Programming note: We won’t be publishing our morning email on Monday because of the government holiday. We’ll be back on Tuesday with the morning email and have some in-depth original reporting for you next week.
It’s been a wild year in Pima County’s justice court system.
In case you need a refresher: Justice courts are the ones you’re most likely to end up in. They’re run by “justices of the peace,” elected judges in each county who are often retired politicians padding their pensions and making healthy sums for a job that doesn’t require a law degree.
They handle things like traffic tickets, DUIs, misdemeanor crimes, small claims disputes and evictions. Each justice court district (Pima County has 10) also elects a constable, a quasi-cop who is responsible for serving paperwork for the court and, importantly, evicting people.
Justices of the peace and constables positions are relics from Arizona’s territorial days that still hold a lot of power. The requirements and training are minimal, and as independently elected officials, justices of the peace and constables have little oversight. They can’t really get fired, except in an election.
It’s a system rife for abuses — and Pima County has seen lots of them. The person deciding your future or throwing you out of your house could have a rap sheet of their own.
Out of Pima County Justice Court system’s 20 elected officers, one resigned as a convicted tax cheat,1 one shot at an unarmed man,2 one can’t carry a gun to the office because a female coworker has a restraining order,3 and another is a chronic criminal speeder who crashes cars and pees on trailers while serving papers.4
Oh, and the woman who was overseeing the courts is a drunk driver who’s in business with the tax cheat judge and who appears to have used her position to move her DUI case so the judges wouldn’t find out.5
Needless to say, all that crime and dysfunction really screwed up the court system.6
So what? Why are we rehashing all this weird old news from Pima County?
Every few years, a scandal pops up of such epic proportions in such an obscure elected office in Arizona (we’re looking at you, former Maricopa County Assessor/absentee employee/Medicaid fraudster/Marshallese baby smuggler Paul Petersen) that it causes the public to ask not only why do we elect these people, but why do we elect these positions?
And it seems Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry is asking himself the same thing.
Huckelberry recently hired former Pima County Sheriff Mark Napier and tasked him with a comprehensive review of the constables (but not judges) in Pima County.
The memo Napier delivered showed some constables seem to hardly work, but get paid the same as the rest, and that they’re a bitterly fractured bunch.
But more importantly, there’s a deep divide in their eviction philosophies, with a “rigid faction,” mostly made up of retired law enforcement and a competing faction that “believes that reasonable steps to assist a person being evicted from their home are appropriate,” Napier wrote.
That divide is even reflected in their clothes, with the rigids dressing like “quasi-law enforcement” and the others dressing like “urban social workers.”
“The county should be concerned that our citizens being evicted from their homes are treated differently based on where they reside within boundaries on a map,” he wrote.
Napier proposed a host of reforms to the county’s constable system, including more balanced distribution of workload and more uniformity in appearance and approach to duties.
But the proposal didn’t go far enough for Huckelberry. In a memo Wednesday, he asked the county attorney to investigate whether the county can eliminate the constable positions as they come up for re-election and replace them with county employees who can do the job better, cheaper and with more accountability than independently elected officials.
“If so, I will be recommending that all of the elected constables be phased out and replaced with civil service employees at a cost significantly less than the present cost of compensating a constable at the rate of $67,000 annually, plus benefits.”
If not, he said, he’ll recommend eliminating the two justice court districts altogether — cutting two constables and two judges — in 2024, noting that the workload doesn’t justify having 10 districts for justices of the peace, either.
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