The Fallout Continues For Cops Who Decided It Was A Good Idea To Raid The Office Of A Small Kansas Newspaper

One can only assume the Marion, Kansas police department felt this would never be this big. Overconfidence is a killer, as the MPD can surely attest, albeit after the fact.

The raid of the Marion County Record is now international news, thanks in large part to the flagrant First Amendment violations. Then there’s the fact that the co-owner of the newspaper — 98-year-old Joan Meyer — died a day after the Marion PD raided her home in search of evidence of apparently non-existent crimes.

Facts were in short supply immediately following the raid. The affidavit for the multiple search warrants were unavailable. The Marion PD said things about probable cause that were almost immediately proven false. And the judge who signed off on the warrants was in no hurry to turn any info over to the Marion County Record, much less those whose interest had been drawn to the case.

There was apparently no probable cause for the raids. That much was admitted by county prosecutor Joel Ensey, who issued a statement announcing the withdrawal of the warrants, as well as a request that the Marion PD immediately return the items seized, which included the (now-deceased) Joan Meyer’s internet router, as well as the paper’s data server.

According to the sworn statements, the Marion PD believed it was constitutional to raid the paper’s office, as well as the paper’s co-owner’s home. The supposed (but admittedly non-existent, at least according to the county DA) cause for action were suspected violations of two Kansas laws. The first involved identity fraud. The second was the far-more-nebulous “used a computer during a crime” statute.

The backstory is this: the paper received information about local business owner Kari Newell, who was seeking a liquor license for a business despite having been arrested for drunk driving and driving without a valid license. This information was given to the newspaper, which verified it using publicly available arrest records. It never published this information because — as became clear later — it felt it was being used as a pawn in divorce proceedings involving Kari Newell.

The paper did, however, contact the local PD. That appears to have been a mistake.

Also included in the speculation was the fact the paper was preparing an article detailing Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody’s past history of misconduct. Again, nothing had been published but the PD had been approached for comment, giving Chief Cody a heads-up on the paper’s plans to expose his checkered past.

This is now just troubled water, albeit water that flows under an international bridge. The small town show of force is news everywhere, which makes it much more difficult to pretend this is anything more than a handful of constitutional violations in service of — at best — a local business owner.

In addition, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) has been called into action, preventing the Marion PD from engaging in a perfunctory (and, presumably, exonerative) investigation of itself. Prosecutor Joel Ensey has shrugged off his alleged ties to Kari Newell and her businesses to call bullshit on the raids.

That leaves everyone still hoping to salvage something from this debacle scrambling. And now that everything’s on the table following the rescinding of the warrants and the release of affidavits and recordings, the desperation of those involved is so palpable those following this case can show us on the doll where the story inappropriately touched us.

We’re five hundred words in and we’re just getting to the latest developments. Let’s begin with the footage from (now-deceased) Marion County Record co-owner Joan Meyer’s home, which shows her (correctly) confronting MPD officers for their intrusions on her rights:

There are six officers. There is one 98-year-old woman. The case being “investigated” involved alleged computer-related crimes. What possibly justified this show of force, much less the underlying search that apparently required six cops in bulletproof vests to show up and wave their flashlights around during a daytime search in an adequately lit home?

This chain of events has grabbed the attention of local lawmakers as well:

Two state lawmakers, the Kansas house Democratic leader, Vic Miller, and Democratic state representative Jason Probst, a former newspaper reporter and editor in Hutchinson, said they plan to pursue legislation dealing with search warrants next year but are looking for other ideas as well.

“I don’t want this to fade away until we’ve addressed it,” Miller said during a statehouse news conference.

Fantastic. But strike while the iron’s hot. If you don’t, this will just become history that can be easily ignored, rather than an indictment of law enforcement’s ability to impose its will to convert “enshrined rights” into “non-existent rights.”

The raid has also drawn the attention of two writers’ unions, which are demanding the Marion PD be held accountable for pushing its way past long-recognized rights supported by decades of judicial precedent.

The WGA East and the NewsGuild-CWA are calling the recent police raid of a tiny newspaper in Kansas “an affront to the constitutionally protected rights of journalists and news media workers.” In a joint statement, the unions are demanding that the Marion County Police department “be held accountable for its raid of the Marion County Record newspaper” in Marion, Kansas.

