Stertz, Freeman and McNulty will prove to be very interesting
On Monday, a lawsuit challenging the IRC’s legislative map begins before Judge Roslyn Silver. The judge allotted both sides 15 hours to present their case.
Last week, both sides presented their list of witnesses to the judge. Witnesses for the plaintiffs include; Rick Stertz, a GOP IRC member, Freeman, a GOP IRC member, RNC redistricting consultant Thomas Hofeller, Willy Desmond , a Strategic Telemetry mapping technician, Democratic Party interim Executive Director DJ Quinlan, Democrat IRC members Jose Herrera and Linda McNulty.
Witnesses for the defendants include; Stanford political science professor, Bruce Cain, who is a redistricting expert, and IRC Colleen Mathis, and former DOJ voting rights specialist Bruce Adelson.
Attorneys will be allowed to question witnesses in any subject during cross-examination, rather than only those issues which arise from direct examination in an attempt to speed up the trial.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Michael Liburdi, told the Yellow Sheet that the testimony of Stertz, Freeman and McNulty will prove to be very interesting.
According to the Yellow Sheet, the plaintiffs have had to fight for cooperation from the IRC in the discovery process. The IRC has balked at turning over “instant message conversations that may have been sent between commissioners, mapping consultants and outsiders.”
Recently the court ordered the IRC to comply with the plaintiffs’ request for instant message conversations between Strategic Telemetry’s Strasma and Desmond the plaintiffs learned about through emails they received in the discovery process.
The IRC has played games with the court first saying that the request for instant messages was not explicitly included in the plaintiffs’ request. According to the Yellow Sheet, the three federal judges hearing the case disagreed and ordered the commission to turn over all electronic communications including instant messages.
When the specificity argument didn’t work, the IRC’s attorneys claimed instant messages are like telephone conversations and a record of them may not actually exist. The IRC also argued that the discovery request was too burdensome.
The IRC attorneys were ordered by the court to determine if the instant message conversations were recorded, and to determine what it would take to produce them.
In his deposition, IRC commissioner Rick Stertz told attorneys with the Attorney General’s Office that the IRC’s Chairwoman, Colleen Mathis, offered him a quid pro quo, the two were parked in separate cars in the same parking lot. Stertz could see Mathis across the lot on the phone with him.
Mathis and her husband Christopher, who was visibly huddled up speaking in her ear, told Stertz that someday he would need her help.
Christopher Mathis has since been called the sixth member of what should have been the five member Independent Redistricting Commission, in a recently filed lawsuit against the Commission. The Commission is supposed to be comprised of two Republicans, two democrats, and one Independent member.
The suit alleges that not only was there a sixth member, Christopher Mathis, but his wife Colleen was not an independent Independent.
Christopher Mathis is a democratic operative. Christopher served as treasurer for the 2010 campaign of Nancy Young Wright, a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives from Legislative District 26 in Pima County. Mathis failed to mention this and other relevant information on her application.
The complaint alleges that “Although his service as a candidate campaign treasurer in 2010 would have disqualified him from appointment to the AIRC, Mr. Mathis effectively became a ‘sixth commissioner’ by closely counseling Defendant Mathis on every aspect of the redistricting process, including votes taken, and interacting with stakeholders to ascertain their support for various proposals. Mr. Mathis attended virtually every public meeting of the AIRC, often spoke with Democratic operatives during hearings, listened in on many conference calls among the AIRC Defendants, and acted on Defendant Mathis’s behalf to round up votes on decisions coming before the commission. Mr. Mathis even went so far as to propose a deal to establish legislative district boundaries in which the Democrat commissioners would draw districts in southern Arizona and the Republican commissioners would draw those in northern Arizona. For someone constitutionally barred from service on the commission, Mr. Mathis was allowed to have unprecedented involvement in and influence on the redistricting process.”
Commissioner Rick Stertz describes times when he had to shoo Christopher Mathis away from conversations Stertz was having with the Republicans’ legal counsel. Mathis made his presence known and he seemed to be almost always present.
In the now notorious conversation, in which Mathis offers the quid pro quo, Christopher Mathis appeared to be heavily engaged.
In that conversation, Stertz asked Mathis twice if she was offering a quid pro quo, and twice she responded that someday he would need her vote on something that really mattered to him. He refused, and never once did she vote with the Republicans on the commission.
As a matter of fact, the republican commissioners were denied their preferred legal representation. Instead, Mathis sided with the Democratic commissioners Linda McNulty and Jose Herrera in choosing a lawyer for the republican commissioners. They chose Joseph Kanefield as its Republican legal counsel. Kanefield only registered as a Republican nine months prior to his response to the request for proposals and was a registered Democrat for at least 17 years prior.