RIP Carola Jacobson

I have sad news to report: Carola Jacobson, a truly wonderful woman and a mother who stood alone against the Maricopa County Mafia, has succumbed to breast cancer, dying on December 30. Her memorial service is today in Phoenix.

This blog became involved with Carola and the case involving her son (then 14) in the fall of 2010. At the time, her son was accused of some very fanciful charges of having orchestrated several hours of sex play between two young children, and he was being held in juvenile detention.

As Kerwyn and I began to look at the charges, the conduct of police and prosecutors, and the circumstances around which the events supposedly took place, both of us came to understand that what the authorities were alleging were the facts actually were things that could not have happened at all. For example, they claimed that the boy somehow coerced neighborhood children to go into the passively-ventilated and unfinished attic in his Phoenix home in June 2010 and spend several hours during two different days, despite the fact that these acts would have had to have taken place in temperatures upward of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The fact that such actions would have created noticeable effects that no one ever observed (because they did not happen) did not faze Phoenix police and Maricopa County prosecutors. They had their narrative, and even though it had been proven wrong, they were going to stick with it at all costs. And the cost was the life of Carola Jacobson.

Last April, I had this post on how Maricopa County officials literally were murdering Carola, and how she had to stop her cancer treatments in order to pay her son's legal bills. Prosecutors knew this and they also knew they had no case, but continued on simply because Maricopa County has a policy that once prosecutors file a case, they do not let actual innocence stand in the way of pursuing it.

You see, according to Maricopa County prosecutors, if a person is charged, that is proof of guilt, and even if the facts show otherwise, the person still is guilty because there are criminal charges. Furthermore, prosecutors there go by the policy that once charges are filed, they MUST get at least a guilty plea to SOMETHING, even if everyone knows that "something" never happened.

In the Jacobson situation, the boy finally agreed to plead to one charge of "disturbing the peace" in order to have the other charges dropped, providing he passed a polygraph and have a psychologist say he was not a danger to the community. However, even after both of those conditions were met, prosecutors STILL were trying to pursue the case simply out of spite.

Why do prosecutors act this way? The logic is perverse, but perversity is the order of the day in American "law enforcement." Prosecutors claim that if it is discovered that they have charged innocent people with crimes that never occurred, the public will "lose confidence" in the ability of prosecutors to do their duties.

Therefore, they argue, it is important that they keep public confidence, so they must pursue wrongly-charged people anyway because if they were to admit they were wrong, the public would lose confidence in them. Get it? Thus, their unwritten rule of not dropping charges even when everyone -- including them -- know they are false. After all, prosecutors openly declared in the infamous Pottawattamie case that: "There is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (emphasis added).

It takes a while to let that one soak in. Prosecutors in this country openly have declared that they have the RIGHT to "frame" people, and that doing so does not violate the rights of innocent people. If that does not infuriate readers, then nothing will.

I content that Maricopa County officials knew exactly what they were doing when they drove Carola Jacobson to an early death. They knew she needed cancer treatments, and by increasing her stress and by forcing her to choose between her son's freedom and medical care, she would choose her son -- and die in the process.

No one in the Maricopa County prosecutors' office will face any sanctions for this outrageous and evil behavior. It is business as usual in Arizona and in the United States of America. If I seem angry, it is because I am.

Rest in peace, Carola. You came to this country not knowing that its "justice" system is a sham and that vengeful and dishonest people would try to destroy you, and I wish I could apologize on behalf of others in this country, but somehow I doubt that will do any good.

Thomas and Aubuchon should have been investigated years ago

While I welcome the investigation that the Arizona State Bar has made against former Maricopa County DA Andrew Thomas and his partners-in-crime Lisa Aubuchon and Rachel Alexander, nonetheless, I cannot help but note that the bar and the media in Arizona (and especially in Phoenix) were all-too-happy to paint these people as heroes as long as they were abusing people who did not have political connections. In other words, I am saying that as long as the DA's office went after people like Courtney Bisbee who were not politically wired into the establishment, the media (other than the Phoenix New Times) simply went along with whatever the authorities wanted them to believe and ignored the abuse.

Like Michael Nifong, who went to the North Carolina Bar Woodshed four years ago for his role in the Duke Lacrosse Case, Thomas and Aubuchon don't have a chance to keep their law licenses. (I believe that Alexander, who played a minor role, might get off with a reprimand.) Yet, I also believe that these people should have been in the dock long ago before Thomas made the strategic error of becoming Sheriff Joe Arpaio's errand boy.

For example, when Supervisors Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox were indicted on multiple felonies, and Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe was charged with bribery and other crimes, there also was Susan Schuerman. She had the bad fortune of being Stapley's secretary, and Thomas and Arpaio wanted her to give the DA more ammunition, and what followed was utterly shameful. As reporter Laurie Roberts writes:

Schuerman, 57, has worked for the county for 25 years – 17 as Supervisor Don Stapley's secretary.

She came under the steely gaze of the Sheriff's Office in December 2008, when she returned from a dentist appointment to find detectives waiting for her. Stapley had just been served with a 118-count indictment charging him with failing to publicly disclose loans, real-estate dealings and other assets.

“They take me into this conference room and hand me a grand jury subpoena and say we want to talk to you about the Stapley matter,” she tells me. “I didn't even know what the Stapley matter was.”

Over the next few weeks, Schuerman says Sheriff Joe Arpaio's right-hand man, Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott, hounded her for information, trying to scare her into turning on Stapley. She refused. One, because she says she didn't have any dirt on her boss and two, because she saw this for what it was -- an orchestrated campaign to bring down Stapley and anyone else who dared cross the sheriff.

“Hendershott told me I would be sorry,” she says, “and I was.”

Deputies followed her to lunch. Undercover cops watched her east Phoenix home, leaving her daughter in tears and her neighbors wondering what she'd done.

Then in February 2009, word suddenly “leaked” out to the media that Schuerman was under investigation for using county resources to conduct Stapley's private business and later, bribery. Her office was searched and she was told to leave the building, to go outside where the media pack was waiting.

Declaring her a suspect was an ingenious way to turn up the heat. Thomas blocked the county from giving her an attorney, noting that taxpayers don't provide lawyers to government employees suspected of crimes.

And so Schuerman was on her own.

She had no money for an attorney. She'd raised three kids on a secretary's salary. She'd lived on the financial edge since 2005 when her daughter suffered a stroke on her 21st birthday, one that left her paralyzed and dependent on her mother.

Schuerman, too, was paralyzed -- with fear. That she'd lose her job and her health benefits – all the more precious because she has Crohn's Disease. That she'd be taken to jail and then what would happen to her daughter, Jenifer?

“I wanted to die,” she says. “I didn't know what to do.

This simply is sick. Sick. For all of his identity with the Evangelical Right, other people are nothing but pawns for Thomas, people that he uses to help his own political career, and if innocent people are destroyed in the meantime, well, that is "collateral damage" that comes when someone is "rooting out corruption."

What do the Republicans have to say? Their own words expose their perfidy:

Just this week, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party decried the ethics hearing that begins Monday.

“Andy was trying to do the right thing by rooting out corruption,” Rob Haney said.

