Andrew Peyton Thomas (born 1966) is an American politician, author and former attorney. He was the county attorney for Maricopa County in Arizona from 2004 until April 6, 2010. During his term in office, he was known for his anti-illegal immigrant policies. On April 10, 2012, Thomas was disbarred by a disciplinary panel of the Arizona State Supreme Court for his actions as county attorney.
Early life and education Thomas was born in Long Beach, California, in 1966 and spent most of his childhood in Missouri's Ozarks. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Missouri in 1988 and earned his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1991.
Early career Thomas moved to Arizona to join a law firm in Phoenix, where he practiced civil litigation, and left in 1994 to be Assistant Attorney General for Arizona, followed by posts as deputy counsel and criminal justice policy advisor to governor Fife Symington III. Thomas later became chief attorney at the Arizona Department of Corrections.
In 2002, Thomas easily won the Republican nomination for Arizona Attorney General, but lost the general election to Terry Goddard, though he managed to make waves with strong stands against crime, abortion and, especially, illegal immigration.
Thomas joined the Maricopa County Attorney's Office as a Deputy County Attorney in 2003, then ran successfully for Maricopa County Attorney in 2004, having campaigned for state-based laws and initiatives against illegal immigration, pledging to pursue "fetal homicide" cases, and opposing same-sex marriage. He took office in January 2005, with virtually no prosecutorial experience.
Maricopa County Attorney
Elections Thomas ran for Maricopa County Attorney in 2004 on a platform of seeking tougher sentences for violent criminals and stopping illegal immigration. He posted the phrase "Stop Illegal Immigration" on his campaign road signs.
Thomas faced the Democrat Don Harris in the general election. Thomas was endorsed by The Arizona Republic newspaper, the outgoing Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, then Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon, and the former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods.- Thomas won the election easily, with over 58% of the votes cast.
In his 2008 re-election bid, Thomas faced Democrat Tim Nelson. Thomas lost many of his 2004 endorsers. The Arizona Republic wrote "Thomas simply has worn his intensely partisan Republican politics too boldly on his sleeve. Nowhere has that partisanship been more in evidence than in his rabid pursuit of the small fry of illegal immigration, the petty hoodlums and the traffic violators." Rick Romley stated "Police chiefs tell me that the Maricopa County attorney's relationships with their police agencies are at an all-time low. And people are fearful that they are being targeted just because of the color of their skin." Thomas still won the election decisively, beating Nelson by an over 7% margin.
Policies As a candidate for Maricopa County Attorney, Andrew Thomas campaigned on "tough on crime, tough on illegal immigration" principles, and promised to stop illegal immigration. As Maricopa County Attorney, Thomas also focused on the rights of crime victims, and adopted tough policies on violent crime, child exploitation, identity theft and repeat offenders. During his time in office, he lobbied for and helped pass legislative bills targeting identity theft, human smuggling, control of methamphetamine, crimes against unborn children and victims' rights.
Illegal immigration
As Maricopa County Attorney, Thomas kept the issue of illegal immigration at the forefront of Arizona politics.
Thomas prosecuted illegal immigrants as co-conspirators in smuggling themselves, under his interpretation of Arizona's 2005 human smuggling law. This practice was initially upheld by Arizona's appeals court in 2008, but was found unconstitutional by the U.S. District Court in Phoenix in 2013, with the current Maricopa County Attorney declining to appeal the ruling.
Thomas helped draft and campaigned for Proposition 100, a ballot measure aimed at denying bail to people who are in the U.S. illegally and charged with a range of felonies. During the campaign for the ballot measure, Thomas asserted that "[f]ar too many illegal immigrants accused of serious crimes have jumped bail and slipped across the border in order to avoid justice in an Arizona courtroom." Approved in 2006 by nearly 80% of the state's voters, the law was challenged by the ACLU in a 2008 class-action, and ruled unconstitutional by an en banc panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in October, 2014.
Thomas was a strong supporter of Arizona's 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act, a law intended to regulate the presence of illegal immigrants in the state.Plascencia, Luis F.B., Employer Sanctions in Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia edited by Kathleen R Arnold p. 179 Sometimes called the "Employer Sanctions Law," it makes it a felony for a person to take the identity of another person, whether real or fictitious, for the purposes of obtaining employment, and provides civil penalties for employers that intentionally or knowingly employ an alien who does not have the legal right or authorization under federal law to work in the United States. After the act was signed into law, Thomas set up a web site that explained the law, and provided a form to report violations. In cooperation with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Thomas' focus of enforcement was on the apprehension of unauthorized workers through workplace raids or through traffic inspections. Few charges were brought against employers.
