Grand Jury Story
Published: May 12, 2008
<nyt_text>
</nyt_text>On Oct. 18, Jim Larkin and his wife,
Molly, were in bed in their home outside Phoenix when a group of men in
unmarked cars pulled up and began knocking on the door and shining
flashlights in the house, saying, “You know what we want.” Recalling
the night on the phone last week, Mr. Larkin said, “I had no idea what
they wanted.” Mrs. Larkin immediately called 911 and said, “Oh my God,
help us, please,” begging the police to find out who was threatening
them at their door.In fact, the cops were already on the case.The
Maricopa County Selective Enforcement Unit had arrived to arrest Mr.
Larkin for the crime of disclosing the inner workings of a grand jury.
Michael Lacey, the executive editor of Village Voice Media, was
arrested in similar fashion at his home near Phoenix. Mr.
Larkin and Mr. Lacey are the two principal owners of Village Voice
Media, publisher of The Phoenix New Times. Earlier that day, under Mr.
Lacey’s and Mr. Larkin’s bylines, the paper published an article about
a subpoena it had received demanding, among other things, the Internet
addresses and domain names of members of the public who had visited the
newspaper’s Web site.Reporters have ended up in handcuffs in the
United States before — some have gone to jail to protect the identity
of sources — but it is a rare moment when someone here is imprisoned
for the crime of typing.In the months since, The Phoenix New
Times has steadily covered a story it finds itself in the middle of,
but its executives recently decided to match the legal aggression from
local authorities with some aggression of their own. At the end of last
month, Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin filed a lawsuit accusing the Maricopa
County sheriff, the county attorney and a special prosecutor of
engaging in a pattern of negligence, conspiracy and racketeering
motivated by an effort to suppress the newspaper’s right to publish and
the public’s right to know.The Phoenix New Times, the original
paper of what is now a chain of 16 alternative weeklies that includes
The Village Voice and LA Weekly, has been engaged in a running battle
with the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, on and off since 1992. He
first came to prominence as a jailer who mandated that his charges wear
pink underwear, eat green bologna and live in a tent city where a neon
vacancy sign he installed always glows, a reminder that there’s always
room at Joe’s Inn. He is the architect of both female and juvenile
chain gangs, a first by most accounts, and transferred more than 3,000
prisoners to new facilities in their underwear, a scene that was
captured eagerly by television crews.Sheriff Arpaio has been
historically a darling of television news. While his willingness to
create a kind of tented gulag in the desert might be the source of
amusement to those who tire of stories of coddled prisoners, it should
be pointed out that some of those prisoners have an alarming tendency
to die while under his care. On May 3, The East Valley Tribune
reported, “More than 60 Maricopa County jail inmates have died since
2004, many from illnesses that would be treatable in normal medical
settings.”More recently, he has been the self-appointed tip of the spear in the fight against illegal immigration, organizing posses that swept Hispanic neighborhoods and arresting people his officers suspected of being illegal aliens.The
Phoenix New Times and the sheriff have traded roundhouses for years,
but the dustup took a serious turn in July 2004, when John Dougherty,
then a reporter at the paper, wrote that Sheriff Arpaio had invested
$690,000 in cash in commercial real estate at a time when his salary
was $72,000 along with a modest federal pension. Mr. Dougherty also
reported that the sheriff had removed information from public records
about his commercial holdings. (Since then, Mr. Dougherty has been
freelancing, including for The New York Times.) In the final
paragraph of the article, the newspaper published Sheriff Arpaio’s home
address, a violation of a little-known Arizona statute that prohibits
publication of the address on the Web if it poses “an imminent and
serious threat” to the sheriff or his family. (The statute came into
play when the newspaper story was placed on The Phoenix New Times Web
site.)In April 2005, Sheriff
Arpaio requested an investigation by the county attorney, arguing that
he had been the subject of death threats in the past and that the
publication of his address, which was freely available in a variety of
public records, put his family at risk. The county attorney,
Andrew Thomas, appointed Dennis I. Wilenchik, a political ally and
former employer, as a special prosecutor in the case in 2007. Mr.
Wilenchik issued subpoenas to The Phoenix New Times in August for
sources and records tied to articles about Mr. Arpaio and also sought
information on any member of the public who had visited the newspaper’s
Web site since 2004, presumably to see who had been mousing over his
home address.On Oct. 18, The New Times ran an article under the
bylines of Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey criticizing the broad subpoenas;
later that same day, the two were picked up and taken to jail. In the
ensuing uproar, Mr. Wilenchik was fired and the charges against the two
New Times executives were dropped.Mr. Lacey said the suit filed
by himself and Mr. Larkin against Sheriff Arpaio and the county
officials was necessary because the sheriff continues to restrict
access to information to The New Times and other news media.“Suing
people is not the core of what we do, but our arrest was just the
culmination of an ongoing reign of terror that is still continuing,” he
said. “He went after inmates, then he went after immigrants, and now
it’s journalists.”A spokesman for the sheriff initially stated
that he would respond to an interview request, then a few minutes later
sent an e-mail message that said “the office is unable to comment on
pending litigation.” Mr. Thomas sent a statement by e-mail suggesting
that, “After endangering the sheriff and admitting violating the law in
their own tabloid, the editors of The New Times now have filed a
frivolous lawsuit that reads like a John Grisham novel.”Considering
that journalists generally merit public sympathy on par with
dogcatchers and meter maids, there had been little outcry over the
sheriff’s efforts to limit access and reporting of his office’s
activities, but the grab for the Web addresses of plain old citizens
got plenty of people’s attention. “I am unaware of any case in
which the government has sought to know not just the identity of
readers, but their surfing habits,” Mr. Lacey said.If Mr. Larkin
and Mr. Lacey want their pound of flesh from Sheriff Arpaio, they will
have to get in line. Over $50 million in lawsuits have been filed
naming the county and its sheriff as a defendant. Sheriff Arpaio and
Mr. Thomas are both up for re-election this fall, and the growing
liabilities could be an issue in the coming campaign.Sheriff Arpaio told The Arizona Republic that he couldn’t care less.“They
can’t take their own medicine, so they have to be like crybabies and
file a lawsuit against the sheriff and the county attorney. So you know
what? I welcome the lawsuit. I welcome being sued.”Reporters
around the world work under state-imposed limits on information, and
there are even places where police show up in the dead of night and
spirit them away to jail for having the temerity to commit journalism.
It is a grim tableau repeated too often all over the world: it happens
in Iran, it happens in China, it happens in Zimbabwe. And last fall, it
happened in Phoenix.<nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id><nyt_update_bottom>
</nyt_update_bottom>
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