Right. Unfortunately, the real corruption is found in the DA's office (which STILL is trying to destroy the Jacobson family) and with Joe "Pink Underwear" Arpaio. When there is no accountability with people who have the power to arrest and prosecute, there always will abuse. Always. No exceptions.

The Newest Outrage in Arizona

It looks as though the situation involving false charges against the son of Carola Jacobson is not over, even though it should have ended months ago. Carola has sent me an email with the latest prosecutorial/government outrage from a state (Arizona) that seems to lead the country in being outrageous:

As I think you know the judge ordered that the state has to pay for our expert, well, she has not been paid due to "budget cuts". The prosecutor does not want to dismiss until she has interviewed the expert and not surprisingly the expert will not talk to the prosecutor until she has been paid. So I guess we are moving forward with a trial date at the end of September. They seem to have enough money to persue a b.s. case but can't pay for the expert which was ordered to be paid for by the state by the judge. Doesn't that leave you scratching your head???

This kind of Catch-22 is not unusual for people who have dealt with the courts in this country, and Maricopa County is especially bad. Notice that the prosecutor is not even trying to do any research on this case or is trying to apply even basic common sense.

No, the modern American prosecutor is told to hold onto a case and never assume innocence, no matter how ridiculous the evidence. The idea is to use the powers of the office to string out people, and then "bleed 'em and plead 'em," as prosecutors like to say.

I hope that people reading this will not be silent. I'm going to do what I can to publicize this latest outrage.

Some good news from Phoenix

Carola Jacobson called today to let me know that a court-appointed expert will become involved in the case. According to Carola, "Now more papers have to be filed, the expert will be interviewed by the prosecutor with the next hearing in 30 days being the one where the expert testifies and the attorney will file a motion to dismiss there."

The expert "will testify that the police interviews were tainted, thus false memory was planted into the kids heads and the testimony would not be reliable. The judge granted the motion that the state pays for the expert instead of me and released the funds."

The only reason it has gone this far is because the prosecutor, "Ignoble" Murphy, has insisted on using all of the authority of his office to keep the Big Lie alive. Murphy already has given his reason: he doesn't like to lose cases, and given what I have seen from the Maricopa County prosecutors, the "polestar" of that office is "win at all costs," regardless of guilt or innocence.

These are people who stop at nothing, people who often are more ruthless and more dishonest than those they prosecute. But at least in this situation, a courageous woman has protected her son from people who have no more conscience than a shark that smells blood.

(My apologies for the earlier error.)

"Ignoble" Murphy's cold-blooded attempt to murder Carola Jacobson

Since last fall, I have written several posts about the unwarranted and utterly dishonest prosecution of the son of Carola Jacobson in Phoenix, Arizona. Even now, the case is not over because "Ignoble" Murphy, the Maricopa County prosecutor handling this one, says that he doesn't like to lose, which he actually seems to believe is justification for going after a young man who is innocent of the charges.

Unfortunately, this case has a very tragic side to it: Carola's health. The website set up to help raise money for her tells a story that portrays not only a mother willing to give up her health in order to defend her son, but also tells us something we need to know about modern prosecutorial "ethics." The site says:

Carola was initially diagnosed with stage IIb breast cancer in 2008. After surgery, treatment and a complete change in life style the cancer remained in remission until she was thrown for another loop when her 14-year-old son was arrested in August 2010 on false charges. Doing what mothers do she put her son's interest before her own and stopped ongoing treatment to pay for his legal defense. Despite of clear evidence of his innocence the authorities kept pursuing the case, the legal fees reached astronomical amounts and depleted all of her savings. Then in March 2011 the next shoe dropped when she was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Tests revealed that this was only the tip of the iceberg and the cancer had spread to her lungs, bones and spine, one tumor causing a compression fracture in her back keeping her bedridden and unable to work. Treatment needs to start as soon as possible but the insurance will only cover a fraction of the cost and payments are due before the treatment starts. (Emphasis added)

By the way, don't think for a second that Murphy and others at the Maricopa County District Attorney's office are unaware of this situation. To people like Murphy, it actually is an advantage, for it gives him the opportunity to try to push Carola's son into a "diversion" program, which is tantamount to a guilty plea.

Why? Murphy knows that he can push this case as much as he wants, as the "ethics" of Maricopa County are to bleed people whenever possible. In this situation, he figures that sooner or later, Carola will be faced with the awful choice of paying for cancer treatments that will keep her alive, or continue to pay legal fees to keep Murphy from trying to put her son in prison.

It would be one thing if the boy were guilty of these charges, but as Kerwyn and I have demonstrated on numerous occasions in posts on this blog, the entire case is a fraud, and the authorities know it. Thus, we are seeing what I believe is nothing less than an attempted cold-blooded murder of a woman whose only "crime" is defending her child.

What Murphy and Maricopa County authorities are doing is unconscionable. If there are human beings in this country who can go even lower, I would hate to know who they are.

I will add one important thing: Carola did not ask me to write this, and she has not sought the publicity. I write this because I want people to fully understand what is at stake in this case and what the authorities in Phoenix are doing in what I believe as cold-blooded an act as I ever have seen. These really are people who will stop at nothing.

Prosecutors and their unwritten rule: Don't drop a case no matter how bad it might be

On the 27th of this month, Carola Jacobson's son will have a hearing before a Maricopa County juvenile judge who is going to decide what will happen to the young man. As has been covered extensively in this blog, the charges against the young man (now 15) are bogus, and transparently so.

We have seen how the police interviews of the children were beyond tainted, and that the scenario which police and prosecutors claim was in the realm of physical impossibility, unless one is willing to believe that for a few days in a row, a 14-year-old boy could coerce young children (who lived elsewhere and voluntarily came to the house) into an unfinished attic and make them engage in sex play for several hours.

The main reason that the prosecution's account is not believable is that the Maricopa County authorities want us to believe that young children would do those things for hours in a place where temperatures in June would be upwards of 140 degrees. (Remember, this is Phoenix, Arizona, where daytime temperatures in June average well above 100 degrees.)

In other words, it makes no sense at all. I'm sure that the American Academy of Pediatrics might have something to say about prosecutor Noble Murphy's claim that these things MUST have happened because he says it did.

So, what is a prosecutor to do? One would think that most prosecutors would say that if there is no evidence, or if the evidence is hopelessly tainted, then all charges should be dismissed. Think again.

No prosecutor openly will admit this, for obvious reasons, but the policy of most prosecutorial offices in the United States is explained by the nihilistic phrase, "Bleed 'em and plead 'em."

WHY PROSECUTORS HOLD THE ADVANTAGES

When I was a newspaper reporter in Chattanooga more than 30 years ago, I heard the local district attorney in a speech claim that prosecutors face all sorts of unjust barriers in their never-ending fight against crime and criminals. At the time, I believed him, but no longer.

Prosecutors really hold all the cards; all of them. They can bring whatever charges they want against anyone they target because grand juries have become prosecutorial playthings. Once charges are filed, they can keep them on the books even if they have no evidence because they can use them as bargaining material.

Lest you think that perhaps they might be hindered by that thing called a guilty conscience, think again. In the recent Pottawattamie vs. McGhee case heard (but not decided because it was settled after oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court), the defendants, prosecutors from Pottawattamie County, Iowa, contended (and I present their exact words): "There is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (emphasis added)

Not ONE prosecutor in this country made a public statement against that utterly chilling statement. The Obama administration supported it, and every association of prosecutors in the USA publicly agreed. Let me repeat what was said: Prosecutors in the United States claim that they have a right to frame whomever they want, and that no citizen can or should be able to do anything about it.

