Sherriff Joe may be disliked, though not by enough of the 4 million in his county for people to vote against him in serious numbers at any time over the past 16 years.

Some wrongful deaths in custody were of people who are not convicted? How interesting! Would it be more palatable to you if they had been sentenced?

In your opinion he is a whacko and a thug, however that is only your opinion, nothing more. How interesting!

A re-read of that link doesn’t reveal to my ageing eyes any mention of the inmates being pre-trial. Perhaps I missed it. Never mind, it isn’t a crucial point.

Much as I hate to be doing this, I’ve gone back to some of the original Newspaper reports of those abuse cases listed in Joe’s Wikipedia entry.

Charles Agster:

According to court documents, on Aug. 6, 2001, Carol and Charles Agster Jr. were taking their son, who had the mental capacity of a 12-yearold, to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital because he was exhibiting paranoia.

They stopped at a Phoenix convenience store and had to call police because he wouldn’t leave it.

But when police arrived he didn’t recognize them as officers.

They handcuffed him and hog-tied him before taking him to Madison Street Jail, where detention officers placed a “spit mask” or “spit hood” over his face and strapped him to the restraint chair.

Result: death in custody. It’s clear that Agster was a pre-trial inmate.

Scott Norberg:

He was … arrested in Mesa … after police received reports of a delirious, hostile man wandering a neighborhood…

Norberg spoke gibberish to the police who approached him, and popped one of them in the head when he was being handcuffed. At the Mesa police station, he shouted nonsense. One officer testified that when he told Scott to shut up, Scott dropped to one knee, bowed and begged the cop’s forgiveness.

Basically, Norberg was wacked out of his head.
But–and I want to nail this point, because Joe Arpaio has misrepresented it–Norberg was not high on crystal meth at the time of his death. He was transferred from Mesa to the county’s Madison Street Jail about midnight, and was killed 15 hours later.

Another pre-trial inmate killed in custody.

Richard Post:

Richard Post spent only a few hours in Madison Street Jail, but in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s penal colony, no stay is too short to avoid abuse. Especially for inmates like Post, who make demands on their captors. For those kinds of troublemakers, Arpaio’s jailers reserve a special form of treatment…

Post, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, had pounded on his cell door demanding that a jail nurse give him a catheter so he could urinate.

For Arpaio’s jailers, it was an easy call: Post needed “chairing.”
So they crammed him into the device and left him in it for six hours.
They ignored his pleas that such treatment of a paraplegic would cause serious injuries. In fact, the lower, paralyzed portions of his body were severely damaged, and Post would spend four months in bed, convalescing.

But Post’s protestations fell on deaf ears. Jailers intended to teach Post a lesson he would never forget. So they strapped him down roughly into the metal contraption, and tightened its leather straps with all their might.

And broke Post’s neck.

That last article gives accounts of other inmates who’ve reported abuse in Sheriff Joe’s jails.

… the man has thousands of deputies, many of whom would have degrees in criminology, and many of whom would be specialising in a range of different areas of police work.

Pure supposition - the reported facts suggest otherwise.

Finally here’s an interesting contrast from the MCSO’s official site: between Tent City and this animal shelter.

Long story short: Joe Arpaio is a whacko and a thug, he employs thugs and we don’t need his approach to law enforcement anywhere in Australia. A lot of people in Arizona want to be rid of him too - with bloody good reason.

The (repeated) election of Sherriff Joe is in a western democracy with a stable economic base and a press which can investigate/report without fear or favour. A circumstance which did not apply to Germany in the 1930’s. Nor did that fellow face as many elections as Sherriff Joe.

If Sherriff Joe was handling his electoral opponents in Phoenix Arizona 1992-2008 in a manner similar to the way the Nazi party dealt with electoral dissent, he would have been lucky to remain on the ballot paper for even one election, never mind being resoundingly voted in, and be keeping it up for 16-odd years now.

