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| Thomas Perez |
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez warned attorneys for Sheriff Joe Arpaio, of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in Arizona, in a letter dated August 3, that unless Arpaio voluntarily cooperates by August 17 with an investigation by the Justice Department’s civil rights division into allegations that Arpaio’s office has engaged in “unlawful searches and seizures, discriminatory police conduct, and failure to provide basic services to individuals with limited English proficiency,” the Justice Dept. “will file a Title VI civil action to compel access to the requested documents, facilities and personnel.”
GSN described Arpaio’s controversial tenure as sheriff in an article it published on August 3.
The letter from Perez reminds Arpaio that on March 25, 2009, the civil rights division “supplied MCSO with its First Request for Documentation and Information” and it has made several subsequent requests in writing and by telephone.
Perez’s letter acknowledged that the Sheriff’s office has provided his division with 11 pages of documents that it deemed “partially responsive to three of the fifty-one requests in the First Request,” and that the Sheriff’s office had promised further information once it had completed installation and training on its new litigation support system.
However, the Perez letter continued, on May 29, 2009, “counsel informed DOJ in writing that MCSO would ‘not respond to any document requests from DOJ…until appropriate assurances are made’ that DOJ was not improperly coordinating its investigation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
Arpaio’s lawyers said the following month that MCSO would not produce any documents or provide access to MCSO personnel, according to Perez’s letter. In fact, Sheriff Arpaio held a press conference on July 7, 2009, at which he said, “MCSO would not cooperate with the Division’s investigation, would not produce additional documents, and would not provide any access to MCSO facilities or personnel.”
Nearing its conclusion, the Perez letter says, “In order to avoid litigation, please provide a complete response to the First Request and an agreement to permit access to all pertinent MCSO facilities and personnel no later than August 17, 2010.”
“Although we would prefer voluntary compliance in this case as well, we will not hesitate to commence litigation after August 17, 2010, if MCSO continues to take the position that it need not cooperate with the Division’s investigation,” wrote Perez.
According to an article by Channing Turner in the independent, Washington-based news site Main Justice, attorney Robert Driscoll, of Alston & Bird, LLP, who represents Arpaio, has described the Justice Department’s threat to sue the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as premature and has indicated that Arpaio will cooperate with certain elements of the probe.
But Driscoll also claimed that Arpaio had previously handed over thousands of documents in a lawsuit involving allegations that Arpaio’s deputies had racially profiled Hispanics, and that arguments contained in the Perez letter “conflated the legal boundaries between two separate and ongoing investigations.”