On Thursday, October 19, A Federal Judge shot down former sheriff Joe Arpaio’s bid to sweep his criminal record clean.

Washington Post reports, “In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton said the pardon only freed Arpaio from possible punishment. In a four-page order offering a check on the president’s executive power, Bolton wrote that a pardon could not erase the facts of the case.” It continues, “The president issued the pardon, and Arpaio was spared “from any punishment that might otherwise have been imposed,” the judge wrote. “It did not, however, ‘revise the historical facts’ of this case.'”

We filed their own motions challenging the pardon itself, which can be found here.

Our brief argued, “If the President may employ his pardon power to relieve government officers of accountability and risk of penalty for defying injunctions imposed to enforce constitutional rights, that action will permanently impair the courts’ authority and ability to protect those inalienable rights. The result would be an executive branch freed from the judicial scrutiny required to assure compliance with the dictates of the Bill of Rights and other constitutional safeguards.”

Washington Post  quotes our Legal Director, “We are not aware of a single case in our nation’s history where the president pardoned an elected official for disobeying a court order to stop violating constitutional rights,” from the Intercept in September. “With this pardon, Trump has pushed our country into uncharted territory.”

Read the Washington Post article, here.