Heat City

Two more Maricopa County court buildings were evacuated today, one because of a bomb threat and the other because of a cloud of pepper spray, marking another day of chaos in the Valley’s justice system.

At about 10 a.m., a person called authorities to say there was a bomb at a downtown Phoenix building that houses a number of courtrooms handling drunken driving cases, as well as the chambers of several court commissioners. A short time later, someone released pepper spray inside another lower-court building that’s also home to the county Public Defender’s Office.

Sheriff’s deputies believe the bomb threat for the court building at Madison and Central avenues was related to one that cleared out the county’s main court facility less than a block away on Wednesday, causing extra headaches on a day that was already marred by political battles over the case of a jailed detention officer.

It’s been three days since Maricopa County detention office Adam Stoddard was ordered to jail for contempt of court, and the sheriff’s office, which both employs him and supposedly has him in custody, has yet to offer proof he’s behind bars.

Stoddard’s lawyer, deputy county attorney Tom Liddy, said the detention officer surrendered at about 6 p.m. Tuesday. He even told a crowd yesterday that his fellow “brothers and sisters” in the sheriff’s office treated Stoddard “with the utmost respect” as they took him into custody.

But by today, the young officer who was caught on courthouse security video taking confidential documents from a defense attorney still has not shown up in any of the county’s jail records. Additionally, the sheriff’s office has refused to say where he is being held “for his security” and also declined to release a booking photo or inmate number.

To some, at least, it’s enough to question whether Stoddard is really in jail.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputy Sean Pearce tells reporters his union is standing behind jailed detention officer Adam Stoddard. Photo by Nick R. Martin

The timing of it all was impeccable.

Some 20 minutes before a group of union members planned to rally in the shadow of Maricopa County’s main courthouse on Wednesday, their colleagues in the sheriff’s office gave the green light to reopen the facility after it had been evacuated for a morning bomb threat.

The result was that the law-enforcement unions got an audience in the hundreds as crowds streamed back into the courthouse for afternoon proceedings. But more importantly, they go a much-larger platform to call on the Superior Court to release an officer jailed for defying a judge’s order.

“We demand that detention officer (Adam) Stoddard be freed and his record cleared,” shouted Luis Altamirano, vice president of the Maricopa County Association of Detention Officers, as the crowd stared and listened.

Three buildings make up the main facilities for the Maricopa County Superior Court.

Maricopa County’s main courthouses in downtown Phoenix have been shut down today as a bomb threat and a possible sickout by detention officers crippled one of the largest justice systems in the nation just a day after a sheriff’s officer was jailed for violating a court order.

A spokesman with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said 911 dispatchers in Phoenix took a call of a bomb threat at about 10 a.m., and evacuations of the county’s three main Superior Court buildings began quickly after that. Hundreds of people poured out of the buildings, which make up one of the five largest court systems in the nation, and proceedings have been called off for now.

Detention officer Adam Stoddard ignored his attorney’s advice tonight and bunked up in a Maricopa County jail, despite the fact that he cannot yet be booked there.

His attorney, Tom Liddy, said earlier that a clerical error by a judge had prevented the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from booking one of their own into the jails.

“I told him to go home,” Liddy said. “But he said, no, he wanted to stay because that’s what the judge ordered.”

He showed up for jail and left just as quickly.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office says it is unable to book one of its own, detention officer Adam Stoddard, into jail tonight because of a supposed clerical error.

Stoddard apparently surrendered to the custody of his own agency in the past hour, but according to his attorney, the sheriff’s office told him it could not book him because of some sort of error with the paperwork from the judge who sent him there.

“The judge screwed up the order of confinement,” said deputy county attorney Tom Liddy.

Maricopa County detention officer Adam Stoddard will surrender to jail tonight ahead of his midnight deadline to do so, a spokeswoman with the sheriff’s office confirmed.

Spokeswoman Lisa Allen said in an email that Stoddard will be housed in one of the county jails, but she declined to name which one “for his security.” Whatever the location, though, the move guarantees he will be put up in a jail run by the agency he works for.

A Maricopa County justice of the peace said Monday that a defendant who was arrested last year for clapping during a public meeting was “objectively accurate” when she called the deputy arresting her a “fascist.”

In a ruling published yesterday (PDF), Justice of the Peace Steven McMurry slammed the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for the incident in which five local activists were arrested and eventually charged with disrupting a Dec. 17, 2008 meeting of the county Board of Supervisors.

He was supposed to go to jail today, but Maricopa County detention officer Adam Stoddard is on the job instead, working in a courtroom just two floors above the judge whose orders he publicly defied Monday night.

Public defender Maria Schaffer said an attorney in her office spotted Stoddard in uniform, guarding the seventh-floor courtroom of Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Lisa Flores this morning. “He was there,” said Schaffer.

About 12 hours before he returned to the job, Stoddard stood outside the same courthouse and told a pack of journalists he would not obey an order by Judge Gary Donahoe to apologize for rifling through an attorney’s confidential files and seizing a letter from a defendant. The Oct. 19 incident took place in Flores’ courtroom, no less.

Stoddard told reporters he would rather go to jail than apologize.

Watch 3TV’s report, which includes the full statement from detention officer Stoddard.

He did almost everything he was supposed to do. He gathered the area’s media. He prepared a statement. He read it aloud.

But detention officer Adam Stoddard did not apologize on Monday night. Instead, he defied the order issued by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe, which required him to say he was sorry for taking an attorney’s confidential documents six weeks ago or else go to jail today.

“Judge Donahoe has ordered me to feel something I do not” Stoddard said. “He has ordered me to say something I cannot.”

The young detention officer, dressed in his brown duty uniform and wearing a badge, told the pack of journalists and other observers in front of the county’s main courthouse in downtown Phoenix that the judge had essentially “put me in a position where I must lie or go to jail.”

“I will not lie,” he said.