There are two sides to every story, except for former Maricopa Deputy County Attorney Lisa Aubuchon. In Lisa’s case, there is only one side: hers.
Last Monday Aubuchon was fired. Her inevitable dismissal has been looming since her sovereign leader, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, resigned at the beginning of April.
According to an article in The Arizona Republic, Chief Deputy County Attorney Paul Ahler said that Aubuchon “misused the awesome power of the prosecutor's office” and “brought discredit to county service.”
This is not a shockingly original viewpoint. But upon closer examination of Thomas’ “enforcer,” the stunningly absurd potential for misuses of the prosecutor’s office becomes apparent — and truly frightening.
On the shoulders of Thomas and Sherriff Joe Arpaio, Aubuchon’s anthology of unethical behavior ranges from intimidating a detective into collaborating her indictment of a judge to intentionally misrepresenting cases to grand juries when evidence was too insufficient to stand on its own.
So can we ever trust that the power of the prosecutor’s office is being treated with restraint and exercised justifiably?
After all, one of the main safeguards against abuse is the supervision and intervention of the federal government, which, as highlighted recently, suffers from the same exploitative diseases.
An article published Thursday in The Arizona Republic, accounts the indictment and trials of Tommy de Jong, a local dairy farmer, who was charged with three felony counts of pollution in 1996, despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped him build his wastewater-containment system for his farm in 1992.
Research documents show repeated instances of “federal lawyers lying to judges, withholding evidence, coercing witnesses or violated the rights of defendants in other ways.”
Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Roger Strand ruled that federal lawyers knew of de Jong’s innocence and still continued a prosecution that was “not substantially justified and was in bad faith.” De Jong was reimbursed for his legal fees.
De Jong commented, “Their concern was not to do what was right. It was to win. Prosecutorial zeal overcame their integrity.”
The same criticisms have followed Lisa Aubuchon. Quoted in an Arizona Republic article back in April, Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney who has worked with Aubuchon, said, “My criticism of Miss Aubuchon would not be the quality of her pleadings or her presence before the judge as much as it would be an apparent lack of understanding of a role of a prosecutor.”
Proving his point, Aubuchon said, “If I believe in a case, I’m going to go forward on it … I’m going to do what I think is the right thing.”
What Aubuchon failed to realize is that her personal belief does not hold up as evidence in a court of law.
With great power comes great responsibility. Prosecutors, though only human, have been endowed with superhero strength.
But federal investigations against Thomas and Arpaio continue to yield little substantial public results, despite the apparently copious amount of evidence compiled against them — and nobody seems to mind because all expectations have vanished. Good prosecutors, the Spidermen, must necessarily exist outside the realm of public recognition, but human nature tends to create, or at least showcase, more Green Goblins.
Contact this aspiring superhero at djoconn1@asu.edu
