Joe Arpaio

​At a hearing last week in San Francisco, federal appeals court judges grilled a lawyer representing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in a First Amendment lawsuit filed by VVM owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin. Lacey and Larkin sued Arpaio, along with former county attorney Andrew Thomas and a special prosecutor, after they were arrested by Arpaio's deputies on trumped-up charges. The newspapermen alleged that the arrests were part of a vendetta conducted by Arpaio and Thomas against VVM's Phoenix New Times, which for years has run stories critical of the sheriff and his cronies. In fact, New Times' work on Arpaio essentially provided a road map for the U.S. Department of Justice in its recent report about Arpaio's racial profiling of Latinos. Though Lacey and Larkin's suit was initially rejected, in a rare move the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed to rehear the matter in an en banc session. Writing on the law.com website, Kate Moser noted that the justices took exception to several arguments posed by Arpaio's ill-prepared attorney. And VVM's own Peter Jamison, writing in SF Weekly, quoted one justice as saying the facts alleged in the case could provide a basis for the criminal prosecution of "America's toughest sheriff." If the Ninth Circuit should ultimately rule in Lacey and Larkin's favor, the lawsuit could proceed to trial in Arizona.