A former Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) prosecutor who charged Black Lives Matter protesters as gang members had her law license suspended for two years on Tuesday.
April Sponsel, “violated duties owed to her client, to the members of the public, to the legal system, and to the profession,” according to the disciplinary hearing panel’s written decision suspending her, obtained by AZ Central.
“Ms. Sponsel’s misconduct had far-reaching, deleterious consequences,” the panel added. Her suspension goes into effect in 60 days.
Sponsel had been with the County Attorney’s Office for 18 years before she was fired last June for “extreme overcharging” in five cases in 2020. One of those cases involve charging Black Lives Matter protesters in Phoenix as members of a criminal street gang.
According to the panel’s report Sponsel took the lead on pursuing felony charges against 15 BLM protesters in 2020. The panel found that she “dismissed clearly exculpatory information”, failed to review video evidence and falsely accused a man of possessing “ANTIFA paraphernalia”.
Sponsel also invented a fake gang to bring gang related charges against the protesters.
The report said the man Sponsel accused of possessing “ANTIFA paraphernalia” was Ryder Collins. Collins is a nurse who “drove to Phoenix on his day off and met two of his friends to take photographs of downtown Phoenix at sunset”. When he saw police cars with their sirens on blocking a roadway he got curious and went to see what was going on. Since he was late to the scene he hadn’t heard officers’ command to the crowd to disperse and was arrested.
Sponsel “cavalierly dismissed” evidence that would have exonerated Collins, the report said. She later extended a plea offer that would have required that he plead guilty to riot and assisting a criminal street gang. His lawyer did not allow him to accept the plea deal because there was no factual basis for the charges.
All the protesters, including Collins, were charged with riot, hindering prosecution, aggravated assault and assisting a criminal street gang.
Amy Kaper, another protester who was arrested told the panel that she lost her job, suffers from “pretty severe PTSD” and has received death threats and other threats of violence from “white supremacists.”
She said the entire ordeal changed her perspective of the legal system.
“I mean, just coming from my background being like a pretty middle-class, privileged white person, this has really shown me that it’s so much worse than I ever could have imagined,” she told the panel. “So much dirtier, and more insidious, and backwards, and evil than I could have ever, ever imagined.”
Another protester, Nathaniel Llanes said his fingerprint clearance to work with the elderly and disabled was revoked as a result of the arrest and prosecution.
“Viewed in totality, the record clearly and convincingly establishes a rush to file gang charges against the defendants that were unsupported by adequate or competent evaluation of available facts and evidence and without reasoned consideration of each individual’s conduct,” the panel found.
“Even after the indictments, Ms. Sponsel did not competently or diligently evaluate the evidence or competently and diligently reassess the existence of ‘a reasonable likelihood of conviction’ (the applicable standard per MCAO policy) as to each individual,” the report added.
More than 40 felony cases were eventually dismissed, including the charges against the protesters. Despite this Sponsel insists she did nothing wrong.
