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PHOENIX — In a new letter to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, defense attorneys continue to allege that police and prosecutors presented clearly false information to a grand jury in order to criminally charge the back-up operator of a self-driving Uber test car after a deadly crash in March 2018.
Attorneys for Rafaela Vasquez claim she was not watching a TV show on her personal cell phone but instead monitoring work-related chat messages on her work phone.
“The claim that our client, a Trans woman and an alleged felon, was watching television instead of the road was salacious and incendiary enough to ignite a firestorm of publicity,” according to Vasquez’s attorneys, Marci Kratter and Albert Morrison. “The problem with that claim, however, was that Ms. Vasquez was not watching The Voice program, or any other program, on her phone. Your assigned prosecutors have refused to address the central fallacy of their case.”
The letter was sent on June 13, 2022 and was prompted by an MCAO announcement to fire veteran prosecutor April Sponsel.
Sponsel, who was not involved in the Uber prosecution, was fired for a pattern of extreme charging, failing to review evidence, and misleading grand juries.
The most public example was exposed in ABC15’s “Politically Charged” investigation, which revealed Sponsel colluded with Phoenix officers to invent a gang and charge...
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