Andanh.com

Last summer, Dibor Roberts was a nursing student, a soft-spoken Cottonwood woman working four nights a week at an assisted living center in the Village of Oak Creek.

Today, the 48-year-old native of Senegal is a household name in the Verde Valley where police paint her as a lawbreaker on the lam while her supporters shake their heads in disbelief, wondering how this mess got so far out of hand.

“Everybody I talk to that hasn't heard of it goes, ‘Oh my God.' ” said Ethel Short of Cottonwood.

It was 10:45 p.m. on July 29 and Roberts was headed home from work, taking the shortcut to Cottonwood, a dark stretch of Beaverhead Flat and Cornville roads. She was passing a vehicle when Yavapai County Sheriff's Sgt. Jeff Newnum clocked her doing 65 mph in a 50 zone. He hit the lights and went after her but she, who by then had slowed to the speed limit, didn't pull over. Instead, she drove on, stopped at a stop sign, turned onto Cornville and kept going.

Newnum told a Superior Court jury this week that he twice pulled his marked SUV up to the side of Roberts' car to get her attention during the two-mile pursuit. The first time, she ignored him. The second, she was yelling and gesturing.

“I knew I had an angry driver,” he said.

So he -- not knowing what he was facing -- passed her and forced her to stop, approached with his gun drawn, broke out a window with his baton so he could unlock the door and pulled her out of the car.

Meanwhile, she -- not knowing whether the guy in uniform pointing a gun at her car was really a cop -- became terrified, fumbled with her cell phone as she attempted to call 911 and began flailing as he grabbed her. In the struggle, the car rolled onto the officer's foot.

She repeatedly tried to explain why she didn't stop, just as she'd tried to communicate her intentions when he pulled alongside. But she has a heavy accent and he didn't understand.

“I told him I wasn't running away,” she told jurors. “I was just trying to get to a lighted area.”

Roberts, you see, had just seen a Phoenix TV report the previous week about a police imposter pulling people over and was following the advice given by police, to proceed to a safe, lighted area. There was one about three miles ahead.

Roberts, a U.S. citizen since 2006, was handcuffed that night and taken to jail. She, who had never before been arrested, spent six days behind bars before her husband could post the $20,000 bail. She was charged with resisting arrest and unlawful flight, both felonies.

The case has outraged many in the Verde Valley, and women lined long courtroom benches this week for her trial. “I drive that road all the time from Sedona and I tell you, I wouldn't stop,” Julie Grady of Pine Valley told me.

Sheriff Steve Waugh didn't return a call. Earlier, he told reporters that Newnum acted appropriately. “This would not have even occurred had she not been speeding,” he said. “It would not have occurred had she pulled to right side of road as required by state law.”

It also might not have occurred had the officer, once he realized she wasn't a threat, taken a breath rather than a baton to her window, and listened to what the woman was trying to say.

Note to self: avoid Yavapai County when the sun goes down.

The incident has prompted the Rev. Oscar Tillman, head of the Maricopa County NAACP, to ask the U.S. Justice Department to investigate. Meanwhile, Sedona resident Barbara Litrell has launched a campaign aimed at changing state law to give women the right to drive to lighted area when being pulled over. “A Woman's Right to Light,” she's calling it.

Not that it'll be much help to Roberts. It took the jury less than an hour Friday to find her guilty – effectively ending her hope of ever becoming a nurse. Two hours later, Judge Michael Bluff reduced the resisting arrest count to a misdemeanor and gave her six months of unsupervised probation for felony flight.

Making her possibly the first person ever to be convicted of fleeing the cops and obeying a stop sign, all at the same time.

(Column published May 17, 2008.)

From the political notebook:

• Congressional Republicans have finally gotten the memo. Three special-election losses in Republican-leaning districts have convinced them that they are in deep political trouble.

From the early indications, however, the reaction will not be a return to the conservative critique and principles that got them the majority to begin with. Instead, there seems to be a retreat into what Barry Goldwater used to deride as "me-too" Republicanism.

Me-tooism characterized the Republican Party from the Eisenhower administration until the election of Ronald Reagan. Republicans were for whatever the Democrats were for, only a little less of it. They offered imitation liberalism on the cheap. Unsurprisingly, voters generally preferred the original.