I wasn’t pointing to electoral success (of Sherriff Joe) as a gauge of Sherriff Joe’s policy. Just considering that the number of voters and the size of his (repeated) overwhelming mandate, in a liberal western democracy would indicate that he is unlikely to be prone to erratic or unacceptable behaviour.

Digressions such as the sanity or otherwise of One Nations & it’s voters aside, the purpose of the exercise was to put Sherriff Joe into perspective.

Hardcore Law and Order types cheer and see a Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry type, teaching criminals a lesson by making them work on chain gangs in pink pyjamas & eat weevilly porridge. Assisted by a handful of hardworking deputies.

Others see Roscoe P. Coletrane straight out of Duke of Hazzard, riding around on a horse cracking a whip, deliberately brutalising by putting them on a chain gang, half-starving them and forcing them to wear pink frillies in public. Assisted by a handful of half witted deputies sporting names like Billy-Bob and Jim-Joe

The actual Sherriff Joe Arpaio is nothing like either group imagines, something which is not made clear when he is profiled overseas. For a start, the man has thousands of deputies, many of whom would have degrees in criminology, and many of whom would be specialising in a range of different areas of police work.

The county prison population is 10,000 (spread over many jails, many of which are multi-thousand prisoner facilities). In rough numbers, this is the same number of inmates as Qld & NSW combined. Thus I assume (perhaps unwisely) that over such a large number of inmates, it is unlikely that most of them will be pre-trial (remand). It is very plausible that most of them are cons.

That newspaper, upon reflection, is perhaps an unreliable source. Skimming some of the articles reveals some clues to this. How seriously should one take a purported newspaper, which in news articles (”news”, not “op-ed” or “opinion”) routinely uses phrases such as “the fat one with stupid eyes” to describe public officers? Even the most fringe of opinion columns in this country would resile from the use of such language.

Sherriff Joe seems to have a rather unhappy relationship with many newspapers, undoubtedly this rag is one of them. A quick trawl of their other news reveals plenty of articles in which Sherriff Joe is portrayed as a cowardly, shallow, craven type. The kindest I can be to the Phoenix Times is to say that within their pages one is unlikely to find objective news coverage of Sherriff Joe.

I apologise if I assumed you had academic/univeristy or debating experience. Your statement above makes it likely you do not. Sorry.

Why apologise? It seems to me to be a positive advantage, based on the debaters I’ve met.

My point is that democratic success is not a useful way to gauge to quality or efficacy of policy. It’s nearly orthogonal in fact. And you proved my point: fully one quarter of Queenslanders thought P.H.O.N. had policies and people worth voting for.

I hesitate to trip the switch on Godwin’s Law, but this will probably be comment #49 so it’s due. I’ll approach it sideways though, in the fashion of my sorry failure to be exposed to the cut-and-thrust of True Debaters.

There was another famous figure who was democratically elected with very popular policies. Turns out he was nuts.

Sherriff Joe has put himself to more than a million voters in several consecutive elections, he attracts more than half the primary vote, and roughly double his nearest runner up.

For that many people to overwhelmingly support him continually, 2 things are likely;
1/. That he is proactively doing things they approve of, and;
2/. That he is well adjusted, not prone to ratbaggery (think Mark Latham)

You offer up, implying there are some similarities, the votes cast for the One Nation as an example that my broad assumption need not apply. This is apples with oranges. In the 1998 Qld state election the One Nation party attracted at best 1/4 of the vote, unlike the 1/2 that Sherriff Joe routinely attracts when he wins. One Nation did not win, did not get double the votes of everybody else.

One Nation did make quite a mark. 1/4 of the voters in Qld are not raving lunatics supporting someone they believed to be equally as fringe as themselves. One Nation was a flash in the pan, their electoral success was uanble to be replicated at subsequent elections. The voters knew a dud when they saw one, and didn’t vote for them again. One Nation failed to stand the test of time over even one electoral cycle. They scared the horses pretty quickly.

Sherriff Joe however, has maintained his overwhelming support through several consecutive elections.

He is a lot of things, including the anti-christ in the mind of urban white liberals, but he clearly doesn’t scare the horses for the 4 million people in Maricopa County.

