pays Out Millions For Loving Constitution Too Much, Jailing Journalists In Middle Of The Night

Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are pretty famous for being dicks* and buying all the newspapers and then all the people who made the newspapers run out the door screaming. ( Me. I ran out the door screaming.) Well, they did a little journalisming once, about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and he arrested them, in the middle of the night, for doing journalism about him! It was sort of hilarious, if you love the comedy stylings of Middle East dictatorships!

Well, now Maricopa County has approved a $3.75 million settlement for Lacey and Larkin for arresting them for doing journalism about Joe Arpaio. This is good! We think our wingnut friends will agree you are not supposed to arrest people for exercising their First Amendment right to a free press, because Constitution! (We are just kidding, our wingnut friends do not agree! Some of our wingnut friends want to actually execute journalists, for treason!) It is weird, because they are always saying how they are going to get arrested and put into FEMA camps for carrying Bibles, but then when journalists actually do get arrested forcarrying Biblesjournalisming, Larry Klayman is nowhere to be found! Huh.

The only thing that annoys us about Lacey and Larkin’s settlement is it’s sort of almost as big a payout as a black guy framed for murder by prosecutors might get after spending 18 to 20 years behind bars. Sure, “abuse of power” and “that is bad” and all, and Joe Arpaio should not be arresting journalists, from their homes, in the middle of the night on trumped-up misdemeanor charges, ab-so-lutely! But if they’re gonna get $3.75 million, maybe it’s time to up the settlements for wrongful convictions of innocent people who spend decades behind bars and then come out and are basically like Encino Man dug up from under the new pool.

If you want to read the million-word press release about how awesome Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are (we assume; we did not actually read the press release because Jesus Christ that shit is like Linda Taylor-long, but without being an amazing freaky True Crime of History story, again, we assume; do let us know in comments if anyone in the press release kidnapped a bunch of bab

ies and then murdered some olds, all while allowing Ronald Freaking Reagan to paint his enduring myth of the Welfare Queen), then that shit is below.

Statement of Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, former owners of New Times, Regarding Settlement of Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dennis Wilenchik

Sheriff Joe Arpaio arrested us on October 18, 2007, for writing “Grand Jury Targets New Times and Its Readers.”

Earlier today, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors ratified a $3.75 million settlement of our lawsuit filed in 2008 against Sheriff Arpaio and special Maricopa County prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. This follows a June 9, 2011, finding in our favor by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals with respect to efforts by Arpaio and Wilenchik to escape liability for their actions.

Unlike most of Arpaio’s victims, we had the financial wherewithal to defend ourselves in court, and we were able to speak through the newspaper. But the vulnerable and impoverished victims of Arpaio’s ongoing abusive practices have neither the money nor the voice to fight back. We intend to use proceeds from today’s settlement to help those who fight the good fight against government actors who attack the most vulnerable among us. We further intend to help an organization that seeks to preserve and protect free speech on the Internet.

Our decision to settle this case rather than demand our day in court is largely motivated by the knowledge that nothing that can come from a trial will speak as clearly and with as much binding legal force as the Ninth Circuit’s landmark decision in Lacey v. Arpaio.

In a scathing opinion, the appeals court scolded Arpaio and Wilenchik for retaliating against a free press, for grand jury abuse, for false arrest, and for a variety of other conduct. The Court served notice that thuggish behavior by police and prosecutors against journalists strikes at the heart of the Constitution. The Court’s landmark opinion has already been cited in a dozen published federal appellate cases and over a dozen federal district court opinions in the short time since it was handed down.

The events giving rise to this settlement began in 2004 when Phoenix New Times published a story “Sheriff Joe’s Real Estate Game,” July 1, 2004) questioning the source of funds for $690,000 in cash invested by Sheriff Arpaio in two pieces of commercial real estate.

The Sheriff also owned another half-dozen commercial properties. The records of those six parcels were also hidden from public view.

Using an Arizona statute intended to protect a peace officer’s home address, Arpaio redacted from public records all of the financial details of his commercial transactions.

Reporter John Dougherty detailed these problems and asked: Where does a public servant get this kind of cash? Why is the Sheriff hiding his real estate speculation?

Arpaio responded with a heavy-handed, two-and-a-half-year campaign to have the newspaper and its reporters and editors prosecuted for disclosing his home address. While the paper did publish, as part of its investigation, the Sheriff’s address, that very same address was widely available elsewhere on the web, including on official government sites. Furthermore, the obscure statute that Arpaio relied upon to pursue New Times states that the publication of the address must present a knowing and timely threat. Given that the subpoenas were served two-and-a-half years after Dougherty’s original story, the “timely threat” appears not to have existed.

