The racist Joe Arpaio got his precious presidential pardon but it can’t erase the fact that he intentionally violated a court order and was convicted for it, a federal judge has decided. Arpaio had petitioned the court to toss out his criminal record after Donald Trump’s pardon spared him from a possible six months in the slammer. The judge said nope:
In her order Thursday, Phoenix-based U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton rejected arguments from Arpaio's lawyers and Justice Department prosecutors that the longtime Maricopa County sheriff was entitled to have all rulings in the case vacated, including the guilty verdict the judge delivered in July after a five-day trial.
“The power to pardon is an executive prerogative of mercy, not of judicial recordkeeping," Bolton wrote, quoting an appeals court ruling. "To vacate all rulings in this case would run afoul of this important distinction. The Court found Defendant guilty of criminal contempt. The President issued the pardon. Defendant accepted. The pardon undoubtedly spared Defendant from any punishment that might otherwise have been imposed. It did not, however, 'revise the historical facts' of this case."
Arpaio, a Trump surrogate, was finally kicked out of office last November by Maricopa County voters, but not before his reign of terror left black and brown communities devastated. As his deputies swept workplaces to arrest immigrant parents and inmates in his jails were starved, tortured, and left in blistering heat, Arpaio’s office ignored or under-investigated hundreds of sex crimes, including child molestation.
In 2013, El Mirage resident Levalya Beyart told the Phoenix New Times “that after she reported that her 13-year-old, mentally disabled daughter had apparently been raped in her home, a sheriff's deputy told her the case wasn't a priority.”
After his conviction this past summer, Arpaio went on a right-wing media campaign to lobby for his pardon and mercy from jail—perhaps in his shriveled black heart fearing he’d be treated the same way he’d treated other prisoners—and got it. But, it doesn’t change the fact that he remains a criminal, and will always be one.