A tale of 2 Arpaios: Sheriff Joe takes the stand

There were two Sheriff Joe Arpaios in federal court Wednesday.

The one on the witness stand facing civil-contempt allegations seemed browbeaten, hoarse and removed from the operational details of his office.

It was a marked contrast from the confident, defiant Arpaio of March 2012, appearing on the courtroom video monitor Wednesday.

That Arpaio struck a different tone, vowing to continue the brand of illegal-immigration enforcement that made him famous.

Arpaio took the stand for the first time this week to answer allegations he violated a federal judge's orders stemming from a class-action racial-profiling suit.

He told plaintiffs' attorney Stanley Young that he remembered hearing about the preliminary injunction when it was issued but said he didn't have knowledge of all the facts of the order.

"I delegated this court order to my subordinates and also to my counsel that represented me," he said.

Arpaio said he didn't recall if he ever did anything to ensure his office was complying with the order, saying he handed over the task to his former deputy chief, Brian Sands.

Earlier in the day, Sands also distanced himself in testimony from enforcement responsibility, telling his attorney that it was typically his subordinate's duty to implement training materials. Sands said he didn't know why the training module was never completed.

The sheriff and his top aide, Jerry Sheridan, have already admitted to contempt of court, so plaintiffs are using their time to convince District Court Judge G. Murray Snow that Arpaio's violations were a matter of intentional neglect. Arpaio's attorneys have repeatedly denied this classification, attributing the failures to a lack of organization.

In December 2011, Snow instructed sheriff's officials to stop detaining people solely on the basis of being in the country illegally, without suspicion of a state crime. Absent a state crime and special local authorization, the duty to enforce illegal-immigration laws is the federal government's alone. But the message never made it to deputies, who continued the practice for 18 months.

Plaintiffs on Wednesday used Arpaio's own words to bolster their theory, by way of press releases, interviews and taped depositions.

After Arpaio confirmed he knew the order existed, Young rolled out a procession of evidence — all time-stamped after December 2011 — to demonstrate the sheriff's defiance.

Young presented a Feb. 9, 2012, Sheriff's Office press release, in which Arpaio promised he would "not be deterred by activist groups and politicians" and would continue to enforce "all immigration laws."

Arpaio testified that the release should have included "illegal" before the word "immigration," and should have said all laws that the agency can enforce. Arpaio said some of the press releases issued throughout the years may have contained errors.

Young then played a clip published March 1, 2012, from Univision News, where Arpaio defends his policies.

"I'm going to continue to enforce the laws," he said. "If they don't like what I'm doing, get the laws changed in Washington or in the state of Arizona."

Young turned off the clip and turned to Arpaio, saying, "You know that the laws that are enacted in Washington, D.C., are federal laws, right?"

Plaintiffs used similar tactics during the original racial-profiling trial. Snow later found the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office had violated the constitutional rights of thousands of Latinos during their regular and "saturation" patrols.

Snow's 2013 ruling relayed a message about Arpaio's defiance: Had the Sheriff's Office ceased immigration enforcement after they were stripped of the federal authority to do so, the plaintiffs' claims might have been moot, he wrote.

"As was made clear by the testimony of the sheriff and other members of the MCSO command staff at trial, nothing has changed," Snow wrote.

A finding of intentional violations after this week's civil-contempt hearing amounts to a referral for criminal contempt of court.

Also Wednesday, one of the sheriff's lead attorneys, Tom Liddy, partially removed himself from the case. Liddy, who works for Maricopa County, said he was concerned about a conflict of interest after last week's federal Appeals Court ruling that named the county along with the Sheriff's Office as a party in the racial-profiling case.

Arpaio is scheduled to continue his testimony Thursday morning.