No, I am sure that prosecutors reading this blog would tell me that is NOT what is what the statement meant, but please don't feed me crap, people. The government will tell you that if a prosecutor engages in outrageous or even criminal framing of a defendant, the government has plenty of options to take against the offender, from bringing criminal charges to hauling the prosecutor before the state bar.

However, government authorities are playing a shell game. Yes, these "remedies" theoretically can be imposed. No, the government won't impose them, no matter how outrageous and outright criminal the conduct of prosecutors.

The one option that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that regular citizens -- including those that are framed -- DON'T have is to be able to sue the prosecutor. (The courts and advocates for prosecutors claim that lawsuits would keep them from "doing their jobs.")

The problem is that the one remedy that an individual citizen might have to rectify a grievous wrong is the lawsuit. All of the other vaunted remedies must be launched by the government itself. In other words, the government is given the power and the authority to discipline...the government.

Lawsuits can be brought by citizens and can be decided by juries consisting of citizens. Government disciplinary actions, on the other hand, are launched by the very people who stand to be harmed if their cohorts are disciplined.

Don't kid yourselves. Yes, prosecutors in North Carolina were happy to see Mike Nifong get thrown to the sharks of disbarment after his execrable conduct in the Duke Lacrosse Case, but they also knew that Nifong's disbarment potentially made all of them just a little more vulnerable to the same treatment, should they get out of line. Thus, they made a big show out of disbarring Nifong, but then made sure that other prosecutors in the state that lied and broke the law would not have to face the same fate. Nifong's disbarment actually protected the other miscreants employed by the State of North Carolina as prosecutors.

If anyone were to question their conduct, they could reply: "What do you mean saying prosecutors get away with bad acts? Mike Nifong got disbarred! What further proof do you need to know that the authorities stand ready to discipline anyone in our profession who does wrong?"

As for criminal charges, they rarely are brought and juries are loathe to convict wayward prosecutors, no matter how outrageous their conduct. Call it a belief in law-and-order, but the record stands, as no American jury ever has convicted a prosecutor of criminal misconduct.

When I spoke to a representative of the Georgia State Bar last year about the conduct of Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor in the Tonya Craft case, she told me that she believed that the prosecutors were "just doing their jobs." She then said to me, "She was acquitted, wasn't she?" as though that made everything just fine.

My response to her was: "Yes, after spending more than a million dollars to debunk charges that transparently were false and never should have been brought in the first place."

In the Duke Lacrosse Case, the three families spent close to five million dollars to defend their sons against charges that from the start were laughingly false. (The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, now has graduated from lying and prostitution to murder. This is the woman that Durham and Duke University held up as a near-saint.)

To put it another way, if prosecutors want to bleed someone to death, they can do it because, well, they can do it. The vast majority of people cannot afford the kind of defense needed to fight false charges, and prosecutors know it. And because they actually believe that they have a "right" to frame innocent people, and that nothing will happen to them if they do, you can bet that the profession attracts the very kind of people that one does not want to see in a courtroom in the first place.

This brings us back full circle to the case involving Carola Jacobson and her son, which I will cover in my next post. Why does "Ignoble" Murphy continue to insist that he wants to prosecutor this case? He claims it is because he "has not lost a case in seven years." In other words, it is nothing but a game to him.

However, the situation -- not that anyone in Maricopa County government would care -- is that Carola Jacobson is very, very ill, and that she had to give up cancer treatments in order to pay her son's legal bills. This situation deserves more attention, as do other cases which I will be covering soon enough.

This is important: Carola needs our help!

Carola Jacobson has been a rock in the defense of her son, and I am proud to be her friend. However, she is seriously ill with breast cancer and friends have established a website to help raise funds for her.

It is utterly outrageous that a woman is forced to spend all that she has for legal help in a case that is a farce and a lie. The "justice" system of Maricopa County, Arizona, has done everything it could to destroy her life and the lives of her children. Now it wants to destroy her health by continuing to place her under huge amounts of stress.

While we cannot force the authorities of Maricopa County to do what is right, at least we can give to help Carola get the cancer treatment she needs. So, if you have the opportunity, please give what you can!

Maricopa County: You Cannot Make Up This Stuff

The Jacobson case goes on and on (and on), but there are some important developments. At a recent deposition, the Jacobson attorney deposed social worker Jennifer Ingalls, who accused police of asking leading questions of the children being interviewed. (Yes, I had to pull myself off the floor after hearing this.)

But, it gets better. The Jacobson attorney in his deposition with Det. Terge Boe, the illustrious "sex crimes" investigator in Phoenix, asked Boe if he asked leading questions, and if he had come to a conclusion first, and then tried to frame the questions to get the answers he wanted. Boe answered..."yes."

In places where prosecutors have an IQ of greater than 3, such admissions from the principal investigators would tell the DA's office that this is not evidence, but rather a toxic waste dump from which anyone with any sense would flee. However, this case is in Maricopa County, Arizona, where prosecutors compete with one another to see who can be named the biggest idiot in the state.

The ironically-named Noble Murphy (from now on to be called Ignoble Murphy) is the prosecutor in this case, and he declared to the Jacobson's attorney that he "has not lost a cast in seven years," which is a pretty stupid reason to continue this one.

In other words, Ignoble believes that the whole thing is nothing more than a game, which I doubt he would believe if his own life or the life of someone in his family were at stake. This is the kind of arrogance that permeates not only the DA's office in Maricopa County, but prosecutorial offices around this country.

Protecting the Worst Among Us: How the U.S. Supreme Court Rewards Prosecutorial Misconduct

Camille Tilley, the mother of wrongfully-convicted Courtney Bisbee, sent me the link to a stunning article that has appeared in the Los Angeles Times about how the U.S. Supreme Court protects prosecutors who lie and deliberatly hide exculpatory evidence. If you want to know why people like Chris Arnt and Len Gregor are willing to lie openly in court, hide evidence, suborn perjury, and fabricate documents during a trial, this article lays it out for you.

Perhaps the most chilling paragraph in this excellent story is found here:

Last year, the court heard the case of two Iowa prosecutors who were sued for framing two black teenagers for the murder of a security guard even though witnesses had pointed to a suspect who was white. In asking for the claim to be tossed out, the Iowa prosecutors asserted "there is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (Emphasis mine)

I want readers to sit back and contemplate what the Iowa prosecutors are saying: Because the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly say that prosecutors are not to frame innocent people, therefore, prosecutors are permitted to do so. (However, I suspect that many of those people would claim that even though the Constitution does not specifically say that women have an untrammeled "right" to an abortion, nonetheless the Constitution guarantees that "right.")

While the argument these people used was extreme, nonetheless I believe that it reflects the mentality of prosecutors around the country. Because they know that they won't face any legal consequences for their misdeeds, they feel free to do whatever they want, even if they know they are lying.

Furthermore, keep in mind that the consequences of prosecutorial misconduct are horrific. People are wrongfully sent to prison. Families are destroyed. People are executed for crimes they did not commit.