Umm, Jacques Chester.. is that a serious attempt at debate?

Surely thou jests.

Sherriff Joe’s wikipedia listing states that the Maricopa prison system houses sentenced inmates, as well as pre-trial detainees.

It may have been me that incorrectly steered the discussion. I rechecked the Phoenix times link and rather than ALL the prisoners it says Most of the inmates are pre- trial.

Most of the prisoners in his custody are being booked or awaiting trial; they are presumed innocent).

However it may mean that the inmates in his custody are actually the ones waiting for the court case. I don’t know it wasn’t clear.

In any event mistreating prisoners and placing them on second rate food rations with moldy food is a thug mentality of running a holding prison. The guy’s a thug.

In any event there is an attempt for a recall election for his position in November and it will be interesting to see how it goes.

I have endeavoured to delve past the sensationalist snapshot of him, and put into perspective some of the (as it turns out, clearly uninformed) comments made above about him.

Maricapo county does have a population less than Queensland, but at a hundred thousand or so less in populations of 4 million, an insignificant difference.

Ken, I must respectfully disagree with your statement that I am wrong about Maricopa jails. Sherriff Joe’s wikipedia listing states that the Maricopa prison system houses sentenced inmates, as well as pre-trial detainees. This is supported by the Maricopa Country Sherriff’s Office website, which states the counry jail system houses convicted criminals, and has an inmate population of 10,000.

Both of these facts may be incorrect. I am open to a dissenting evidence.

If you are going to disagree with something I state, please have the courtesy to first research evidence which contradicts what I have stated. I am prepared to be corrected, however, not by somebody who is using opinion projection as a substitute for research.

Not true. Sheriff Joe, like other US sheriffs, fulfils a policing role. He does not run prisons. The people in county jails have not been found guilty of any offence and are entitled to the presumption of innocence. It is clear from any number of Sheriff Joe’s pronouncements that he sees his function as inflicting punishment on them just the same. If they weren’t guilty, well, they wouldn’t have been arrested, would they? The presumption of innocence has not been abolised in the US. Like Sheriff Joe, Steve and observa seem to be congenitally incapable of understanding it.

As for Steve’s statistic of “5 lawsuits over death in questionable circumstances of Maricopa County inmates”, even assuming it’s accurate it’s a fairly remarkable one. Maricopa County has a population smaller than Queensland. In Australia we had a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which investigated claims/suspicions and found not a single one to have been caused by police or prison officer violence throughout the entire nation. I’m not sure how many of those suspicious cases resulted in lawsuits despite those findings, but five lawsuits in a place a fraction of Australia’s size does not appear to be a statistic that necessarily bears out the innocent intepretation of Arpaio that Steve urges.

As for the bashing death of Scott Norberg, it wasn’t so much that he was killed by rogue officers. As Steve suggests, isolated events of that sort can happen in any police service. It was the fact that Arpaio defended and condoned them in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most gross form of wrongdoing and thuggery. The evidence in the Doomadgee case was much more equivocal. Defending officers in these circumstances further entrenches the conviction that Arpaio sees himself as above the law, someone justified in exacting punishment on people in custody notwithstanding that they haven’t been convicted of any criminal offence.

Finally, I note that this thread has gone completely off the rails. Not only does a US sheriff have no role in punishing or deterring offenders (as opposed to the earlier task of investigating and arresting them), but the figures suggest that his high-handed and almost certainly unconstitutional methods don’t in fact reduce crime anyway. This post was about the deterrent effect of sentencing, an area in which a sheriff by definition has no role.

Since 1992 Sherriff Joe has been winning elections by roughly this margin. For this many people to keep voting him in by that margin, he is unlikely to be a nutter.

Following your lead in using Queensland as a parallel for Maracopa Country, I present in evidence against your ‘unlikely to be a nutter’ claim people’s exhibit A, “Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party”.

Whenever Sherriff Joe is mentioned in the media the focus is usually (sensational) on the more colourful aspects of his jailhouse regime.

