Arpaio's top aide accused of lying to court monitor

An attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union ripped into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's top aide Friday morning, continuing what has been a harrowing week of contempt hearings for the embattled agency.

Arpaio and a handful of brass are accused of three broad allegations of civil contempt of a federal court's orders stemming from an 8-year-old racial-profiling lawsuit.

Plaintiffs' attorney Cecillia Wang of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project dedicated the morning to one of these allegations—that the Sheriff's Office had deliberately defied U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow's order to discreetly collect video evidence related to the case.

This failure has been laid at the feet of Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, who quickly directed a subordinate to issue an e-mail blast to commanders in an effort to retrieve the recordings.

Biggest development:

Plaintiffs said not only did the gaffe almost certainly jeopardize the internal investigation — why would those with incriminating self-recordings hand over this evidence? — but that Sheridan lied and tried to cover his tracks when asked about the order.

Sheridan maintained Friday that he honestly forgot that he had ordered the e-mail, which is why he didn't mention the directive when he met with a court-appointed monitor later that day.

Wang was unconvinced.

"So you had over a 2-hour meeting with members of the monitor team, you argued back and forth about how best to do it, at the end of the day a consensus was reached, and during that entire time, you did not mention you had already set in motion your earlier plan … the e-mail?"

MCSO response:

Although Sheridan didn't deny the judge's order was violated, he testified Friday that he still believes the e-mail was the most efficient way to go about the collection.

"How could we prevent anyone if they had the … desire to destroy a video?" he said. "The only way we could come up with that is if we served 700 search warrants all at once, and I don't think that would even work."

Why it's important:

In March 2014, the high-profile death of former Deputy Ramon "Charley" Armendariz unearthed a series of damning revelations about Armendariz and the Sheriff's Office. Armendariz, a former member of the human-smuggling unit, had been stashing drugs, IDs, wallets, license plates and torn-up citations in his home, indicating some sort of a shakedown effort on those he pulled over.

Sheriff's officials were quick to term Armendariz a "rogue" deputy, but could not distance themselves from another key discovery in the deputy's home — Armendariz had been recording his own traffic stops.

The videos signaled that the Sheriff's Office had not turned over all evidence that was required of them during the discovery phase of the racial-profiling case. Although this revelation did not come to light until one year after Snow issued his May 2013 ruling that the Sheriff's Office had racially profiled Latinos, he ordered officials to quietly collect all on-duty recordings from their deputies.

Quotable:

Wang: "When you spoke with the monitor, you told him Chief Trombi sent the e-mail without your knowledge. That was a lie, right? ..."

Sheridan: "First of all, be careful about calling me a liar. I wasn't aware that he sent that e-mail out."

What's next:

Plaintiffs' attorneys will continue examining Sheridan on the issue of videotapes and other allegations of contempt of court when the hearing resumes at 1:30 p.m.