And Lacey, good job of respecting the crowd you were speaking to on the 40th anniversary of MLK's death:

Billye Paulson, a black journalist who works for the Tribune, called the speech "offensive" and fired off an angry e-mail to Lacey demanding an apology.

"I found your acceptance speech at the April 4 SPJ awards banquet disgusting, inappropriate and vulgar. And I DID take offense. But the obscenities take a back seat to the use of the n-word, which was not necessary and very insulting," she wrote in the e-mail.

Paulson attended the event with the 82-year-old mother of the late Tribune sports writer Bob Moran, a black journalist who died last month from cancer. His mother was there to accept a special recognition award on behalf of her son.

So how much contrition has Lacey shown for his remark—the classic fatal mistake of white men who mistakenly believe they're down enough to say whatever they want—delivered to an audience including grandmothers? He's sorry that his "comments about a dead colleague rankled listeners."

"My words, meant to honor a friend, were inappropriate," Lacey said. "All present have my sincere apology. It is regrettable that any phrase of mine offended those attending a First Amendment awards banquet."

He's sorry the sticks in the mud in the audience are oversensitive enough to get offended. They probably didn't realize he was down.

This is not only the thousandth demonstration of the fact that Mike Lacey is, by all appearances, an asshole; it is also a reminder to whites everywhere: JUST LEAVE THAT WORD ALONE, FOR GOD'S SAKE. Whether ending in -er or -a, it is not for you.

[via Romenesko]

What a neat clusterfuck! We're sure there's a chatroom somewhere on the web, maybe "DSBRD LWYRS 4 LUV," where they can go spend some time with former Duke-case-handling D.A. Mike Nifong.

Jack Shafer, who once worked for Lacey and Larkin and maintains a favorable opinion of the two, waggled his finger in Arizona's direction: "Never pick a fight with people who buy their whiskey by the truckload, their ink by the tanker, and their pixels at wholesale."

This morning, the state's largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, went to court to ask that all filings in the case be unsealed. Their Sunday editorial explained that they're often "leery of New Times' style of free-for-all journalism. But, in this appalling overreach of government intrusion, both the New Times and the public were grievously wronged."

Reports in the New-Times over more than a decade have detailed Arpaio's backroom dealings, his mistreatment of prisoners under his watch and his general scuminess. Prisoners at his county jail get only two meals a day, must wear pink underwear, and live in tents outside the jail where they work seven days a week in chain gangs, digging graves for the indigent.

An investigation by county prosecutors into the paper's reporting began when New-Times published Arpaio's home address on its website in 2004. A little-known Arizona statute dictates that it's legal to publish the home address of a law enforcement agent in print, or on the radio or television, just not on the Internet; when the print article was uploaded to the New-Times website, prosecutors pounced.

Lacey and Larkin's "first joint byline" in 40 years of working together came after the two decided the special prosecutor leading the investigation was operating outside ethical boundaries—according to Lacey and Larkin's piece, he had made ex parte advances toward the judge and subpoenaed "all documents" related to the paper's stories, as well as analytical information on the Internet activities of the paper's entire web audience, including IP addresses and "contents of electronic shopping carts." All you people who've bought that bestselling "How To Assassinate a Maricopa County Sheriff" are in big trouble now!

"In our deliberations, we faced the obvious: A grand jury investigation is a fearsome thing; a tainted grand jury is a tipping point," Lacey and Larkin write. "We intend now to break the silence and resist." They did so with the 5,000-word piece and were answered with a night in jail; they were released early this morning on $500 bonds.

New Times was born out of Kent State rage, and we're pretty sure Lacey and Larkin, while not wild about the whole jail thing, are kind of loving fighting the man again, though Lacey had enough decorum (shocking, really) to tell off reporters outside the jail: "The problem is that it takes me being arrested for you guys to show up. This is a story we're all involved in. Those subpoenas are what you should be writing about."

The Village Voice's editor, Tony Ortega, knows something about Sheriff Joe Arpaio; while a reporter at the Phoenix New-Times, he investigated the sheriff's abuse of prisoners, and had this to say about his bosses' arrests: "I hope that, whatever other journalists think about the Voice or VVM, they can see that this represents one of the worst abuses of a newspaper's first amendment rights in memory," he told us. Gotta say, we can't disagree with that. Update: Ortega weighs in with his own thoughts on the Voice's website.

Earlier: Village Voice Media Executive Editor Released From Jail and Vows to Fight [VV]

*My former employer