US Marshals Raid Sheriff Joe's Office -Judge Orders Seizure of Records, Hard Drives in Racial-Profiling Case

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/09/joe_arpaio19.jpg

Sheriff Joe Arpaio

WND

A judge on Friday ordered the seizure of identification documents and computer hard drives from Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office, and chastised his attorneys for failing to turn over the evidence, requested months ago in a racial-profiling case against the Arizona lawman.

The U.S. Marshals Service later raided the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow ordered the raid after a court-ordered monitor reported the sheriff’s office failed to hand over more than 1,400 identification documents – driver’s licenses, passports and identification cards – as part of a misconduct investigation involving the sheriff’s office.

Arpaio’s immigration smuggling squad and other deputies are accused of regularly pocketing items from people during traffic stops and busts of safe houses used during illegal-immigrant smuggling.

Court monitors claim the IDs belonged primarily to people of Hispanic descent.

Robert Warshaw, the official monitoring the sheriff’s office for the judge, claims the documents were slated for destruction. Warshaw also contends the sheriff’s office ordered employees not to voluntarily reveal the existence of the records.

Arpaio’s attorney John Masterson said the court had no evidence the IDs were handled improperly.

The 50 hard drives are related to Arpaio’s secret investigation involving the judge, who dealt Arpaio one of his toughest legal defeats in 2013 when he concluded deputies had racially profiled Latinos during traffic stops.

Months later, the judge ordered a sweeping overhaul of the agency to stamp out the “unconstitutional” practice. The order included employing an independent monitoring team to oversee the agency’s compliance.

The hard drives originated from a Seattle computer programmer named Dennis Montgomery, who was hired by Arpaio to eavesdrop on Snow’s wife after she was reportedly overheard making prejudicial statements about the sheriff during the 2012 election.

The investigator intended to prove the federal government was colluding against Arpaio by pressing a separate civil-rights lawsuit against him for racial profiling.

As WND reported, Arpaio has pressed for the judge to allow Montgomery to participate in the legal dispute, and in a recent filing suggests, strongly, that the judge is pursuing his own interests by delaying a decision on the motion to allow the investigator to intervene.

“The delay in this lawsuit is creating much more than the appearance that this court is working in concert with the American Civil Liberties Union in order to harm defendant Sheriff Joe Arpaio and intervenor Dennis Montgomery, as well as make good on its commitment, expressed by the court’s wife as confirmed by neutral persons, to ‘destroy’ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio so the sheriff cannot be reelected in 2016.”

Read more at WND:

http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/u-s-marshals-raid-sheriff-joes-office/