Wilcox: No Conflict in Voting on Special Prosecutors Issue; Longtime County Supervisor is Under Investigation
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The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted today to publicly release a legal analysis that explains why County Attorney Andrew Thomas' request to hire special prosecutors wasn't being heard.
Click here to read the eight-page analysis, which supports the Supervisors' decision to leave Thomas' request off the agenda for today's meeting. We covered the reasons, as explained to us by county officials, in a blog post yesterday.One interesting aspect to today's vote was that Mary Rose Wilcox, who's under criminal investigation by the Sheriff's Office, took part in it.
Don Stapley, who would be the initial target of the special prosecutors, recused himself from the vote. Wilcox joined the remaining three Supervisors in voting, even though it seems likely that the special prosecutors -- if hired -- would conceivably go after her next.
We asked Wilcox after this morning's Board of Supervisors meeting whether she felt she had some personal stake in the vote on the issue of special prosecutors. She said she didn't.
Wilcox told us that she consulted with the board's attorney, "and they said I had no conflict."
That almost makes sense. Today's vote regarding the prosecutors waived the board's attorney-client privilege and made the legal analysis public. It didn't address directly the question of hiring the prosecutors.
Yet if it wasn't right for Stapley to vote, it's hard to understand why it was okay for Wilcox. It's not like Stapley is currently under indictment -- he, like Wilcox, is merely the subject of a criminal investigation.
In our simple brain, it seems like both should have voted -- or neither.
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