Marion County atty withdraws search warrant against Kansas paper, returns items | Hacker News Reader

Marion County atty withdraws search warrant against Kansas paper, returns items

kshb.com

95 pointsceltoid37 comments

I'm trying to find some more background on why this happened, and man it's muddy.

Some sources I take with a grain of salt [0] allege that it's about leaked documents concerning a local restaurant owner's DUI which might make her ineligible to hold a liquor license. Others seem to indicate this is a personal issue re: the police chief [1].

To me, this reeks of small town politics, and someone overstepping to do a [potentially/probably improper] raid that probably would never have made headlines had they not stepped into a first amendment hornets' nest.

[0]: https://nypost.com/2023/08/16/marion-county-record-owner-cal... [1]: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/melinda...

It's not really that muddy.

https://www.rcfp.org/marion-county-record-raid-letter/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/editor-of-marion-county-re...

Or you can read their own coverage at http://marionrecord.com

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193676139/newspaper-marion-c...

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/16/1194115195/kansas-newspaper-p...

https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article27823...

Here's a conversation [0] with the editor of the paper by an indie journalist. She originally broke the story about the editor investigating the police chief.

[0] https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-the...

Notice that the DA is now trying to spin it as an ordinary investigation into "an employee at the Marion County Record may be guilty of unlawful acts concerning computers". Sure, that may have happened, but maybe someone inside just gave them the docs.

Whatever officials are saying now, it's cover for harassing and intimidating the newspaper and the reporter to prevent or in retaliation for publishing the story.

> I'm trying to find some more background on why this happened, and man it's muddy.

In the past several days this has been about as thoroughly reported on and explicated - locally, nationally, and even internationally - as any small-town freedom of the press incident could possibly be.

That's not remotely enough.

1. I want an explanation of how the Judge signed off on a search warrant against a journalistic outfit, in violation of Federal Law.

2. I want an explanation of the ethics violations at play. The Judge who signed the warrant, was the former County Attorney until she was appointed into her position. Now, presumably her protege is the County Attorney, who happens to be family with the owner of the hotel where Keri Newell's restaurant (not the Cafe) is located.

3. I want an explanation of how public DUI records, in anyway, can be construed to be private information, or identity theft, or whatever else.

4. I want an explanation and apology to the city council person who's home was raided, computers and phones taken, and an elderly couple with health risks left alone with no way to contact anyone.

5. I want an explanation as to why Kris Kobach's KBI's first response was "the media is not above the law", until outrage flaired.

6. And I'm not holding my breath for those affidavits, but they'd damn well better be released unredacted.

This is of course not even getting to the police chief who left Kansas City due to numerous sexual misconduct allegations that the newspaper was looking into.

They better not think they're going to sweep this under the rug.

Corruption + incompetence, but in which measures we will have to wait and see.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The newspaper should file an extensive lawsuit against Marion County and the police department.

Judge needs some scrutiny too. Approving that warrant was horrible.

Normally I'm wary of "judge didn't do what I like that's bad" kind of discussion. But even with the virtual auto stamping of warrants for police that happens, that warrant deserved a lot of scrutiny by a judge paying attention. Of all the things the judge should have been the first layer of serious scrutiny after the county attorney made bad choices.

If there is rubber-stamping behavior going on, that's inappropriate. Prosecuting cases that are flagrant violations of rights might help curtail the practice.

Apparently the court responded that there was no probable cause whatsoever backing the warrant. That should never happen to even a multiple drug deal offender, let alone a news publication.

Their rights were certainly violated, but I personally would rather see criminal proceedings against the person signing warrants despite fuckall for probable cause.

It's far beyond that. They submitted that warrant knowing it lacked probable cause. And this is almost certainly not the first time they've done so; they knew which judge to submit it to. This is just the first time it happened to arise to national attention.

This is not the fault of one incompetent jurist. It hints at much more widespread corruption, probably going back years.

Any healthy ecosystem will evolve relationships over time. There's no fundamental anti-collusion mechanism in the LE machine! On the contrary, it's a state attractor within the system of incentives and organization structure of Enforcing Law under the USG.

