You may have seen, in passing headlines, reports of a bizarre police raid on an elderly newspaper owner's home in a small Kansas city.
But that barely sums up the insanity of it all.
Police in Marion County originally launched the raid at the beginning of this month, hitting the offices of the Marion County Record and seizing, reportedly, "everything" on-site:
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper...
The city's entire five-officer police force and two sheriff's deputies took "everything we have," Meyer said, and it wasn't clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
In addition to the Record's offices, the police also raided the home of Eric Meyer and his mother, Joan, who co-owns the Record:
[Language Warning]
And yes, tragically, Mrs. Meyer died a day after this bizarre and frightening spectacle.
This kind of police action is nuts. You don't expect to see this sort of activity unless some grave, serious crime has been perpetrated — something violent, something to do with state or national security, something big.
So what, exactly, was the reason for the extreme raid? Well:
The police chief who led the raid of a Kansas newspaper alleged in previously unreleased court documents a reporter either impersonated someone else or lied about her intentions when she obtained the driving records of a local business owner.
Um, what?
So, there are a few major things wrong with this:
- First of all, in the U.S., police officers are generally forbidden to conduct raids on news establishments; they are instead required by law to issue subpoenas of journalistic materials so as to protect the integrity of news organizations and the First Amendment rights of the people who run them.
- Second of all, how on earth could a raid like this be justified, even absent those protections? Because a reporter "impersonated someone else?" That's a case of fraud, not espionage. It requires an arrest warrant, not a knock-em-and-sock-em clean out of a newspaper's offices.
- Third, it appears that the original motivation for the warrant was, well, you know, completely incorrect:
[R]eporter Phyllis Zorn, Marion County Record Editor and Publisher Eric Meyer and the newspaper's attorney said Sunday that no laws were broken when Zorn accessed a public state website for information on restaurant operator Kari Newell.
Zorn claims she used Newell's name, along with identifying information she received (unsolicited) from a source, in order to access the public information. That's entirely plausible. Even if it sounds unlikely that she got the information from an unsolicited source, that still can't possibly justify a non-subpoenaed raid, not under federal law.
That's not just speculation: Even the cops who authorized the raid are backing off:
[L]ess than a week after the raids, Marion County top prosecutor Joel Ensey withdrew the search warrants and asked authorities to return the seized materials, saying "insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized."
So the cops who raided the newspaper and the Meyer home did so on the basis of a flimsily prepared warrant that was likely in violation of federal law. But gee, what about the judge who signed off on this whole charade? How does this level of incompetence slip by a magistrate?
Well:
A Kansas judge who signed off on the "Gestapo-style" raid on the Marion County Record reportedly has two DUIs — raising questions about its possible impact on the jurist's decision.
Judge Laura Viar signed a warrant to allow a police raid on the newspaper over claims it illegally obtained DUI information about a local business owner.
Now a lawsuit is reportedly coming. Slate talked to Eric Meyer on the matter:
Next step for us is getting the last of our equipment back. For our lawyer, it's figuring out where the federal lawsuit's gonna be filed. For the readers, the residents, it's figuring out what's actually been happening — what were they being distracted from by this.
I don't think this chaotic fracas is over by a long shot. Stay tuned.
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