During a State Bar of Arizona disciplinary trial, a top prosecutor testified that former Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel was directly informed about the controversial plan to charge protesters as gang members.
Vince Goddard, a former MCAO division chief, said he directly informed Adel about the charges at the outset of the case.
He made the claim during a cross-examination by Ernest Calderon, who’s representing fired prosecutor April Sponsel. She’s the fired attorney fighting to keep her law license after working with Phoenix officers to invent a gang and charge protesters as members.
Read the transcript below:
CALDERON: April proceeded initially with the charges, her supervisor and you concurred, correct?
GODDARD: Yes.
CALDERON: Did you run it up the chain of command?
GODDARD: Yes.
CALDERON: Who did you run it to?GODDARD: Allister Adel.
CALDERON: The County Attorney?
GODDARD: Yes.
CALDRON: Did you explain the case to her?GODDARD: Yes.
CALDERON: And what was her response?
GODDARD: I should say, I explained the case to her as I knew it. Her response, it was short, words to the effect of, "We'll keep an eye on it," or something like that.
POLITICALLY CHARGED: ABC15 investigates Phoenix protest cases
Sponsel’s defense against the State Bar largely rests on the argument that her case was widely accepted by top MCAO officials until an ABC15 investigation into the prosecution aired three months after the initial arrests.
The testimony from Goddard, who brought his own attorney to the trial and resigned during the scandal’s fallout, directly contradicts previous claims from Adel and her office about the former county attorney’s knowledge of the plan.
RELATED: What did Allister Adel know about protest ‘gang’ charges?
ABC15’s “Politically Charged” reports proved that Sponsel and several Phoenix officers presented clearly false testimony to a grand jury to get the gang charges. In maybe the most egregious example, they compared the protesters to the Bloods, Crips, and Hells Angels, records show.
In the wake of the news coverage, MCAO officials held a number of high-level meetings and staff briefings about the case.
During the trial, another top MCAO division chief, Ryan Green, claimed that Sponsel misled top officials about the evidence in the protest gang case and it wasn’t until ABC15’s reports that they discovered there were problems.
Green was assigned to take over the cases after the news series launched.
He testified that he quickly learned many of the underlying facts initially presented by Sponsel - like protesters sharpening their fingernails and umbrella tips to attack officers – were completely false.
MCAO was eventually forced to drop every open felony protest case brought by Phoenix police in 2020 because of the scandal.
Contact ABC15 Chief Investigator Dave Biscobing at Dave@ABC15.com.
