Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio may be the most despicable law enforcement officer in the country. A Justice Department legal complaint against his office alleges widespread constitutional violations and mistreatment of Latinos, including an alleged assault against a pregnant Latina woman, widespread racial profiling and use of racial slurs, and incidents where “female Latina [limited English proficiency] prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of [the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's] failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”

He also may not be sheriff much longer, as an effort to recall Arpaio already collected 120,000 of the 335,000 signatures needed to force a recall election.

A bill that passed the GOP-controlled Arizona House of Representatives could make Arpaio very difficult to defeat, however. Currently, a recalled official in Arizona faces a single election that could include challengers from their own party. The GOP bill would change this process so that the parties would choose their candidates in a primary election, and then Arpaio would likely face the winner of the Democratic primary in the general election.

The reason why this change matters is because Maricopa County is very Republican — Romney won the county by nearly 12 points — so it would be difficult for a Democrat to defeat Arpaio in a one-on-one race. At the same time, Maricopa’s Democratic voters could potentially join with a minority of the county’s Republicans in order to elect a Republican challenger to Arpaio. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when Democrats joined with some Republicans to remove anti-immigrant Senate President Russell Pearce (R) and replace him with Republican challenger Jerry Lewis in a 2011 recall election.

In other words, it may be the case that a majority of Maricopa’s voters want to remove Arpaio, and thus he could lose a recall election under the current rules. Under the GOP House’s bill, however, Arpaio would likely have a clear shot to survive the recall election so long as a majority of the county’s Republicans vote for him in the primary election.

The justices are still considering a case that could potentially invalidate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, but Arizona Republicans are already pushing legislation that’s unlikely to survive contact with the landmark voting rights law if it is not struck down by the Court.

The Arizona Senate recently passed a bill which makes it a felony for anyone working or volunteering on behalf of a political committee or other organization to deliver mailed ballots to a polling place — a bill which could significantly undermine voter turnout efforts in Latino communities. Arizona is one of nine states that must, because of the Voting Rights Act, submit any new voting law to the Justice Department or a federal court to ensure that the law “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”

In 2011, Latino voter turnout jumped nearly 500 percent in one district in Phoenix, Arizona. That same year, Russell Pearce, the former state senate president behind Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070, was recalled from office. In both cases, a major driving force was grassroots volunteers — often high school students — who provided full-service voter turnout operations in Latino communities. These grassroots campaigns would identify voters who received mail in ballots but had not yet returned them, encourage the voter to fill out the ballot, and offer to return it to the polling place in order to make it as easy as possible for the voter to vote. Last year, the Campaign for Arizona’s Future, used this technique to turnout voters opposed to anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio last year. They claim to have turned in nearly 1400 votes using the method that Arizona Republicans now want to criminalize.

So, while there’s nothing inherently racist about regulating how ballots are cast, the bill that recently passed the Arizona senate targets a method of voting that is likely to be unusually common among Latino voters. In other words, the law likely has the “effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color,” and thus is unlikely to survive review under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — unless, of course, the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5.

Seemingly-neutral laws that have a disproportionate impact on minority voters are a common tactic by Republican lawmakers. Voter ID laws, restrictions on registration drives and attacks on early voting all have the effect of making minority voters less likely to vote. As President Lyndon Johnson explained when he originally proposed the Voting Rights Act, “every device of which human ingenuity is capable” will be used by politicians eager to keep certain voters from casting a ballot.

Countless individuals have publicly attested to medical marijuana’s singular effectiveness in alleviating pain, nausea and other suffering. But to those who doubt the credibility of those sources, along comes a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Former U.S. Attorney Mel McDonald, who was a self-professed drug warrior when he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, is now coming out as an avid supporter of medical marijuana. In a YouTube video, he explains his son’s medical transformation after trying the substance:

On August 8, 1997, my stepson Bennett Black was involved in an accident in Gilbert, Arizona. He was crossing the street on a go-pad and was hit by a vehicle going 45 miles an hour. Since 1998, he has had dozens upon dozens of seizures involving epilepsy. There is constant 24-hour nausea. My son had gone from 180 pounds to 119, was literally starving to death. A dear friend had given him some marijuana, illegal at the time, to use thinking that that marijuana would help his condition.

With all of the medicines that we’ve used since 1997, not one has ever been able to solve the problem of the deep and acute nausea other than marijuana. Do not criminalize people that are desperately needing medicine to help them eat and remain alive. Don’t criminalize it and force people like my wife to go underground and to commit crimes to spare the life of her son.

WATCH IT:

McDonald’s state of Arizona now has a medical marijuana law and dispensaries are just starting to emerge, although medical marijuana remains federally illegal. But the video is being circulated after a Republican lawmaker sponsored a ballot initiative to repeal the state’s law. The law is also embroiled in litigation over whether it is preempted by federal law, after Maricopa County appealed a ruling that the law is constitutional.

McDonald, also a former judge and law professor, has become a vocal advocate over the past few weeks, aiming to dispel stereotypes about the types of people who support medical marijuana. In an interview with the Huffington Post, he explains:

Marijuana is the one plant out there that solves enormous problems for people with not only a seizure disorder like my son, but also with cancer and other illness. What I’ve tried to do is to become a vocal proponent that this is not contrived. You don’t have to be riding a skateboard with long hair and be a hippy to realize that there are genuine people that need this. And people that take efforts to block it … [are] just wrong.

Credit: Charlie Leight, The Arizona Republic

On October 10, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez at the border of Mexico and Arizona. According to details in a new autopsy report, Elena Rodgriguez may have been shot as many as 11 times, all but one bullet hitting the teen from behind.

The details are still emerging in an ongoing FBI investigation. Officials say an agent opened fire on the Mexican teen, who was throwing rocks over the border fence. Under the Border Patrol’s current policy, lethal force can be used against someone throwing rocks if agents view a threat. But according to Nogales, Arizona police, it is extremely unlikely those rocks could have hit someone standing next to the fence.

An independent medical examiner who was not involved in the autopsy said the shooting “could be consistent with someone being shot and falling, with subsequent shots hitting the prone body.”

Since 2010, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 19 people. These investigations take years to resolve, and even then it is “extremely rare” for border authorities to face criminal charges. The Department of Homeland Security is reviewing its policy that allows deadly force against rock-throwers, as its current policies face sharp criticism of human rights abuse.