After the Case Review Board of the Maricopa County Attorney’s office found no basis for a prosecution, and the Pinal County Attorney’s Office reviewed the case and likewise refused to prosecute, Dennis Wilenchik was appointed as a special prosecutor to pursue Arpaio’s retaliatory objectives against us.

Wilenchik had earlier represented Arpaio in seeking to silence other press criticism. His law firm had done millions of dollars in legal work for Arpaio. And he had been the focus of New Times stories questioning his highly profitable relationship with Arpaio and former Wilenchik employee Andrew Thomas, the now-disbarred former Maricopa County Attorney.

Wilenchik embraced his role as Arpaio’s special prosecutor with Orwellian vigor. He issued grand jury subpoenas demanding all notes, records and sources on each New Times story mentioning the Sheriff over nearly a four-year span.

More alarming, the prosecutor demanded to know the identity of thousands of the paper’s online readers — anyone and everyone who had read anything on the New Times website in the preceding 44 months. And he demanded to know what other websites these New Times readers had visited.

As the paper’s journalists sat in the closed courtroom of presiding Maricopa County Criminal Judge Anna Baca in the fall of 2007, the grand jury proceedings took an unexpected, and disturbing, turn: Judge Baca lashed out at special prosecutor Wilenchik. According to Judge Baca, Wilenchik had attempted to arrange a secret meeting with the judge using an intermediary who was acquainted with the judge and who had sat on the commission overseeing judicial appointments. Judge Baca termed the approach “absolutely inappropriate.”

Prosecutor Wilenchik’s outrageous behavior is not a matter of opinion.

An attorney’s obligations under the Arizona Rules of Professional Conduct are clear: “A lawyer shall not communicate ex-parte [one side only] with a judge during the proceeding . . .”

There is an old legal cliché: You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Apparently, prosecutor Wilenchik was not content with the stacked deck provided by the grand jury; on October 10, 2007, he attempted to get to the judge.

Faced with an out-of-control prosecutor, we decided to inform our readers.

On October 18, 2007, we published “Grand Jury Targets New Times and Its Readers” in Phoenix New Times. That very night, Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies arrived at our homes, cuffed us in front of our families and loved ones, and dragged us off to jail for violating the secrecy of the grand jury. The alleged transgression is a misdemeanor, normally an offense handled with a ticket or summons, but Arpaio wanted to deliver a message we would hear loud and clear.

Then all hell broke loose.

Media outlets from The Arizona Republic to The New York Times, lawyers, academics, and private citizens reacted with shock and anger to our arrests. The following morning a chagrined Andrew Thomas held a news conference at which he fired Wilenchik as special prosecutor and announced that the investigation was at an end.

It would later be determined by Judge Baca that there had been no grand jury — that Wilenchik had simply issued the subpoenas himself in clear violation of Arizona law, without the grand jury or judicial oversight required by law.

Arpaio and Wilenchik later went before the Ninth Circuit to shield themselves from liability by hiding behind the police and prosecutor immunity doctrine. But the Court wasn’t buying it, and for good reason.

As nearly as we can tell, the last American journalist arrested for something he’d written was John Peter Zenger, and that was prior to the American Revolution.

Before his reign of terror subsided, the Sheriff would become notorious nationally for rounding up immigrants as well as for attacks upon the judiciary.

“County officials could have curtailed the abuses of the Sheriff years ago,” says Lacey. “Instead, they looked the other way until Arpaio’s excesses moved from Mexicans to magistrates. With these cash grants, we choose to stand with those who resist.”

Toward this end, we will make grants from settlement funds to the following organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has successfully litigated against the racial profiling abuses of Sheriff Arpaio’s roundup of Hispanic immigrants; the Florence Project, which defends immigrants detained in confinement; and the grassroots, migrant rights group Puente. We will also be contributing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has taken the lead nationally in fighting in the courts against government intrusion on Internet speech and privacy rights.

*The story offered up most often as proof of Mike Lacey’s dickishness was always “the time he fired someone on a cocktail napkin,” which I personally thought was the one cool thing he ever did. Don’t wanna be fired on a cocktail napkin? Then maybe you should try not to suck.

[ NewTimes ]