This sorry state of affairs continues because the Law-and-Order Conservatives believe that prosecutors should be able to conduct their operations without any worries at all, and that no one should be permitted to impede their actions, even if they are pursuing innocent people. Furthermore, the same people who believe that a business should be destroyed because an employee acted wrongfully refuse to hold that same standard to the agents of the state. The LAT article notes:

The high court has taken a dim view of suing prosecutors, and in Thompson's case, the court's conservatives led by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. questioned whether the district attorney's office should be held responsible for the misdeeds of a few prosecutors. (Emphasis mine)

Would Alito hold to that same standard if Wal-Mart were being sued? I doubt it, and his words send a very clear message to prosecutors everywhere: Lie, lie, and lie some more. The Supreme Court has your backs.

I would like to say that a free society cannot withstand this kind of assault, but Americans long ago threw away their freedoms. Instead, we have a surveillance-police state that empowers some of the worst people among us.

Last May, a Catoosa County jury acquitted Tonya Craft of child molestation charges, and jurors even remarked afterward that Chris Arnt had openly lied to them during closing arguments. We witnessed Joal and Sarah Henke committing perjury, unqualified prosecution witnesses testifying, the fabrication of documents, and more perjury from Sandra Lamb and Sherri Wilson.

In other words, in order to bring criminal charges against Ms. Craft, Arnt and Len Gregor committed crimes, and helped others commit crimes along the way. Jurors and others in the courtroom witnessed criminal behavior, yet not one person who lied and broke the law faced any sanctions.

Arnt, Gregor, Tim Deal, and "judge" brian outhouse are still on the job. No one who lied faced any punishment, and no one will be punished for what they did.

Why? They knew that they were perfectly secure in their lawbreaking because the authorities will not do anything about it. For that matter, the authorities WERE the lawbreakers. Let me put it another way, one that perhaps puts all of this into perspective:

Lawbreaking by government authorities is legal because it is the "Law of the Land." The U.S. Supreme Court has said so.

Maricopa Madness, Part II

Since my last post, I have been to Pittsburgh and back, carrying a large sofa set in the back of my van. Fitting those sofa pieces into that van was a triumph of packing, one that I will carry for the rest of my days as a point of pride.

Indeed, I think the packing analogy seems to fit what is going on not only with Maricopa County prosecutors, but with American prosecutors in general. They have an institution called a court, and they have a jumbled bunch of information, and then they proceed to pack all of that information into what is called a criminal case.

Now, there are times when the information fits better than O.J.'s glove (lots better), and the case is obvious: the accused did it. There are other times when it is clear enough that the accused did it, but getting to a point of trial and a conviction takes some creativity, as the fellow and I had to employ in order to make everything fit.

And, then there are times when prosecutors engage in conduct for which the only analogy can be the venerable "I'll make it fit!" advertisement that Midas Mufflers ran many years ago on television. If anything can describe what Andrew Thomas, Lisa Aubuchon, and, to a lesser degree, Rachel Alexander have done in their prosecutorial tenure in Maricopa County, I think Midas ad "fits" better than anything else (to use an ironic term). Indeed, I don't have to make the case for disbarment fit at all; it is obvious to anyone who looks into this situation that these three miscreants do not need to be in positions of power and authority. They should be in jail.

What exactly did the Unholy Trinity do to have an investigator for the Arizona State Bar recommend that the man who narrowly missed winning the Republican primary for Arizona attorney general (and most likely would have won the general election) should have his law license taken away, along with his two partners-in-crime?

Thomas and Aubuchon worked together to indict and prosecute people who were political enemies of the infamous sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, as well as being seemingly vulnerable to abusive prosecutions.

The investigator's report is available here. The Phoenix New Times describes some of the allegations as follows:

A "reckless, four-year campaign of corruption and power abuse."

That's how retired Judge Charles E. Jones categorized the evidence against ex-County Attorney Andrew Thomas and his one-time hatchet-woman, former Deputy County Attorney Lisa Aubuchon, in probable-cause statements filed today that could lead to disbarment for both lawyers.

Jones also slammed the pair's legal rampage as wasteful to the taxpayers and vindictive in the extreme.

"Motivation for much of the alleged impropriety appears retaliatory," noted Jones, "intended to do personal harm to the reputations of Judges, County Supervisors, and other county officials.

"Actions by Respondent appear intent on intimidation, focused on political gain, and appear fully disconnected from professional and prosecutorial standards long associated with the administration of justice, particularly criminal justice."

I remember when the North Carolina State Bar filed charges against Mike Nifong, charges that ultimately led to his disbarment. Like Nifong, Thomas, Aubuchon, and Alexander have claimed that the whole thing is nothing more than a "political witch hunt" in which the Unholy Trinity is being good conservatives who only care about law and order and good government. These are people who have scoffed at the law or who have de facto declared themselves to be the law.

Furthermore, these three were the darlings of the Christian conservatives and the hard right of Arizona. (Alexander -- with her brother -- runs a blog called Intellectual Conservative which claims to be at least somewhat libertarian, although you could have fooled me.)

No doubt, many of the Usual Suspects (Arizona Right to Life, Focus on the Family, and other such groups) will claim that the "liberal establishment" is out to get these fine, upstanding Christians. As a theologically conservative evangelical (out of the Reformed camp), I had always thought that the Scriptures told people to do justice, not to make it up as they went along.

In fact, if the standards of Old Testament Law were applied to the behavior of the Unholy Trinity, they would be facing a mob that would be preparing to stone them into eternity. One cannot lie and "do justice." One cannot knowingly bring false charges and "do justice." One cannot go on moral crusades against innocent people and "do justice."

If you want to understand just how dishonest and vindictive the Unholy Trinity really are, read about the Matt Bandy case in which Thomas turned all of his tax-funded guns loose on a 16-year-old boy with no criminal record. It is absolutely clear that Thomas really did not care if Bandy was guilty or innocent of downloading child pornography on his computer. He just wanted to look good so people like James Dobson and Gary Bauer and their allies would declare him to be a hero "saving the children."

The culture of lying and abuse that pervaded Andrew Thomas' office when he was County Attorney of Maricopa County has managed to outlive Thomas' reign of terror. As Carola Jacobson has found, prosecutors in Maricopa County really don't care about guilt or innocence or even the truth. They just wanted to win, period, no matter what the costs and no matter if the innocent were destroyed.

THAT is the legacy of Andrew Thomas, Lisa Aubuchon, and Rachel Alexander. I do hope they enjoy their post-legal careers and only wish that they could enjoy their tarnished years while residing in the Crowbar Motel, which is where they belong.

Maricopa Madness, Part I

When Andrew Thomas resigned as DA for Maricopa County last April so that he could run for Arizona attorney general, it ultimately set off a chain of events that has so exposed the practices of prosecutors in that place that Thomas and two of his ringleaders, Lisa Aubuchon and Rachel Alexander, now are facing disbarment, which in this day of the unaccountable prosecutor is an amazing thing.

Before going further, I will say that there is so much happening there, mostly bad, that I cannot cover it in this space. Furthermore, I am coming in on this story in the same way a vulture comes onto a carcass. As carrion goes, this is pretty good stuff, but as a latecomer to the utter madness that is Maricopa County "justice," I pretty much am limited to repeating what others have written.