The internet has revealed some rough statistics, sufficient to put Sherriff Joe into perspective.

Maricopa County (where Joe is Sherriff) has a population of 3.8 million people. (Qld has 4.1 million)

Maricopa County has a prison population of circa 10,000 inmates. (Australia has circa 25,000 inmates)

Sherriff Joe is no backwoods small county yokel presiding over 2 half-witted deputies, so we can all drop the Dukes of Hazzard/Sherriff Roscoe picture we have formed.

Sherriff Joe is one man wearing the hats of the Qld Commissioner of Police and the Qld Commisioner of Corrective Services. Throw in the personality and political skills of an Independant who keeps getting elected to the Senate, and you’ve got Sherriff Joe.

A population of 3.8 million should yield a voting age population somewhere just above 2million. At the last Maricopa Sherriff election 1.1 million voters turned out. In a 3-horse race, Sherriff Joe was returned with 650,000 votes, the runner up recieved 350,000 votes.
Double the number of votes of his nearest challenger, (in a western democracy sample size of 1.1 million) this is a resounding mandate in anybody’s language.

Since 1992 Sherriff Joe has been winning elections by roughly this margin. For this many people to keep voting him in by that margin, he is unlikely to be a nutter.

The size of his police force I can find no hard data for. But for back-of-envelope calculations, the size of the Queensland Police will be a template for Maricopa County Sherriff’s Department.

For the period since Sherriff Joe has been elected, my (admittedly shallow) search reveals 5 lawsuits over death in questionable circumstances of Maricopa County inmates.
IMHO, considering he presides over a uniformed service comparable to Queensland Police, the personal involvement of Sherriff Joe in any of these cases is highly unlikely. No more likely than it would be for the Qld Commissioner of Police to be in a watchouse dealing personally with an individual inmate.

Sherriff Joe, as man at the top, carries the can for these death in custody cases. To the same degree as Commissioner Bob Atkinson carries the can for the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee in Palm Island watchouse.

It would be interesting to see a similar report for some comparable counties in the USA, as Maricopa county is far from the only one where deputies have worked over a suspect in questionable circumstances. (meaning surely Sherriff Joe isn’t the only Sherriff to have been lawsuited)

So what? We’re talking about this nasty piece of work because someone brought him up as some sort of good example of what law enforcement could “achieve”. Are there other bad apples? You want us to answer that question for you?

It would be interesting to see a similar report for some comparable counties in the USA, as Maricopa county is far from the only one where deputies have worked over a suspect in questionable circumstances.

I quite agree, steve. Get back to us when you’ve done the research.

The link was to only the bottom section of the wikipedia entry. The entire entry should be read.

It would be interesting to see a similar report for some comparable counties in the USA, as Maricopa county is far from the only one where deputies have worked over a suspect in questionable circumstances. (meaning surely Sherriff Joe isn’t the only Sherriff to have been lawsuited)

How many cases of abuse against Sherriff Joe has this Dershowitz (or anybody else) fought and won?

At least one. Here’s that link again:

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1999-04-15/news/murder-on-madison-the-norberg-remix/

Quote:

Scott Norberg’s death–murder, the way I see it–became The Norberg Case, settled out of court in January for $8.25 million. Maricopa County’s insurance carrier laid that number on the table after receiving a package from the Norberg family’s attorney, Mike Manning…

The insurers didn’t want this package [of evidence] in a jury’s hands.

Settled out of court, granted, but given the evidence described (which you discount as ‘emotive’) what civil litigation lawyer wouldn’t take the chance to cut a settlement?

Do you have any comment to the points and questions I raised about this thug?

J

C, The link in a comment above is to an article that uses prejudicial, inflammatory and emotive language.

You mean the piece that mentions he runs remand centers and talks about the drug addict that was brutally murdered by thugs under his watch? That piece?
I would call it emotive and I’m sure the writer couldn’t help but feel anger at what had been done. It doesn’t take anything from what happened.

For a more objective lowdown on Sherriff Joe it may be more advisable to start by reading his (extensive) wikipedia listing.