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A Justice Department probe is ongoing.
The thug tactics of the sheriff made him a darling of conservative cable television and national talk radio and a target of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other mainstream media.
But the closed-border crowd loved Arpaio. Mitt Romney even summoned the sheriff to the Midwest to drum up anti-immigrant voters during the Republican primaries.
Sheriff Arpaio's roundups climaxed shortly before this month's election when a heavily armed posse raided the City Hall and library of Mesa, a community where the chief of police and mayor had publicly opposed Arpaio's brutal tactics. Armed like SWAT teams and accompanied by dogs, more than 60 deputies arrested three suspected Mexicans employed to empty trashcans.
The sheriff that Napolitano had teamed up with, when it suited her political agendas, was so out of control that the governor eventually cut off what funds of his she controlled through federal grants. It slowed Arpaio down not one bit.
But Governor Napolitano, better than almost anyone, knew precisely what she was doing when she, once again, cynically climbed into bed with the sheriff to write Michael Chertoff.
If not for Governor Napolitano, Sheriff Arpaio would, and should, have been prosecuted 10 years earlier.
The Justice Department of the United States notified the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on March 25, 1996, that Sheriff Joe Arpaio was under investigation. In a 15-page letter, federal prosecutors laid out their concerns that Arpaio had willfully violated the constitutional rights of prisoners in his jail.
The concerns were not picayune. Arpaio was accused of excessive brutality and ignoring serious medical needs.
Janet Napolitano, U.S. Attorney for Arizona, was part of the Justice Department and kept in the loop. In fact, she was copied on every piece of correspondence in the matter.
Not coincidentally, Arpaio's tactics endeared him to the voting public, which kept the sheriff's approvals rating near an unprecedented 80 percent. The sheriff propelled this groundswell of support with an unending series of media pronouncements about his prisoners: "Making conditions so miserable they will never want to come back," "It's lucky [they] have food."
The sheriff bragged that he spent more on feeding the department's dogs than he spent on inmate chow. He clothed them in pink underwear, housed them in tents, and worked them in chain gangs. While the conditions garnered enormous gouts of publicity, the stunts masked the brutal conditions inside the cells.
In June, three months after the Justice Department's letter, Arpaio's jailers killed inmate Scott Norberg.
The following year, 1997, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno lodged an official complaint in the courts against the sheriff over the conditions in the jail.
As is common in these cases, the Justice Department reached a settlement with the sheriff in which he agreed to a long list of stipulations designed to alleviate the human misery in his cells.
But Arpaio's capitulation to the Justice Department was hailed by the sheriff, not surprisingly, as a victory over Washington bureaucrats.
If Arpaio's smug declarations were not a shock, the behavior of Napolitano was.
About to declare her own candidacy for Arizona Attorney General, Napolitano joined Arpaio at his press conference in a blatant attempt to court the sheriff's support in her upcoming race.
Napolitano declared the federal lawsuit nothing more than a "technicality" and castigated the settlement as merely "a lawyer's paper" ("U.S. Lawsuit Re-Alleges Abuse in Jails," Tony Ortega, November 6, 1997).
Sheriff Arpaio was thrilled and threw his considerable support behind Napolitano in the election.
The details behind the Justice Department investigation and the reforms that Arpaio agreed to enact should pose little mystery to Barack Obama.
The 1996 letter citing Arpaio's violation of prisoners' constitutional rights was signed by Obama's close personal friend and the current governor of Massachusetts, Deval L. Patrick, then-assistant U.S. attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.
What Obama cannot know is that Janet Napolitano's protection of Sheriff Joe Arpaio was more nefarious than has been reported.
In a recent interview, the attorney for the deceased Scott Norberg revealed for the first time that Napolitano's behavior went shamelessly beyond simply endorsing Sheriff Arpaio.
In Arizona, the killing of Scott Norberg on June 1, 1996, dogs Arpaio in the press to this day. The story appears whenever an overview of the sheriff is written.
What has never been revealed is the role Janet Napolitano played in protecting the sheriff from indictment.
When an unconscious Norberg did not respond to a deputy's command, the victim was attacked and beaten by nearly a dozen jailers. The initial violence was witnessed by a holding tank full of prisoners. Norberg was then transferred to a restraint chair where he was shackled and further pummeled until he died.
The family's subsequent lawsuit was settled for more than $8 million dollars in 1999, three years after the death and three years after the letter from the Justice Department.
This month, the Norberg family's attorney, Michael Manning, revealed that Sheriff Arpaio was involved in a massive cover-up that provoked the lawyer to turn over evidence to the FBI.
Notes taken by a deputy the night of the killing were destroyed. Critical X-rays were destroyed. County authorities, under the watchful eye of the sheriff, hid the fact that Norberg's larynx was fractured.
When the family's independent autopsy uncovered the larynx fracture, county authorities claimed the damage to the bloody tissue must have occurred following the death, a biological impossibility. After the county demanded to take custody of the larynx, the evidence was then destroyed.
Manning handed over numerous boxes of evidence to the FBI and then submitted to two interviews with Napolitano's staff. He characterized the prosecutors as very excited by the evidence and the interviews.
Keep in mind that, by the time Manning revealed the details of the cover-up and the destruction of evidence, Napolitano had already appeared at a press conference absolving Arpaio of any responsibility in the Justice Department settlements.