I have written much on prosecutorial misconduct, but I must admit that I was not prepared for the brand of "justice" in the capital city of Arizona, as I figured that the city was too sophisticated and diverse to have a gang of Michael Nifongs running the show in the DA's office. Durham, North Carolina, where Nifong did his damage in the Duke Lacrosse Case, has the uneasy relationship between the city, which has a lot of relatively poor African-Americans, and Duke University, which draws a number of wealthy and white students from out of the area.

Nifong simply exploited the divide and the American mainstream media, which always tries to frame black-white issues as though it always were Birmingham in 1964 and that Reade Seligmann was the second coming of Sam Bowers. Had outside bloggers and writers not intervened in that case, it is likely that Nifong still would be the DA there today, given the complete support he had from Duke University, the Durham government, the local AND national MSM, and the local political establishment.

In the Tonya Craft case, we saw that the "justice" players in the LMJC were trying their best to play to the stereotypes that New Yorkers might have of rural Georgia justice, but I must admit that Andrew Thomas, Lisa Aubuchon, and Rachel Alexander all out do Buzz Franklin, Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt, Len "The Man/Racist" Gregor and "judge" brian outhouse, and that takes a monumental effort, believe me.

So, let us just say that the Terrible Trio of Thomas, Aubuchon, and Alexander are in some hot water, as even Arizona has its limits of outright criminal behavior by those who are sworn to uphold the law. Of course, these three legal stooges did not go quietly. No, they actually hired a private investigator to tail Colorado ethics investigator John Gleason, who investigated the officials for the state Bar of Arizona.

Yes, that's right. The Arizona State Bar hired Gleason, and then the Unholy Trinity actually tried to intimidate him by having him tailed. That alone should have been grounds for recommendation of disbarment, and I doubt it earned them brownie points with the very people who will sit in judgment over them when they have their hearings in 2011.

Bar hearings are not like regular criminal court proceedings, as they are administrative in nature. That means that the "innocent until proven guilty" standard for criminal cases does not hold.

Instead, the Unholy Trinity will be facing a group of people who will be inclined to disbar them, and it is up to Thomas, Aubuchon, and Alexander to try to do the impossible: convince their judges that they really don't deserve to be stripped of their law licenses.

In my next post on this subject, I will go into the outright criminal behavior of these three miscreants and demonstrate how they helped to set a standard -- make that sub-standard -- of justice in Maricopa County that meant prison for Courtney Bisbee and many other innocents.

Good News (For a Change) from Maricopa County!

I have been informed that the 14-year-old son of Carola Jacobson has been released to the custody of his mother and at least will be out of juvenile detention, after having been held there for more than 40 days. While I don't have all of the details of the hearing, it is clear that the boy's attorney, Brian Russo, was aggressive and challenged the prosecution at every point.

This is important, for it is the first time that the courts there have recognized that maybe, just maybe, this boy is not a monster who is terrorizing his neighborhood. From what I have been told about the hearing, one of the parents told the judge that last year, the boy GOT ON THEIR ROOF! Of course, they did not add that other children (including their own) also were on the roof at the same time.

To make matters worse, prosecutors (I'm shocked, SHOCKED!) lied during the hearing. Mr. Russo had requested that prosecutors give him all of the discovery material, including ALL of interview transcripts and tapes. However, prosecutors only gave him some of the material.

Mr. Russo challenged the prosecution and emphatically noted that he had not received everything he was supposed to get. The prosecution denied holding back, but then was forced to admit it had done just that. In other words, officers of the court in Maricopa County lied in court, which surprises no one.

(Hey, this is the state that gave us Janet Napolitano, our erstwhile head of "Homeland Security" who insists that we mundanes go through airport porno scanners -- while refusing to do the same herself. The law is for little people, and Arizona prosecutors and politicians fancy themselves to be Big People.)

Anyway, the boy is home, and while it will be challenging for him to deal with all of this while at school, he still no longer has to sleep in a cell. This is round one. The next step is to take apart this false case and deep-six it.

Miscarriage of Justice in Maricopa County, Part IV: The Police Interviews

When we last looked at the Jacobson case in Maricopa County, Arizona, there was this little issue about “feeling the heat,” that is, about 140 degrees of heat in an unfinished attic where the 14-year-old Jacobson boy was supposed to have coerced three other children and “forced” them to engage in sex play. Unfortunately, the issue of excess, potentially-lethal heat is not the only point of idiocy in the prosecution’s case against the youngster.

No, it seems that the police reports themselves contain the very things that most discredit this case: huge conflicts in the stories that are told, not to mention admissions from one of the children that completely undercuts the police and prosecutorial narrative. To put it another way, had Det. Terje Boe acted like a real cop with common sense instead of the ilk in blue costumes that dominates Phoenix, he would have told his superiors that there was no case at all. None.

Unfortunately, modern police begin with a narrative, and no matter how ludicrous the account becomes, these people ride the horse over the cliff, if need be, but they ride that horse. Thus it was in the Jacobson case.

I first would publicly like to thank Kerwyn for going over the details of the reports about the interviews in fine-comb detail that covers 15 pages and almost 7,000 words. (Kerwyn and I don’t have access to the actual interview transcripts, which we suspect would further damage the state’s case, but if we do get them, we’ll flyspeck them, too.)

Kerwyn’s final product is an amazing line-by-line dissection of the reports, complete with numbering of the lines, and what she pulls out of the material really is stunning for no other reason than it demonstrates that Phoenix has stupid cops and that so-called child protective officers in Arizona are clueless, as is Jennifer Ingalls, who once again has thrown herself in front of a train.

(Ingalls, who was responsible for the false accusations of child pornography against one couple and who played a key role in a horrendous false accusation case in which the authorities actually announced their intention to execute an innocent woman, is the point person in the Jacobson case. In baseball, it is “three strikes and you’re out,” but in the “child protective” business, one can whiff indefinitely, as there are no umpires in that system to count strikes.)

Now to the content of Kerwyn’s document. The first thing that becomes obvious is that people are not getting their stories straight. Once upon a time, wildly-differing stories of supposedly the same events used to make investigators skeptical. That more sane age came before the advent of “professional interviewers” who now insist that inconsistency is “proof” that all of the stories are true (read the nonsense of the Duke Lacrosse Case and you will see what I mean).

In our examination of the various statements from the children to Boe, we will look at the different items to point out not only are the statements inconsistent, but it becomes clear that the entire narrative does not seem to fall under the rules of logic.

The Individuals Involved

Because we are dealing with minors, the real names of the children involved will not be used. Instead, we will use pseudonyms for each of the individuals:

• "Bob" Jacobson: a 14-year-old boy who is accused of child molestation and who is being held in a juvenile detention facility

• "John": He is 12 years old and the main source for the police report

• "Jane": She is 9 at the time of the alleged incident, and she is "John's" sister

• "Alex": He is 9 at the time as well, and is a friend to John and Jane

There are others who play a role (parents and "Bob's" younger brother), but we will concentrate on the children we have named above.

The Alleged Incident

The police and prosecutors claim that Bob coerced John, Jane, and Alex on three consecutive days last June to come to his house, where he forced Jane and Alex to take off their clothes and engage in sex play ("Truth or Dare"). The first two days, the coerced activity occurred in an unfinished attic in the Jacobson home, and on the third day, it was done in Bob's bedroom.