Thomas was also an ardent supporter of Arizona SB 1070, also known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, that at the time of passage in 2010 was the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in recent U.S. history, but which was largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012.
Tough on Crime Thomas helped draft and campaigned for Proposition 301, an Arizona ballot measure which toughened sanctions for abuse of methamphetamines, including amending Arizona law so that a person convicted for the first or second time of personal possession of methamphetamines could be sentenced to a term in jail or prison, allowing judges to use a jail term as a condition of probation to force methamphetamine users to comply with court mandated drug treatment and rehabilitation. In 2006, Proposition 301 was approved by 58% of Arizona's voters.
Thomas put in place a policy in which defendants in most cases were not given the opportunity to negotiate and plea down charges for serious offenses, but rather were required to plead to the most serious charge or face trial on that charge. The list of crimes which were not eligible for plea bargain included second degree murder, manslaughter, aggravated assault with injury or a weapon, sexual assault, arson of an occupied structure, armed robbery, first degree burglary, kidnapping, drive-by shooting, discharging a weapon at an occupied structure, and assault by prisoners with intent to incite riot.
In his first two years in office, Thomas nearly doubled the number of times his office sought the death penalty, despite the number of first-degree murder cases remaining more or less the same. In 2007, Thomas sought the death penalty in almost half of potential first-degree murder cases. This policy change contributed to a backlog of capital cases that crippled the county's public defender system. Judge Timothy Ryan, then Maricopa county's assistant presiding criminal judge, stated "We had more death-penalty cases on our plate than any jurisdiction in the nation, [such] that we didn't have enough prosecutors, judges, or qualified defense attorneys to keep things moving along at a rate that anyone could define as satisfactory." Ultimately, all but a few of the 2007 death-penalty cases brought by Thomas' office ended in guilty plea bargains to reduced charges.
Community outreach Under Thomas, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office expanded their community outreach programs by sponsoring informational websites which published DUI offenders' photographs online, provided news roundups pertaining to regional crime, and discussed illegal immigration issues.
Immediately after starting, Thomas made major changes to the county attorney's office staffing. Among his goals was increasing diversity, and two-thirds of the new appointments were women and minorities. He was criticized for demoting two division chiefs: Paul McMurdie from appeals and Cindi Nannetti from sex crimes. Nannetti was named state prosecutor of the year in 2004 and he was particularly criticized for that move. Nannetti was replaced by Rachel Mitchell.Leonard, Christina. New Maricopa County attorney shakes up staff, Arizona Republic (Phoenix, Arizona) 10 Jan 2005, p. 19 – accessed via Newspapers.com
Conflict with Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Superior Court judges
Thomas engaged in a high-profile conflict with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who are responsible for allocating funds to his office. The dispute, in which he was joined by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, resulted in a number of lawsuits, with legal costs to the county for recent disputes exceeding 2.6 million.
The conflict also resulted in Arpaio investigating and Thomas obtaining multiple indictments against County Supervisors Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox.
Thomas originally obtained indictments on Stapley on December 2, 2008, on 118 felony and misdemeanor counts dealing primarily with financial disclosure irregularities. In an effort to mediate differences with the Board of Supervisors, Thomas transferred the case and criminal investigations to the Yavapai County Attorney's Office.http://sonoranalliance.com/2009/12/08/stapley-wilcox-indicted/ All of the counts in the indictment were subsequently dismissed, as it was found that Stapley had not actually violated any County regulations regarding financial disclosures. Thomas then took the case back from the Yavapai County Attorney's office, and obtained a second indictment against Stapley, on 27 similar felony and misdemeanor counts, on December 8, 2009.
The United States Postal Service granted a request by Thomas and Arpaio to track Wilcox's mail. Using this information, Arpaio and Thomas obtained search warrants for other information and raided a company that had hired Wilcox. Thomas obtained an indictment of Wilcox, charging her with 36 felony counts related to failing to disclose business loans she took out from the business finance arm of an organization which had business before the Board of Supervisors. In February 2010, Pima County Judge John Leonardo, appointed by a special master of the Arizona Supreme Court to hear the matter, ruled that Thomas had acted unethically, and had prosecuted Wilcox for political gain and retaliation, despite conflicts of interest that should have precluded his office from prosecuting. In January 2011, After a ten-month review, Gila County Attorney Daisy Flores concluded there was insufficient evidence to pursue a criminal case against Wilcox. Wilcox sued the county and was awarded a settlement of nearly 1 million in 2011. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.
Related to the Wilcox indictment, and a subsequent attempt by the MCSO to intimidate her attorney, The Arizona Republic editorialized that Thomas and Arpaio were misusing their powers to "intimidate and harass their political enemies."