Nah. Someone who was caught nearby where a cop was killed would always tell the truth.
hno:
That piece-of-shit Sheriff in Arizona (Sheriff Joe) has had several lawsuits against him. One was when a small girl was found murdered. Sheriff Joe rounded up a drifter who was nearby so he could show the people how tough he was on crime and how quick he was to find "the perpetrator of such a heinous crime". Turns out the guy wasn't even guilty. But this piece-of-shit Sheriff had him put in the general population where he was beat down and nearly killed.
http://www.arpaio.com/wordpress/?p=25
"Lynne Montavon: “I know I’ll probably get heat for talking.”A little background: In late December, I wrote about the strange case of a diminutive loner scooped up by Maricopa County sheriff’s detectives in 2001 for questioning in the rape and murder of 8-year-old Elizabeth Byrd.
Sheriff Joe apparently believed this man constituted the quick and decisive arrest he had promised the horde of reporters and camera crews that converged to cover the story. From his sprawling “mobile command site” at the scene of the murder, Arpaio quickly leaked to Valley media that his team of investigators had nabbed a strong “investigative lead” in the case, a drifter named Jefferson Davis McGee.
The problem was, McGee was guilty of nothing more than looking scraggly and living near a stretch of county land where the murder took place.
Yet Arpaio thought he had his man. And from what I’ve been told since my last column on the McGee case, it seems that the sheriff might have gone to great lengths in an attempt to get a confession out of this high-profile suspect.
The problem the sheriff’s office faced was that, after many hours of interrogation, McGee hadn’t confessed to the murder.
So sheriff’s personnel decided to book McGee into the jail on an unrelated charge. There was an outstanding warrant against him on an old petty theft beef (turned out McGee wasn’t guilty of that crime, either).
Then a strange thing happened. Against departmental policy regarding accused child molesters or child killers, McGee was placed in the jail’s general population of maximum-security inmates.
It’s the most dangerous place in the jail. And it’s common knowledge that child molesters, or “chomos” as they’re called by inmates, are in the most danger of all.
Chomos, almost without fail, get beaten in maximum security – which is why it’s standard policy to put them in cells by themselves.
In my December column, I related that internal sheriff’s office documents show that employees in the jail’s classification department already had segregated McGee when an order came from office superiors to have him placed in gen pop.
Of course, once he was moved, the inevitable happened. Fellow inmates found out what everybody else knew from local TV – that McGee was the key suspect in the girl’s murder. They then spent more than 10 minutes taking turns beating him in his bunk."