In the House last week, Republicans supported a bloated farm bill, basically welfare for rich farmers, 100 to 91. Three members of the Arizona Republican delegation - Jeff Flake, Trent Franks and John Shadegg - did vote against the bill.

And only 25 House Republicans voted against the instruction to the Bush administration to quit filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The reserve is intended as a hedge against a major supply disruption. The vote to stop filling it was a pander on gas prices, propelled by politicians wanting to appear to be doing something.

Some Republicans sought to justify it on fiscal grounds. The federal government, they contended, should be filling the reserve when oil prices are low, not when they are high. But that rationale assumes politicians know what the future price of oil will be and therefore know that today's price is higher than tomorrow's. They don't know that. Of Arizona's normally stalwart Republican delegation, only Franks had the gumption to vote against this pander.


• Given that the farm bill is basically welfare for rich farmers, you'd think urban Democrats would align against it and reform would be possible. If the rich shouldn't get tax cuts, why should they get commodity subsidies?

However, urban Democrats are routinely bought off with increases to food stamps and nutrition programs in the farm bill. And sure enough, Arizona Democrats Gabrielle Giffords, Raul Grijalva and Ed Pastor voted for the thing.

To his credit, Harry Mitchell was one of only 15 Democrats to vote against it.


• Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr announced that he would seek the Libertarian Party nomination for president. This sparked some discussion as to whether Barr could do to John McCain what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore.

While libertarian sentiments are growing among the electorate, the Libertarian Party has never amounted to much more than a statistical asterisk in a presidential election. I doubt that Barr is well-enough known to change that.

Moreover, the assumption that he would draw votes primarily from McCain may be mistaken. He seems mainly animated by what he sees as unwarranted curtailments of civil liberties as part of an overreaction to 9/11.

Barack Obama has been sounding some of the same tones. However, I suspect he will pull his punches with McCain on the issue in the general election, since the public clearly supports a strong governmental response in this area. So, Barr's principal appeal may end up being to ardent civil libertarians looking for a champion, and they are more likely to otherwise be leftist voters.


• Gov. Janet Napolitano's deal with the home builders on two ballot initiatives has been roundly criticized, but mainly on process grounds. The home builders agreed to drop their opposition to a state trust land conservation initiative and support the transportation-tax initiative, in exchange for Napolitano arranging to get impact fees removed from the latter. In reality, such deals with deep-pocketed interests are not at all unusual when crafting ballot measures. What is highly unusual is putting the deal in writing, which is how this one became public. Obviously, there isn't a lot of trust between the parties.

The substantive criticism is more telling. This deal is contrary to the public interest on two counts.

The first is that it probably robs the voters of a full discussion of the state trust land conservation issue. Right now, state trust lands are sold to produce money primarily for K-12 education. Proponents will say that conservation can occur without reducing the funds for education, but that's a very dubious claim. With the home builders sidelined, and no other deep-pocketed interests directly affected, voters aren't likely to hear both sides of the argument.

On transportation, much of the new road building involves better connections between developing nodes and the developed urban areas. These are the sorts of improvements for which user fees are possible and appropriate.

Toll roads most closely tie costs to benefits. However, impact fees on new development do a much better job than a general sales tax.

To stick general taxpayers with the cost of connecting the developing periphery is economically distorting and unfair.

As Republican congressional fortunes continue to deteriorate, John McCain should consider making an open pitch to voters for divided government.

Accountability through testing has improved academic achievement, in Arizona and around the country. However, the unwillingness of the Legislature to make AIMS stick as a graduation requirement offers a lesson.

Former NFL offensive lineman Ross Tucker provides some interesting insight on cheating in the NFL in his most recent column for SI.com. This passage will catch the eye of any true Cardinal fan.

"One season when I was with the Bills, the offensive line coach for the team we were were about to face was fired days before the game. He subsequently called our offensive line coach, Jim McNally, and let him know some of the unique defensive formations we could expect to see that week. Needless to say, the defenders were very surprised how well prepared we were."

Tucker was with the Bill in 2004 when they played the Cardinals in Buffalo. On the day the Cardinals left for Buffalo, coach Dennis Green fired offensive line coach Bob Wylie.

The weather was awful that day in Buffalo and the Cardinals lost, 38-14.