Joe Arpaio's deputy: I won't apologize
There are many of them right now—this one we’ll call the Case of the Purloined Letter.
During a trial Oct. 19, a sheriff’s deputy working in court surreptitiously swiped a letter out of a defense attorney’s case file where her back was turned. The incident was caught on video tape.
The officer, Adam Stoddard, says that he saw some words on the letter that made him think that the lawyer’s client was planning a crime, and that grabbing it was justified. A judge disagreed, and ordered him to apologize.
Last night, the officer spoke publicly on the courthouse steps, saying … he wasn’t going to. Nick Martin was there:
Judge Donahoe has ordered me to feel something I do not.” Stoddard said. “He has ordered me to say something I cannot.”
The young detention officer, dressed in his brown duty uniform and wearing a badge, told the pack of journalists and other observers in front of the county’s main courthouse in downtown Phoenix that the judge had essentially “put me in a position where I must lie or go to jail.”
“I will not lie,” he said.
Stoddard has the backing of his boss, Joe Arpaio. As I understand it, Stoddard a) stole something; b) violated attorney-client privilege in two ways (first by looking at the lawyer’s papers and then stealing one); c) isn’t too awfully bright (he seems to have forgotten the room was being taped); and d) is possessed of that peculiar penchant of law-and-0rder types who, when caught doing something they shouldn’t, don’t apologize or evince a sense of shame but rather stonewall and bluster.
Stoddard was supposed to report to jail tonight but was not taken in because of a clerical error, Martin reports.