According to John, Jane, and Alex, the children were frightened of Bob, who threatened to hurt them if they refused to play along. The police and prosecutor also allege that Bob held these children against their will and refused to let them leave.

The Attic "Crime Scene"

 As noted previously, the location for the first two days of this supposed three days of horror was the attic in the Jacobson home. The pull-down ladder entrance to the passively-ventilated space is in the garage, with the room itself being over Ms. Jacobson's bedroom.

One person writing comments on an earlier post said that the 140-plus degrees to which the room probably would have been heated during any of those days really was no obstacle at all, as he cited U.S. soldiers in Iraq. He wrote: "I would say it’s easy to believe that a few kids could sit in a partially vented attic for a few hours when they are lightly dressed." He then noted that construction workers in that area don't quit for the summer.

Kerwyn answered his points:

You are factually incorrect as to heat tolerance.

Heat tolerance as in your example of military is acquired. As a matter of point, when our troops first deployed the "casualty" rate for heat exhaustion was over 70%. The military quickly learned they had to acclimate the soldier prior to front line deployment or lose them to heat exhaustion/stroke.

OSHA sets very strict guidelines for heat acclimation in industry where the adult employees regularly work in very hot environments and OSHA forbids the use of any child as a worker in those environments. Once acclimated, an adult (note the word Adult) can withstand high temperatures as long as they have several short breaks in a cooler area AND keep completely hydrated due to the base 10 to 20 mL/kg per hour passive fluid loss. Even an adult who is acclimated to high temperatures, who fails to keep completely hydrated will suffer heat exhaustion and/or stroke due to passive fluid loss.

High heat exposure affects children much differently as their bodies heat 3 to 6% faster than an adult's and lack the metabolic cooling, faster passive fluid loss (and the attendant loss of vital minerals such as potassium and sodium), smaller available sodium and potassium present in their bodies and smaller body surface area for heat loss that an adult has. You can read the landmark study done by Tsuzuki-Hayakawa and Tochihara to become educated in WHY children do not and cannot acclimate like an adult and why, in very short exposures to high temperatures become seriously compromised.

There are several excellent pediatric studies done on enclosed heat environments and how deadly they are. Automobiles are an excellent example given they have little ventilation (even with windows cracked) and heat very quickly. The unventilated attic temperatures reach these same levels with the same effects.

Prior to coming here and using an acclimated adult as your example, you really should do a bit of research on the subject. Children are NOT little adults. Their bodies and metabolism do NOT work the same way and adults who think that are plain ignorant.

I would also recommend you read the recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics as to use of the WBGT so that you too can determine intellectually that 140 degrees for 2 hours is too long for a child.

In other words, the potential attic heat issue is not trivial, nor can one easily dismiss it, as have police and prosecutors. For now, they pretend it did not happen, just as the New York Times pretended during the Duke Lacrosse Case that Reade Seligmann had a "magic towel" and that he could be in two places at one time.

John's Account to Boe

Terje Boe clearly spends most of the time talking to John who was the main "eyewitness." Except he saw nothing. John told Boe that for the first two days, he closed his eyes, but heard what was happening. (He definitely must have heard a lot of "details" that I had no idea could be identified by sound.) However, he claims that on the third day, he sat under a table and closed his eyes.

Keep in mind that it is being alleged that Bob forced a child to molest John's sister, but John did nothing while his sibling supposedly was being molested against her will. Furthermore, he told no one until confronted by parents. This alleged incident did not come to light until John was caught telling another friend about what had happened by the friend's father. So he was so in fear of his life he didn't tell his mother or any other adult.

Jane's Revelation About Alex

According to the police, Jane was forced to do unspeakable things with Alex. However she told Boe that she and Alex stayed in the attic after the others had left and continued to do sex play. She also told Boe that she and the boy have done these things at other times, as well, since she wanted him “to be her boyfriend.”

Obviously, such a statement does not fit the "Really Mean Boy Forces Child To Do Sex Acts Against Her Will" narrative that the authorities in Phoenix seem to have swallowed (and want everyone else to swallow, too). To add to our suspicions that Boe and Ingalls really were not interested in finding out what happened, but rather just wanted to build a case against Bob, the "detective" failed to ask Alex about any of Jane's allegations. Yet, Jane's statement is mutually exclusive with the claims that Bob forced her to do sex acts.

The "Bob Threatened Us" Claim

The only way the police/prosecution narrative even can make sense is that the children claim Bob coerced them. Having seen pictures of "Bob," I can say that he is not exactly a strapping lad and I don't think that his presence would strike abject terror into many people. (I am NOT giving "Bob" a lack of respect, but rather am pointing out that we are dealing with a boy, not a monster.)

However, the tales of threats (like about everything else) are quite inconsistent. Kerwyn has been able to get the following from Boe's notes:

• John: Bob threatened to kick Alex in the groin, but he does not recall what, if anything, Bob said to Jane;

• Jane: Bob threatened to punch her;

• Alex: Bob told him that "I better not get in trouble for this."

Then there is the inconvenient fact that Bob supposedly was able to force these children to leave their air-conditioned homes for two consecutive days to spend a couple of hours each day in an attic that would have been slightly more comfortable than sitting in a heated oven. For that matter, each of the three children has a different take on why they went to Bob's house in the first place, none of them involving the hint of coercion.

There is one more thing that does not make sense. The children claim to have been held against their will, but they had cell phones and when the parents called John and told him that he and his sister had to come home, they went home. Could have they called someone for help?

I also need to point out that Boe used the tactic of telling one child that another child already had "disclosed" certain information. This is smarmy in my view because (1) it is dishonest, (2) it generally is used to try to pry false information out of a person being questioned, and (3) it is a tactic one uses with hardened criminals, not 9-year-old children.

(One should note that this was a favorite tactic used by Joseph and Laurie Braga when they worked for Janet Reno in some infamous sex-abuse hysteria cases. They would tell a child that another child already had “disclosed” and that he or she should do the same thing. Once the child gave answers the Bragas wanted, the child was rewarded, while those who did not “disclose” immediately were badgered until they “disclosed,” too.)

So, this is our story. The main “witness” apparently didn’t see anything because he sat under a table with his eyes closed, but yet described what he says he didn’t see in rich detail. The girl says that she and the other boy loved to play sex games together and they did it often. (Boe and Ingalls apparently ignore those statements, as they don’t fit their narrative.)

The two boys claim that Bob threatened them, although when they give Boe reasons as to why they would voluntarily leave their houses to go to the home of a “dangerous predator” on three consecutive days, none of them involve threats. (The boys wanted to play video games, while Jane hoped that Alex would be there.)

Furthermore, they voluntarily left their air-conditioned houses in the 100+ Phoenix heat to spend hours in a passively-ventilated attic where temperatures would be upward of 140 degrees, and the Jacobson boy would not let them leave. Except he let them leave because it was time for the other kids to go home, according to the police document.

I don’t know about my readers, but some things seem to be missing here. First, we have covered the attic business, and the heat and condition of the attic itself make it highly unlikely that children could have engaged in anything up there for a couple of hours. Second, the coercive and dishonest method of Boe’s questioning clearly taints the questioning, and Kerwyn and I both suspect (we emphasize the word “suspect”) that the transcripts of the interviews would demonstrate the dishonesty of this so-called investigation.

