Girl’s botched rape investigation leads to major lawsuit settlement

PHOENIX — Officials agreed Wednesday to pay $3.5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged metro Phoenix’s sheriff botched the investigation into the rape of a 13-year-old girl and failed to arrest the suspect who then went on to sexually attack her again.

The girl’s rape case was among more than 400 sex-crime cases that were inadequately investigated or not looked into at all by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office over a three-year period ending in 2007.

The decision to resolve the lawsuit by the girl’s guardians marks the latest in a long string of legal settlements against Arpaio’s office. The county had previously paid more than $68 million in judgments, settlements and legal fees for the sheriff’s office during Arpaio’s 22-year tenure. Some settlements resolved lawsuits filed over the treatment of inmates in Arpaio’s jails and the sheriff’s failed corruption investigations of political foes.

The settlement applies only to the lawsuit over the 13-year-old girl, who eventually got an abortion after she became pregnant from a subsequent attack.

“We’re talking about old history, but sometimes you learn from old history,” Arpaio said of the bungled cases at a news conference Wednesday. “You try to do everything you can to hope that it never happens again.”

He said he hopes the settlement money will go toward helping the victim and characterized the case’s resolution as a good business decision, since the girl’s family had sought $30 million.

The botched sex-crimes investigations served as an embarrassment for Arpaio, who promotes himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” and eventually reopened the more than 400 of its sex-crime cases. The sheriff apologized in December 2011 for the bungled cases, and his office has since said it has moved to clear up the cases and taken steps to prevent the problem from happening again.

A former supervisor says her investigators were pulled away from time to time to help with training efforts and Arpaio’s immigrant-smuggling squad.