#WeekInJustice: Week 122
Cinco de Mayo marks a successful battle in the State of Puebla, Mexico, and a nice excuse to eat great food and socialize. But starting in 2017, the U.S. began an awareness campaign to bring attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children. Now Pima County and the City of Tucson have issued proclamations to mark a major collaboration, today we joined both governments and victims’ families to announce the formation of a new task force designated to help solve and prosecute those cases.
The People’s Office plays a role here:
- Our Civil Division successfully created an Inter-Governmental Agreement with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, so our Criminal Division could specially deputize Pascua Yaqui prosecutors to better focus on tribal victims. This week, Tohono O’odham approved the same. These are believed to be the first and second such agreements in the United States.
- As reported in the news, Joseph Ricks, supervising attorney in our Domestic Violence Unit, is finishing a second full week of trial in which the allegation is intimate partner violence that led to the murder of a mother and her two boys.
Tracy Miller was recognized as a Hero Without a Cape by the Children’s Advocacy Center of Southern Arizona for the volume of cases like those described above that she and her entire Special Victims Unit have handled for years.
- And a team from our Victim Services Division traveled to Phoenix this week for the Arizona Awards Ceremony for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, where one of our wonderful volunteers – Gloria Bernal – was honored with a Distinguished Service Award in Leadership.
Prevention and Accountability.
This is the way of the People’s Office.
To be continued, Laura