The Bureau of Suffering, if you will.

Lawsuit? KS state AG or the Feds need to open a criminal investigation.

The KS State AG is Kris Kobach. There's a less than zero chance of accountability coming at his hand. This is the dipshit that the court had to sanction and basically say "you need to go back to law school 101" and forced him to take remedial education.

(The KBI reports to him, and their initial response was that "the media is not above the law" until it became clear this was national news.)

Oops, sorry, I told the truth about a Republican, I deserve my HN smackdown, but, here, maybe this will help:

* Federal judge finds Kris Kobach in contempt of court in voting rights case (https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article2...)

* Kobach Sanctioned For Misconduct In Voting Rights Case, But Not Found 'Dishonest' (https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2019-...)

* Judge Orders Kris Kobach to Take Remedial Legal Classes After Multiple Courtroom Blunders (https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/kris-kobach-ordered-to-take-...)

* Kris Kobach, Already Ordered to Remedial Law Classes, Faces Even More Legal Challenges (https://americasvoice.org/blog/kobach-more-legal-challenges/)

Cant get smacked down for telling the truth. Kobach should have gone with Brownback and just left us alone.

"Once those items are in the possession of the expert, the expert plans to make a "forensic copy" and then check to see if anything was accessed or altered."

If the seized computers were booted up from their normal OS drive then a whole bunch of timestamps, metadata and logs would be changed. A forensic image of the drive could be used to prove this without altering the original device.

Of course if the police used a forensic image tool in the first place that would leave far less evidence of analysis on the original machine.

It was rather bizarre to say the search warrant was "withdrawn". That is not something which can be undone once police have taken possession of some items.

What about the late Joan Meyer?

What about her? She is now a perfect object lesson for how best to treat the police. /s

I think he Kansas AG should pursue manslaughter charges. The government effectively killed her.

The Kansas AG is a monster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152075

He's not going to do anything.

There needs to be a federal lawsuit.

After all, they've sent their message[1]. Which is the whole point of the exercise.

It is insufficient in cases like this to simply return something and act like that makes it alright. That's no different from being caught stealing a TV, and then returning the TV, which sure as heck doesn't get you out of criminal convictions.

Everyone involved: the attorney, the police, and the judge signing the "warrant" needs to be fired and prohibited from being involved in any part of the legal system again, and the county needs to pay financial restitution - there's no way any of the seized equipment can be trusted anymore so needs to be replaced, and you need punitive damages so that other counties can see that the "find out" part is expensive.

[1] And presumably imaged, tampered with, and damaged all the equipment.

A section 1983 suit seems reasonable, but I don’t think that happens much outside of voting rights, and outside of the feds bringing the case. But I am no expert.

Fines for this kind of fuckery should be large enough to fund a local paper for years.

I don't disagree.

But the problem is that the taxpayers and not those corrupt dipshits will be footing the bill.

This whole thing makes me think warrant review process by Judges needs to be re-done from the ground up. Potentially 2 different judges? 3? different areas?

The core issue with warrants is that definitionally the police don't yet have direct evidence so can only provide "probable cause" or whatever for the warrant. But "probable cause" seems to have devolved to a police officer says that there's probable cause, and swears that they're not lying.

There is no actual penalty for a PO lying, and the judges are trained to just believe what they're told, after all in many (most?) cases the police are definitionally asking for a warrant because they don't have evidence.

This all ignores the copious evidence that police are not able to avoid just claiming "probable cause" any time they need to (take stop and frisk, where being black was probable cause, numerous examples of traffic stops turning into unwarranted searches, etc)

What's an "atty?"

(Do you really need to abbreviate "attorney"?)

It's an extremely commonly used abbreviation for attorney. Maybe without it the title exceeds HN's character limit?

Yep, 3 over char limit.

You can also remove "search"

HN has character limits on headlines

It was the easiest way to fit the title within the text constraints of the field while still keeping clarity.

The way abbreviations are tossed about around here, I'm surprised anyone would even notice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com