Fuentes pleaded guilty to a felony charge of Conspiracy to Commit Honest Services Wire Fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. – Felipe Fuentes, 62, of Nogales, Arizona, pleaded guilty last week for his role in a long-running bribery conspiracy that spanned much of his tenure as the elected County Assessor for Santa Cruz County. You can read our special action petition here.Ĭlick here to read more about Goldwater’s work to protect Arizonans’ right to hold the judiciary accountable.PHOENIX, Ariz. It’s the proper constitutional course-and it protects all voters. The Goldwater Institute will always defend voters’ right to have an equal say in holding their government accountable. In independent style, Arizonans overwhelmingly approved the amendment. So Arizonans removed the offending provision to gain statehood, only for the state’s first legislature to put a constitutional amendment restoring the provision before the voters in 1912. But President William Howard Taft opposed the provision-and he objected to Arizona’s admission into the union over it. When Arizona sought to become a state, our proposed state constitution included a provision guaranteeing Arizonans the ability to vote to recall judges.
Moreover, the state constitution says that privileges such as the right to vote “equally belong to all citizens.”Īrizonans have long cherished their right to hold the judiciary accountable.
#SANTA CRUZ COUNTY PROPERTY TAX FREE#
The Arizona Constitution requires that “ll elections shall be free and equal,” which courts have said means that the vote of each voter must be “equal in its influence.” Ballots must carry the same weight, and voters may not be treated unequally. “The current system is unfair to the millions of Arizona voters who are bound by the decisions of the judges on the Arizona Court of Appeals, and it raises serious constitutional questions.” “If a judge’s decision will affect the whole state, it shouldn’t matter where in the state he or she lives,” says former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Andrew Gould, who serves as special counsel in this matter. In practice, this unjust system means that approximately 60 percent of Arizona voters get to vote in retention elections for Court of Appeals judges residing in Maricopa County (the state’s largest county by far), but only about 10 percent of voters can participate in retention elections for Court of Appeals judges residing in the far smaller Pinal, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Greenlee, Graham, or Gila counties. But since the Arizona Supreme Court only reviews approximately 1 percent of all appellate cases, the Court of Appeals is the court of last resort for most Arizona litigants. Court of Appeals decisions bind all Arizonans in the same way that decisions of the Arizona Supreme Court do, unless and until the state Supreme Court overturns those decisions. Instead, a voter’s residency limits their choices to only those Court of Appeals judges who resided in a corresponding geographic area of the state when appointed.
#SANTA CRUZ COUNTY PROPERTY TAX TRIAL#
But they cannot vote on the retention of all the judges on the Court of Appeals, the state’s intermediate appellate court, which handles appeals from the trial courts and whose decisions set statewide legal precedent. Today, all Arizonans periodically vote on whether to retain each of the justices of the Arizona Supreme Court, the highest court in the state. Goldwater’s special action petition, filed with the Arizona Supreme Court this week on behalf of four voters, urges the high court to strike down the current retention election system for Court of Appeals judges and ensure all voters have an equal say. Now the Goldwater Institute is filing suit to uphold Arizonans’ right to hold the judiciary accountable. And it’s precisely what’s happening to millions of Arizonans under an unconstitutional system that affords only a tiny subset of voters the right to vote in retention elections for judges on the Arizona Court of Appeals, whose decisions affect all Arizonans. That’s what happens when citizens are unfairly denied the right to vote for or against public officials who make decisions that affect their lives.
0 kommentar(er)
