Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio heads to court over allegations of deputies racially profiling Latinos
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announces July 17, 2012, in Phoenix that President Obama's birth certificate, as presented by the White House in April 2011, is a forgery based on an investigation by Arpaio's office. / AP Photo
(AP) PHOENIX - For years, the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America has vehemently denied allegations that his deputies racially profile Latinos in his trademark immigration patrols.
Joe Arpaio would dismiss his critics in his signature brash style at countless news conferences and in numerous appearances on television.
Now, the sheriff in Arizona's most populous county will have to convince a federal judge who is presiding over a lawsuit that heads to trial on Thursday and is expected to last until early August.
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The plaintiffs say Arpaio's officers based some traffic stops on the race of Hispanics who were in vehicles, had no probable cause to pull them over and made the stops so they could inquire about their immigration status.
"He is not free to say whatever he wants," said Dan Pochoda, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, one of the groups that has pushed the lawsuit against Arpaio.
"He will be called as a witness in our case," Pochoda said. "He will not have control over the flow of information, and he is not the final arbiter."
The plaintiffs aren't seeking money damages and instead are seeking a declaration that Arpaio's office racially profiles and an order that requires it to make changes to prevent what they said is discriminatory policing.
If Arpaio loses the civil case, he won't face jail time or fines.
Arpaio declined to comment, and his lead attorney, Tim Casey, didn't return a call seeking comment Wednesday.
But at a late June hearing, Casey said the sheriff wanted the trial so he could prove his critics wrong and remove the stigma that the racial profiling allegation carries. "What we want is resolution," Casey said.
The lawsuit marks the first case in which the sheriff's office has been accused of systematically racially profiling Latinos and will serve as a bellwether for a similar yet broader civil rights lawsuit filed against Arpaio in May by the U.S. Department of Justice.
That lawsuit makes many of the same racial profiling allegations, but goes further to say that Arpaio's office retaliated against its critics, punished Latino jail inmates with limited English skills for speaking Spanish and failed to adequately investigate a large number of sex-crimes cases. No trial date in that case has been set.
Arpaio has said the DOJ lawsuit is a politically motivated attack by the Obama administration as a way to court Latino voters in a presidential election year. DOJ officials say the department began its initial civil rights inquiry of Arpaio's office during the Bush administration and notified the sheriff of its formal investigation a few months after President Obama took office.
Meanwhile, Arpaio is trying to revive the old controversy over Mr. Obama's birth certificate, announcing Tuesday that investigators working for him have concluded the document is not legitimate. Arizona's Democratic Party responded by insisting Arpaio was trying to draw attention away from problems within his own agency.
So-called "birthers" maintain Mr. Obama is ineligible to be president because, they contend, he was born in Kenya. However, Hawaii officials have repeatedly verified Mr. Obama's citizenship, and courts have rebuffed lawsuits over the issue.
"President Obama was born in Honolulu, and his birth certificate is valid," Joshua A. Wisch, a special assistant to Hawaii's attorney general, said in a statement. "Regarding the latest allegations from a sheriff in Arizona, they are untrue, misinformed, and misconstrue Hawaii law."
Arpaio has staked his reputation on immigration enforcement and, in turn, won support and financial contributors from people across the country who helped him build a $4 million campaign war chest.
The patrols have brought allegations that Arpaio himself ordered some of them not based on reports of crime but letters from Arizonans who complained about people with dark skin congregating in an area or speaking Spanish.
Some of the people who filed the lawsuit were stopped by Arpaio's deputies in regular patrols, while others were stopped in his special immigration patrols known as "sweeps."
During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city — in some cases, heavily Latino areas — over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders.
Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office, which hasn't conducted any of the special patrols since October.
Arpaio has repeatedly said people who are pulled over in his patrols were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes and that it was only afterward that officers found that many of them were illegal immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Murray Snow has issued rulings against Arpaio earlier in the case. In December, he barred Arpaio's deputies who are enforcing Arizona's 2005 immigrant smuggling law from detaining people based solely on the suspicion that they're in the country illegally. Arpaio has appealed that decision.
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So the penny drops.
Good luck with that jack@ss and good luck with your Presidential witch hunt.
LMAO@ CBS RATINGS DROPPING LIKE A ROCK.
--------------
You do realize if you WATCH CBS it helps their ratings, don't you?
The left wing lawyers and others were whining long ago because he keep his prisioners in tents and made them wear pink jump suits and underwear and eat baloney sandwiches.
This all has to do with Obama and Eric Holder election year politics and they getting the Hispanic vote.
Nothing more.
Also since Arpaio exposed Obama's birth certificate as a forged document with many inconsistencies in it, Obama has a vendetta to discredit him.
The same thing is going on with the Zimmerman/ Martin case.
It's like living under a communist regime with Obama and Holder.
Then Obama signed the unconstitutional National Defense Authorization Act where they can hold you indefinately if they decide to call you a terrorist.
Eric Holder is now like the head of the KGB where they can now come for you in the middle of the night and you diappear forever.
We have never seen these sorts of things until Obama became president.
He is a dangerous person and must be defeated in 2012.
There is no leftwing. WE are AMERICANS. This whole hate thing started by design to make us turn against each other.
PLEASE look up history....look up the 1933 Business Coup.
The same players then, Prescott Bush (who supported Hitler), DuPont, GE, GM, Morgan, US Steel and other Wall Street titans, conspired to forcibly remove FDR from office through the use of arms.
They wanted Major General Smedley Butler(WW1 hero) to overthrow the government with the Bonus Army(WW1 veterans who were promissed bonuses they didn't recieve) by marching on the white house.
He was a loyal American and told Congress. They agreed with him, but because of corporate power nothing was done.
Today that inaction is costing America it's freedom.
Those corporations today are now multinational corporations.
Ask who the men in black are.....
We have been betrayed and endgame is near.
We must reelect President Obama for another term.
He signed it several times in left than four years.
Why do you defend Obama?
Oh that's right, you love him and are his willing shill.