Police raid on small Kansas newspaper sets off constitutional alarms

A police raid on a small-town Kansas newspaper is prompting a First Amendment struggle.

Surveillance video of the raid on the family-owned Marion County Record newsroom got through ABC News displays a police officer studying Miranda Rights to a reporter and different officials taking footage and seizing pc apparatus and cellphones.

The seek warrant was once carried out Friday on the newspaper and on the house of its co-owner, Joan Meyer, the Marion Police Department showed in a observation to ABC News.

The police raid was once precipitated through a criticism from a distinguished native industry proprietor and critic of the newspaper, who accused two town council individuals at a public assembly of illegally disseminating confidential felony information about her.

Eric Meyer, the writer of the Record, stated his newspaper was once tipped off concerning the industry proprietor’s riding listing however by no means revealed a tale about it.

“These are Hitler tactics, and something has to be done,” Joan Meyer instructed the Wichita Eagle newspaper after her house and industry had been raided.

It grew to become out to be amongst Joan Meyer’s final phrases. Less than two years ahead of her centennial birthday, she died on Saturday after, in line with her son, complaining that she was once too stressed through the raid to consume or sleep.

“How dare they take the last day of her life and make her filled with fear and anger,” Eric Meyer instructed ABC News.

He stated that up till her loss of life, his mom, a newspaper girl because the Nineteen Fifties, was once nonetheless writing a weekly column about recollections.

“It’s everything you’ve ever heard of in the third world,” Eric Meyer stated of the police raid. “It really is like we’re living in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

‘Heavy-handed transfer’

On Monday, the newspaper’s lawyer, Bernie Rhodes, despatched a letter to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, accusing him and his officials of a “heavy-handed” transfer and advising him that the newspaper intends “take every step to obtain relief” for the damages the raid brought about. In the letter, shared with ABC News, Rhodes presented Cody an “opportunity to mitigate” the damages “from the illegal searches you personally authorized, directed and conducted.”

Rhodes wrote that the police “plainly violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as Sections 11, 15, and 18 of the Kansas Bill of Rights,” and he urged the police department to refrain from viewing any of the materials seized from the newspaper until a judge can hear the case.

Rhodes’ letter also invoked the death of Joan Meyer, whom he said told officers during the raid — “those are Hitler ways.”

“She is true,” Rhodes said in his letter. “Your private resolution to regard the native newspaper as a drug cartel or a boulevard gang offends the constitutional protections the founding fathers gave the loose press.”

How the complaint against the Record surfaced

During an Aug. 7, Marion City Council assembly, which was once recorded and posted to the council’s YouTube page, a neighborhood eating place proprietor, who known herself as Kari Newell, stood up and accused two of the council individuals of “recklessly and negligently” sharing information about her driving record “with others with out doing the due diligence of creating positive that the information they had been sharing was once no less than felony information…”

“I’m bringing it to you guys’ consideration that that is going to be positioned with the county lawyer, that there was once a motive force’s privateness coverage act that was once breached through you and the person that shared that information with you,” Newell said at the council meeting. “I’m very disenchanted that as a consultant of our group, for your elected place, that you’d behave so negligently and maliciously.”

Newell could not be reached for comment by ABC News. She told The Associated Press that the Record violated the law to get her personal information about the status of her driving record, which the AP reported includes a 2008 drunken driving conviction.

34 news and media groups condemn raid

The search of the newspaper and Meyer’s home has garnered attention from national media groups, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which sent Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody a letter condemning the raid as unconstitutional. The letter was co-signed by 34 news and media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The AP.

The Society of Professional Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which each co-signed the letter, additionally dedicated $20,000 to a felony protection fund established to lend a hand the Record.

“Newsroom searches and seizures are among the most intrusive actions law enforcement can take with respect to the free press, and the most potentially suppressive of free speech by the press and the public,” the letter said.

The letter goes on to say: “There seems to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the hunt — in particular when different investigative steps could have been to be had — and we’re involved that it’s going to have violated federal legislation strictly restricting federal, state, and native legislation enforcement’s talent to behavior newsroom searches.”

‘Underlying wrongdoing’

In a statement to ABC News, Cody said there are exceptions to the federal law, specifically noting, “When there’s reason why to consider the journalist is participating within the underlying wrongdoing.”

Eric Meyer denied his staff was involved in any wrongdoing and that his reporters even notified the Marion Police Department of the tip the newspaper got on the local business owner, but the agency never responded.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the Marion Police Department said it could not disclose details on a “felony investigation.” The statement added that “when the remainder of the tale is to be had to the general public, the judicial machine this is being wondered will probably be vindicated.”

In the statement, the police department agreed that the federal Privacy Protection Act “does give protection to reporters from maximum searches of newsrooms through federal and state cops.”

“It is correct that usually, it calls for police to make use of subpoenas, reasonably than seek warrants, to go looking the premises of reporters except they themselves are suspects within the offense that’s the matter of the hunt,” according to the police statement.

According to the search warrant executed at the newspaper and at Meyer’s home, police contend they had “possible motive” to believe identity theft and unlawful acts concerning computers “has been dedicated.”

“The Marion Kansas Police Department believes it’s the elementary accountability of the police to make sure the protection, safety, and well-being of all individuals of the general public. This dedication will have to stay steadfast and independent, unaffected through political or media influences, so as to uphold the rules of justice, equivalent coverage, and the rule of thumb of legislation for everybody locally,” the police department’s statement reads. “The sufferer asks that we do the entire legislation lets in to make sure justice is served. The Marion Kansas Police Department will do not anything much less.”

Eric Meyer said he is determined to ensure that the police raid does not have a chilling effect on his newspaper’s aggressive coverage of Marion County.

“If they suspect I’m going to surrender as a result of they have made it tricky for us to position out a newspaper for one week, they have were given some other factor coming,” Meyer stated.