[…]

The Society of Professional Journalists also weighed in. “By all accounts, the raid was an egregious attack on freedom of the press, the First Amendment and all the liberties we hold dear as journalists in this great country,” SPJ National President Claire Regan said during an emergency board meeting last week to approve funding to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, the town’s most pressing issue was being ignored by the town government, despite one of those presiding over this shitstorm having had her own house raided during this daylong incursion on long-held rights. Ruth Herbel’s home was raided that same day, and yet…

Both City Council member Ruth Herbel and the newspaper have said they received a copy of a document about the status of the restaurant owner’s license without soliciting it. The document disclosed the restaurant’s license number and her date of birth, which are required to check the status of a person’s license online and gain access to a more complete driving record. The police chief maintains they broke state laws to do that, while the newspaper and Herbel’s attorneys say they didn’t.

Herbel, the city’s vice mayor, presided over the City Council’s meeting Monday, its first since the raids. It lasted less than an hour, and Herbel announced that council members would not discuss the raids — something its agenda already had said in an all-caps statement in red followed by 47 exclamation points. She said the council will address the raids in a future meeting.

The 47 exclamation points did not matter. The raids were discussed. Council members (including a potential mayoral candidate) apparently refused to wholeheartedly condemn the PD’s actions, but at least Herbel was on board with ending Chief Cody’s career in Marion, Kansas. And it followed statements from the government agency indirectly involved in this shameful series of events making it clear the access the cops called “illegal” was actually completely legal.

While Herbel said after the meeting that she agrees that Cody should resign, other City Council members declined to comment. Mike Powers, a retired district court judge who is the only candidate for mayor this fall, said it’s premature to make any judgments.

The meeting came after Kansas Department of Revenue spokesperson Zack Denney said it’s legal to access the driver’s license database online to check the status of a person’s license using information obtained independently. The department’s Division of Vehicles issues licenses.

“The website is public-facing, and anyone can use it,” he said.

And more news surfaced, suggesting this was a string of self-serving events that culminated in the government deciding (as a group) a local newspaper no longer had First Amendment rights. The underlying issue was information about a DUI arrest involving a local business owner. The judge who signed off on the search warrants — the ones the local prosecutor withdrew stating they were not supported by probable cause — has her own history of driving drunk.

The Kansas magistrate judge who authorized a police raid of the Marion County Record newsroom over its probe into a local restaurateur’s drunken-driving record has her own hidden history of driving under the influence.

Judge Laura Viar, who was appointed on Jan. 1 to fill a vacant 8th Judicial District magistrate seat, was arrested at least twice for DUI in two different Kansas counties in 2012, a Wichita Eagle investigation found.

She was the lead prosecutor for Morris County at the time.

On top of all of this, the Marion PD had its facts wrong about how the (supposedly illegal) information gathering was performed by the Marion County Record:

The website Marion Chief of Police Gideon Cody accuses a reporter of accessing illegally is not the website the reporter used, according to Kansas Department of Revenue.

Cody claims in his affidavit the reporter used a website that appears to be the Kansas Motor Vehicles Records search, which requires users to select specific criteria to access another driver’s information.

Cody writes in the affidavit, “downloading the document involved either impersonating the victim or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought. Based on the options available on Kansas DOR records website.”

In the affidavit Cody writes the reporter would’ve needed to select a purpose for the research. Cody didn’t think the criteria applied to the reporter.

The KSHB 41 News I-Team contacted KDOR.

In email, KDOR responded by saying, “the service used in the Marion County situation is KDOR’s free license status check, which does not require you to select criterion for the purpose of checking the status of an individual’s driver’s license.”

This isn’t getting any better for those who hoped there might be a chance to salvage this series of rights violations.

First, there’s the chief of the department, who had been made aware the paper was investigating his misconduct history. Then there’s a local business owner who might have enough sway to induce police activity on her behalf. Then there’s the judge who might feel people shouldn’t be so interested in DUI arrests. Finally, there’s the unverified accusations someone allegedly impersonated Kari Newell to download her info from a public website. And underneath it all runs a nasty strain of recrimination, given that the information was apparently supplied to the newspaper by disgruntled, soon to be ex-spouse.

What it looks like is a conspiracy. It probably isn’t. But it is not inconceivable that a handful of people operating on their own, inadvertently aligned interests, are capable of producing something that looks like a conspiracy. Whether or not something conspiratorial actually occurred is unlikely to be proven without a lawsuit and considerable amount of compelled discovery.

Until then, we can take it at face value: cops abused laws to secure bad warrants to violate rights. And that’s enough to go on for now.