Third, the girl’s claims that she and the other boy have been doing sex play on their own damages the “he forced us to do this” narrative that Boe, Ingalls, and the others involved in this case are trying to project. Boe’s failure to follow up on this line of questioning demonstrates to us that he saw this “revelation” as being a problem, so he just let it be.

Once again, we see police and prosecutors trying to pound square pegs into round holes – insisting all the while that the pegs are round. There is something else that is important here; not only are aspects of these accounts not believable, but the material we have seen is the basis for holding a 14-year-old boy in custody and threatening to try him as an adult and destroy his life.

This is a situation in which child-on-child touching and imitation sex play was discovered by parents. When that happened, the kids acted like, well, kids. They made up stories that Bob had forced them to do it instead of admitting that they were doing it on their own without coercion. Yes, they knew they should not have been doing it, but by accusing Bob, they could (in their minds) get off the hook.

The parents, not surprisingly, in this day of getting the authorities involved in everything, went to the police, and the police were all-too-happy to feed the fires of hysteria. In an earlier age, police would have told the parents that their kids were lying to them (and, by the way, the parents would have known that and probably not gone to the police in the first place). Unfortunately, with false accusations being the order of the day with law enforcement and "child protective" organizations, we can see that this case got legs and it was "on with the show."

One would hope that police and prosecutors would have more sense, but perhaps that is hoping for too much. Once again, we see a rush to judgment based upon flimsy evidence and a set of conflicting statements.

Phoenix advertises all around the country in colleges for new police recruits. An advertisement that was in the hall outside my office had a picture of a woman in civilian clothes looking at herself in a mirror wearing the blue costume of the Phoenix police, with the heading something like “Picture yourself as a Phoenix police officer.”

The woman in the mirror is wearing a police hat. From what I have seen in this case, like so many others in Phoenix, maybe this wannabe cop should have been wearing a dunce cap.

Miscarriage of Justice in Maricopa County, Part III: Feeling Even More Heat

In an earlier post, I pointed out something that should have been obvious to the police and so-called child protective workers in Phoenix, but conveniently was ignored by authorities: an unfinished attic with passive ventilation/cooling is NOT going to be a place where young children are going to be engaging in sex play for at least two hours in June in that city. Why? No one is going to be playing around in temperatures upward of 150 degrees F.

That's right; authorities are alleging that the Jacobson boy was able to coerce three other children into an attic where temperatures would be at a level to where they easily could cause death for anyone who stayed up there for two hours, let alone children in the 9-12 range. To give further evidence, the authorities allege that one of those days was a Monday, and according to Accu-Weather, the Monday temps in June in Phoenix were 108, 101, 105, and 112.

Kerwyn called a number of companies in the Phoenix area that do attic ventilation and they told her that even with the light-colored tiles that people have on their roofs in that area (as opposed to black asphalt shingles), temperatures in a passively-ventilated attic would get to about 150 degrees or so. In other words, the Phoenix police and the "child-protective" bureaucracies want us to believe that children could "play" in that atmosphere for a couple of hours with no harmful physical results.

This, of course, is nonsense. Sheer nonsense. Utter nonsense. This is something that ordinary people can understand without having to own a degree in this or that. However, the so-called experts of Maricopa County, the same people who tried to convict an innocent woman of murder, complete with wanting to have her executed, only to be confronted with hard evidence that she did not kill anyone.

Not surprisingly, we see that Jennifer Ingalls, the same "child protective worker" who played a role in the Randall case is involved in this one. This is a woman who cannot tell the difference between a harmless picture of a child in a bathtub and outright child pornography.

(I would love to do a major article on the fact that the "law enforcement experts" in this country today are less capable than ever of being able to deal with evidence and make sense from it. Where everyone else sees white, these people insist on seeing black. Watching the so-called experts in the Duke Lacrosse Case try to engage in outright Harry Potter Forensic Science, including a belief in things like "magic towels" that could make some DNA disappear while leaving traces of DNA of others, tells me that we now are in an age in which the authorities prefer fantasy to the truth.)

So, we are supposed to believe that somehow a 14-year-old boy was able to coerce children from their own homes, force them into an attic where temperatures were 150 or so degrees, and force them to do disgusting things for a couple of hours while rolling about on a dusty floor of particle board. Furthermore, we are supposed to believe he was able to do this at least two days in a row, and having these children being exposed to temperatures that often result either in death or serious health effects in other children resulted in no appreciable effects upon these particular children.

This, people, is nothing more than Harry Potter Forensics. This is utter fantasy, the very kind of thing that so-called experts are supposed to be able to discern as being nonsense. Instead, we have police and prosecutors wanting us to believe the unbelievable.

I wish this were just an isolated incident. However, don't forget that most prosecutors and police lined up to support Mike Nifong even when bloggers and attorneys were blowing huge holes in his evidence. Don't forget that police and prosecutors line up behind lies and forgeries in the Tonya Craft case, in which we were supposed to believe that Ms. Craft was molesting little children in front of other children and adults -- yet they saw nothing.

If you want to understand why I no longer have any confidence in police and prosecutors to tell the truth, this is why. When these people are trying to convince us that we are supposed to believe fantasy over basic logic, then we no longer are in an age in which truth matters. When a member of the Georgia State Bar tells me that lying, forging documents, and subornation of perjury is just another day at the office for prosecutors who "are just doing their jobs," then we have to understand that the unthinkable has happened: The authorities in this country really do prefer lies to the truth, and they insist that the rest of us go along -- or else.

Miscarriage of Justice in Maricopa County, Part II: Feeling the Heat

NOTE: My two-part series is going to be a three-part series, as a casual question from Kerwyn tonight has led to some facts that, frankly, the police, prosecutors, and investigators in the case involving the 14-year-old boy in Phoenix are not going to be able to sidestep. So, as you will see, Part II is going to be dedicated to some common sense about Phoenix, Arizona, in June.

As you can see from the Accu-Weather temperature list from June, 2010, Phoenix is one very hot place in the summer. (I remember driving there the first Saturday of June, 2006, and it was 114 degrees in the late afternoon in Needles, California, which is just across the Colorado River from Arizona.)

OK, let us do some thinking, which is not what police and prosecutors often do. (Scheming, yes; thinking, generally not.) According to our crack "investigators" Carola Jacobson's son was supposed to have coerced three other young children into an unfinished attic -- really, a little more than a crawl space -- that was NOT AIR CONDITIONED during three consecutive days in June.

Think about it. As I noted in this post, a woman died in Arizona after being left in a "punishment shack" in 107-degree heat for four hours. However, we are supposed to believe that for three days in a row, four young children did "sex play" in a tiny attic room in the middle of the day for several hours at a time, but no one got sick from the heat. Furthermore, we are supposed to believe that they actually could pull off such a feat. Right.

To give readers a better sense of the alleged "crime scene," I have put a couple of pictures of that attic space and would ask them to visualize four children rolling about the floor, at least two of them naked, on days when no one would want to stay in such a hotbox for more than a few seconds.

