And she has formed a political action committee called Mothers Against Arpaio, with other victims of Arpaio's tactics, to do just that. The 25-year-old single mom wants to run Arpaio - who in elections past has been the state's most popular politician - out of office. Earlier this month, the Saville family filed a $10 million lawsuit against the county for entrapment and wrongly incarcerating James Saville.Īs for Linda Saville, she is not content with just the lawsuit. He faced up to 22 years in prison if convicted of the trumped-up charges designed to boost Arpaio's popularity. What was good press for Arpaio was a horrific experience for James Saville. "The jurors indicated this was clearly a publicity stunt." ![]() "Arpaio had cameras out there waiting to film the arrest," Ferragut says. After the trial, jurors told Ferragut they were convinced that Saville had been a pawn in an elaborate media ploy. James Saville's attorney, Ulises Ferragut, had to prove that the idea of killing the sheriff had started with law enforcement, that deputies or their agents urged Saville to commit the crime and that Saville was not predisposed to do it.įerragut proved all three elements, and James Saville walked out of Arpaio's jail a free man. Saville didn't deserve to be locked up in Arpaio's dungeon.įour years after his televised arrest, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury ruled that Arpaio's detectives had entrapped Saville.Įntrapment defenses rarely succeed because they are exceedingly difficult to prove. This is where Arpaio wished the Saville newsreel had ended. ![]() "Well, we took this guy off the street," Arpaio bragged in his best John Wayne inflection to a television news station after going home to "comfort" his wife in the wake of the alleged foiled assassination attempt. News anchors gushed how they were thankful that Saville's despicable plot had been foiled by vigilant deputies and that the brave Arpaio had averted yet another serious attempt on his life. ![]() That Saville was railroaded was incidental to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, where stroking Sheriff Joe Arpaio's publicity furnace comes well ahead of law enforcement.Īll that mattered to Arpaio and his media czarina, Lisa Allen MacPherson, was that Saville's arrest led the evening television news and was page-one material in the county's daily newspapers.Īnd they got what they wanted: Images of gun-wielding deputies swooping into a parking lot and taking a bewildered and unarmed Saville into custody filled the airwaves. ![]() Poor and confused, Saville was the perfect stooge for yet another Joe Arpaio publicity stunt. James Saville was 18 years old when he was arrested on July 9, 1999, by undercover sheriff's deputies and charged with plotting to kill Arpaio with a bomb.Ī self-described pyromaniac with prior felony convictions, Saville was slapped with a $1 million bond and no hope of getting out of jail before his trial. "He was set up," she says, recalling that day last June. "I swore I was not going to let this happen to someone else," she said about that fateful Friday the 13th, when her kid brother was acquitted by a jury and released three days later from the Maricopa County Jail after spending four years behind bars. Linda Saville leans across the table in a downtown Phoenix restaurant and recites the pledge she made at the moment her brother was acquitted of conspiring to kill Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
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