Sheriff Joe Arpaio gets a lot of attention in Phoenix for being corrupt, infantile, fanatical, and power hungry, but he's not the only bad public servant out there. Bill Montgomery, the Maricopa County Attorney, is one of the nation's worst prosecutors. Montgomery, a Republican, is facing re-election on Nov. 8. His opponent, former prosecutor and Democrat Diego Rodriguez, has been critical of Montgomery’s record. “People just want to know the County Attorney’s Office matches their idea of justice,” he said earlier this week. According to Rodriguez, Montgomery “is a political animal. He’s not what I am comfortable having administer justice in this county.
Montgomery is bad on a whole host of issues—the death penalty, abortion, immigration, marijuana, sex crimes, racial justice, animal protection, transparency, and innocence claims, to name a few—and we will cover them all over the next few weeks. But for now, lets just start with the fact that Maricopa administers the death penalty more often than 99.5 percent of other counties or county-equivalents. Yes, 99.5 percent.
All of that is because of Bill Montgomery’s office. In fact, between 2010, the year he was elected, and 2015, Bill Montgomery's office was responsible for 28 death sentences. From “Too Broken to Fix,” a report from Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project:
Between 2010 and 2015, Maricopa County had 28 death sentences. Maricopa’s rate of death sentencing per 100 homicides is approximately 2.3 times higher than the rate for the rest of Arizona. Though Maricopa has one percent of the nation’s population, it accounts for 3.6 percent of the death sentences returned nationally between 2010 and 2015.
That puts Montgomery's office in the top one-half of one percent when it comes to death penalty sentences. This, despite the fact that death penalty cases are insanely expensive for the taxpayer, and despite the fact that evidence shows that the death penalty isn't a real deterrent.
And, if the sheer number of cases alone isn't adequately concerning, the defendants share some troubling similarities.
For one, 62 percent of those defendants sentenced to death in those five years suffered from "intellectual disability, severe mental illness, or brain damage." There's also a history of racial inequity in death penalty prosecutions—57 percent of defendants sentenced to death have been people of color. What's more, 18 percent of those sentenced to death have been African-American, "even though African-Americans are just six percent of Maricopa’s population." And in a full 21 percent of cases, there's been evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.
Researchers from Fair Punishment Project attribute much of the high death penalty sentences to prosecutorial overreach. “What we saw in Maricopa County that struck us the most was the pattern of over-zealousness from the prosecution,” said Smith, director of the Fair Punishment Project and senior research fellow at Harvard Law School. “Both in terms of pushing the ethical and legal boundaries in cases, and also seeking the death sentence and obtaining it some of the most broken and vulnerable people.”
Montgomery wants it both ways. He wants to sentence a ton of people to death while pretending he's not that bad. The Arizona Republic reported this week that "Montgomery said he has been bringing the number of cases down[.]" But the numbers are clear—Bill Montgomery continues to rack up death sentences more than virtually any other prosecutor, despite evidence of impropriety and racial bias.
Montgomery and Rodriguez are on the ballot in Maricopa County on Nov. 8.