Below The Beltway

A few weeks ago, I posted this video showing Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Deputy Adam Stoddard clearly and blatantly stealing documents from the file of a defense attorney:

Well, the Judge held a hearing in the matter and Stoddard got read the riot act:

A Maricopa County judge on Tuesday ordered detention officer Adam Stoddard to hold a news conference and publicly apologize for swiping a document from a defense attorney’s file behind her back last month in an incident caught on courtroom videotape. If the Maricopa County Sheriff’s officer refuses or the defense attorney decides the apology is not “sufficient,” Judge Gary Donahoe’s ruling said he would throw Stoddard in jail.

Donahoe’s ruling held Stoddard in contempt for the Oct. 19 incident in which he could be seen on a courtroom security video sneaking up behind attorney Joanne Cuccia in the middle of a hearing and taking a document from her file.

During several days of testimony following the incident, Stoddard said he happened to have glanced at the file and saw the words “going to,” “steal” and “money” grouped together in a sentence. It made him think a crime was taking place and gave him the authority to pull the document, he said.

But Donahoe rejected that story, saying there’s no way “a reasonable detention officer” would have thought a crime was taking place based on what he saw.

“There was no immediate or future security threat that would have justified a reasonable detention officer in DO Stoddard’s situation removing, seizing and coping a document from a defense attorney’s file,” Donahoe wrote in his ruling, which was made public today. “A reasonable detention officer would have recognized after spending approximately 37 seconds reading the paragraph in question, that the ‘key words’ had nothing to do with an immediate or future security threat to the jail or anyone else.”

Donahoe was skeptical last week that Arizona law gave him any authority to punish Stoddard for taking the file. But in the ruling, Donahoe said he found case law that allowed him to do it. It had to do with a 1995 case in which a judge determined that something that took place outside of his or her courtroom still affected the integrity of the court.

“This case is not about disobeying a court order,” Donahoe wrote. “It is about protecting a defense attorney from misbehavior and harassment by another officer of the court.”

You’d think it would be over there, wouldn’t you ?

But no, this is Maricopa County, the home of wacky Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Wednesday it will be a cold day in Maricopa County before one of his officers apologizes for taking an attorney’s confidential files.

He was responding to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe, who on Tuesday ordered a county detention officer to apologize for a bizarre incident in which he was caught on a courtroom security video sneaking a confidential document from a defense attorney’s file.

Donahoe ordered officer Adam Stoddard to hold a press conference before Dec. 1 to apologize to the attorney or else face jail time.

“Superior Court judges do not order my officers to hold press conferences,” Arpaio said in a news release. “I decide who holds press conferences and when they are held.”

An attorney for the sheriff, Tom Liddy, went even further, saying it’s unlikely Stoddard will go to jail for refusing to apologize. “Folks should not hold their breaths,” he said.

But the sheriff’s office, which runs the county jails, doesn’t plan to defy the order outright. Liddy said the agency will challenge it in a higher court.

The attorney said the order violates Stoddard’s rights to free speech.

The judge “cannot order somebody to lie,” Liddy said. “Of course he’s not sorry for doing his job…It’s absurd on his face.”

Once you realize who Stoddard’s boss is, the outrageous arrogance of his actions make a lot more sens.