“Frankly it’s not a hard case to discern what is going on,” Figueroa said. “There’s obviously some hiding the ball going on. I don’t know what’s in those dispatches, phone calls, emails. I don’t know what testimony was presented to the grand jury. But this is, in my opinion — at least from what I’ve seen in the pictures alone, the two pictures here alone — this was a grand jury who not only was able to indict a tuna sandwich but did so.” He dropped the charges with preju- dice. That rarely happens in Arizona criminal courts. The reasons he listed on the dismissal were a lack of disclosure, a violation of Simpson’s rights to a speedy trial, and the lack of response to the pending requests. Prosecutors can never refile the charges. “I’d like to think that I would have made different decisions than what’s happening here,” said Figueroa, who served as Pinal County Attorney in the 1990s. “I’m disappointed. I’m disap- pointed this process has taken so long and I’m certainly disappointed it would appear to be a violation of Mr. Simpson’s rights.” Elevated charges against people who try to sue Simpson’s legal team and other attorneys with clients in Pinal County said they suspect Simpson’s case may be part of a pattern: The sheriff’s office seems to bring criminal charges against people who intend to sue the office. The charges make the plaintiffs’ lives miserable, derail their civil cases and insulate the sheriff’s office from accountability. Last month Phoenix New Times reported that the Pinal County Attorney’s Office filed two misdemeanors against Thomas Garro. On Jan. 9, a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy so violently detained Garro, a 79-year-old deaf Lyft driver, that his passenger called 911. The passenger was terrified of the deputy and thought he was going to kill them during what should have been a drama-free traffic stop. Garro was taken to the hospital after the encounter and released with two civil traffic citations, both of which were later dropped. New Times wrote about the inci- dent and the driver’s intent to file a notice of claim in April. The county attorney didn’t file the charges — passive resisting arrest and failure to comply with a police officer — against Garro until May 25, more than a month later. Billy Peard, an attorney who is helping with Simpson’s case but is not licensed in Arizona and is not representing him, read about the charges against Garro and saw parallels with Simpson’s situation. Simpson filed his notice of claim on Jan. 29, 2025. He was indicted two weeks later. “There might be a custom,” Peard said, using a term for an informal policy or prac- tice within the sheriff’s office. Simpson has since sued the deputy, Brando Reibschied, in federal court. He waited for the criminal case to resolve, knowing those charges could complicate a civil suit. “For the judge to tell me good luck in my civil case in the lawsuit makes me feel that I have a chance against them,” Simpson told Phoenix New Times. “But you know, it’ll only take one other judge to say ‘quali- fied immunity.’ That’s all it takes and this lawsuit is done.” In the complaint, Simpson accuses Reibschied of using excessive force when he tased him during the traffic stop. He also claims the deputy submitted the crim- inal charges against him maliciously as retaliation for his pending civil suit, and violated his First Amendment rights in doing so. Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple and County Attorney Brad Miller are not named in the lawsuit. “I don’t need to fight a cop on the street,” Simpson said of his lawsuit and the resisting arrest charges that Figueroa dropped. “I’ll go to jail. I’ll go spend the night in jail and fight you later. I’ll fight you in court. I’ll fight with whoever I need to fight in court. I’m not gonna fight you on the street. It’s gonna get me dead. The cop is gonna win every time.” When asked for comment, Sam Salzwedel, a spokesperson for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, directed New Times to reach out to the county attorney’s office. “When we receive notices of claim, we pass them along to the county attorney,” he wrote. “That’s pretty much it. We don’t flag people in our system as having filed a notice of claim.” Pinal County Attorney’s Office spokes- person Christy Kelly said she was unable to get in touch with the attorneys assigned to the case in time to comment for this story. How deputies turned a routine stop into a fiasco The pictures the judge referred to in the hearing were screenshots from Simpson’s confiscated dash camera footage. They show Simpson, who Reibschied pulled over for speeding, standing at the rear bumper of his pickup truck, where the deputy had ordered him to stand instead of approaching his window. Simpson’s arms are in the air, and the deputies on the scene are nowhere near him. His legal team obtained the footage through a public records request and included the screenshots in their motion. They later received body camera footage from one of the deputies on the scene through the criminal disclosure process and included screenshots from that footage in the federal complaint they filed. Footage shows Simpson being pulled over on I-10 near Eloy. Reibschied motions at him from his patrol vehicle to get out of the pickup and walk toward him. While Simpson walks to the back fender yelling at the deputy with his arms clearly in the air, another deputy pulls in and gets out of his vehicle. With his arms in the air, Simpson argues with the deputies briefly. Reibschied, who has his Taser out, tries to tase him, missing. A third deputy with a canine walks over from the front of Simpson’s truck. When the Taser misses, the deputy yells at Simpson to get on his knees or he’ll get bit. Simpson starts to kneel when Reibschied fires the Taser again, this time successfully, and Simpson falls to the ground. “As soon as he went to give up it finally worked and he fell,” the deputy wearing the body cam can be heard saying about the tasing later in the footage. Simpson said he was angry that he was being pulled over because he felt the deputy had been driving erratically. He’d been driving behind Reibschied, whose speed was fluctuating, in the left passing lane when he decided to pass in the middle lane. Reibschied then pulled him over. Simpson yelled at the deputy, in part out of anger and in part to be heard over the noise of the traffic. He said he was confused about why he had to get out of his pickup rather than wait in it for the deputy to look at his license and papers. But he complied with all of the orders and was complying when he was tased. Living with charges hanging over his head was stressful, Simpson said. In the year and a half that they were pending, he needed to find new work and a place to live. Knowing that landlords and bosses would run background checks and could reject him for pending felony charges made that process more difficult. But knowing the dashcam video could exist gave him hope. Without it, he thinks he’d have been convicted and serving time. He originally installed them as a precaution. He knew that if he ever got into an accident or needed documenta- tion of a traffic stop, the camera would provide it. But his cameras aren’t always reliable, he said. “Thank God it was working that day,” Simpson said. “It would definitely be my word against his. The video shows that there’s nobody around me to assault. There’s nobody around me to resist.” County attorneys stonewall records requests The federal lawsuit accuses Reibschied of purposefully not handing over the video footage or telling the county attor- ney’s office that it existed before the grand jury because it undermined the case against Simpson. “The assigned prosecuting attorney learned of the existence of this video footage from Plaintiff’s criminal defense attorney,” the complaint reads. After their client was indicted >> p 16 A Pinal County Sheriff’s deputy tased William Simpson during a traffic stop on I-10 near Eloy in Aug. 2024. (Pinal County Sheriff’s Office) The Pinal County Attorney’s Office indicted Simpson with two felonies and three misdemeanors two weeks after he filed a notice of claim that he intended to sue for the tasing. (Provided by William Simpson)