No doubt, the authorities will try to come up with something that will explain away that which cannot be explained. That is typical of police and prosecutors today. I remember the Duke Lacrosse Case when the Durham police and prosecutor Mike Nifong desperately tried to come up with an explanation that could fit the facts as everyone knew them.

Other than some Duke faculty members and hardcore feminists and racialists, the square peg could not be pounded into the round hole. Likewise, the authorities in Maricopa County want us to believe that for three days in a row, the 14-year-old boy forced three other children into a room where temperatures easily could have been above 125 degrees. Furthermore, we are asked to believe that he forced them in that tiny space to do all sorts of sex play for several hours. Right.

In Part III, we will take a hard look at the police reports. As readers will see, there are even more holes in the prosecution's case, not that police and prosecutors in Maricopa County -- or most other places in the USA, for that matter -- care about the truth.

However, there ARE people in this country who do care about the truth, and we won't be silent.

Miscarriage of Justice in Maricopa County, Part I

In my post last week on the current brutality in Maricopa County, Arizona, I did not give any names in the case which I now am following, given that the principals all are juveniles. However, this post will name some names and explain what is happening and why I will not back down from reporting the case.

I also will explain the problems that criminal defendants have in dealing with attorneys, especially attorneys that are unethical or simply see their jobs as offering their clients up to prosecutors as so many sacrifices. Let me begin.

This past year, Phoenix police arrested a 14-year-old boy, on charges of child molestation. In typical Maricopa County fashion, the boy is being held in juvenile detention without bond, and the prosecutors are threatening to have him tried as an adult.

His mother, Carola Jacobson, contacted me and we have talked several times and emailed, so I am about as up on this case as I can be. However, I have not simply taken her word for it that her son is innocent; instead, Kerwyn and I have read the police reports and Kerwyn, being someone who knows both the details of these reports and the various police tactics, has told me that the interviewing techniques used by the police on these children are inappropriate at best and brutal at worst.

Furthermore, when placed in context with one another, the various statements simply don't make sense, according to Kerwyn. What is bad, however, is that if the police reports, which invariably are "sanitized" to place police in the best light, describe testimony which Kerwyn calls "babbling bullsh-t," then one only can imagine what the transcripts and videotapes are going to show.

According to the police, prosecutors, and child "protective" services people, Ms. Jacobson's son "coerced" some other children into playing "Truth or Dare" with one another in the attic of his house. Interestingly, the "investigators" claim that the children were there against their will and that the accused kept them from leaving. Conversely, the boy denies having ANY involvement with these "activities."

However, since this is alleged to have happened on at least three occasions, one is left to wonder why these "terrified" children came back to the Jacobson house for more. (I'm sure that the prosecution and investigators can come up with some lies on that one, just as the LMJC prosecutors were able to explain away the odd fact that Tonya Craft's "victims" came back to her house even though they supposedly were terrified of the "abuse.") In my post on the actual police reports, I will deal specifically with the logical difficulties.

(The reason that the authorities continue to hold the boy is that the families of the so-called victims claim that their children are "terrified" of the boy's release, and that he poses a "danger to the community." Right. Kids who willingly went to a boy's house numerous times suddenly are frightened of the same boy. Give me a break.)

This case, however, has some very interesting and compelling twists. First, Ms. Jacobson is from Germany (I have told her she is like Tonya Craft with a German accent), and her son is a German citizen. The brutality being shown toward this boy is not going to resonate with the German authorities, who are going to want to know how the child's rights are being protected by the American "justice" system.

In other words, we have the possible makings of an international incident and a number of us are wondering how this will figure into the larger mix. Given the very bad PR that Maricopa County already has managed to create with its brutal system of "justice," I doubt that the German government will be pleased to see one of its citizens -- and a child at that -- being brutalized by the local authorities.

Second, there have been lawyer difficulties. After her son's arrest, Ms. Jacobson contacted attorney Michael Urbano, who assured her that he would fight for his rights and all that. She told him up front that she and her son wanted NO plea deals, but almost immediately, Urbano was trying to talk the boy into taking a plea.

The last straw was the hearing this week regarding the boy's possible release to home confinement. Not only was Urbano unprepared, but he finally admitted to Ms. Jacobson that he had not even read the police reports, nor had he filed a request for discovery materials, including the interview transcripts. In other words, he was doing nothing but setting up his "client" in the name of defending him.

That was enough, and Ms. Jacobson now has a new attorney, and things look a bit more promising. In my second post in this brief series, I will look closely at what came from the police reports.

Phoenix, Maricopa County, and Brutality to Children

Phoenix, Arizona, and the surrounding Maricopa County long have had a reputation of having its legal institutions being synonymous with lawlessness. Here is a place where a mentally-ill female prisoner literally was tortured to death by being put in a metal shack for four hours, exposed to the brutal desert heat until she died.

(After World War II, German and Japanese soldiers who did such things to American prisoners of war were executed. Maricopa County has decided that no one on the prison staff would be prosecuted. Please do not try this at home with anyone you know as only police and prosecutors have a "get out of jail free" card.)

Arizona's brutality is not limited to torturing mentally-ill women to death, however. No, the state also brutalizes children, and in the coming weeks, I will be dealing with an egregious case that reflects just how Phoenix and Maricopa County used unconscionable interrogation tactics on a young child in order to get him to say what the detective wanted him to say, rather than telling what most likely was the truth.

This particular case is more proof that Arizona, Phoenix, and Maricopa County operate according to a code of "ethics" that make the LMJC look like a paragon of justice. That's right: these are people who make people like Tim Deal and Holly Kittle look to be competent and truthful. Lord help us.

Not surprisingly, this is a child molestation case, another one in which the authorities are hellbent on pursuing a specific narrative, and they are willing to use whatever tactics necessary to get the story they want, the truth be damned. While Kerwyn and I went over the police reports, Kerwyn found something very, very disturbing: the "interviews" were not interviews at all; instead, they were interrogations in which Det. Terje Boe of the Phoenix Police Department threatened one child with a lie detector test, and continually told lies to the children in order to get them to change their stories.

Sitting with Boe was Jennifer Ingalls, an infamous Child Protective Services worker who already has been involved in some high-profile, false accusation cases, including one in which she tried to have parents who took photographs of their two very young children taking baths thrown into prison for "child pornography."

What we know so far is shocking. A 14-year-old boy is being held without bond in a juvenile detention facility in Phoenix, and the authorities are determined to try him as an adult. The only "evidence" of child molestation comes from some young children who were "encouraged" by Boe and Ingalls to change their stories, and who also have had their parents involved in telling the children what to say.

Not surprisingly, the authorities in Maricopa County (home of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio) are making it difficult for the boy's mother even to get normal documents that are supposed to be made available quickly to defendants. In the meantime, the Maricopa County DA's office is trying to find a way to try this boy as an adult.

Yes, that is right. The same office that refused even to consider bringing the tiniest of criminal charges against prison workers who literally tortured a mentally-ill woman to death is teaming with local police to engage in brutality against a young teenager.

The "law" in Arizona definitely is skewed. Police gun down unarmed people and assault others, and Phoenix police are at the top among the largest U.S. cities in per population shootings. Phoenix and Maricopa County are places where people truly must fear the occupying costumed army known as the "police."

There will be more on this case as we get material. As in the Tonya Craft case, we will not back off.