I have always felt that any officer of the law charged with breaking the law should face a mandatory doubling of their sentence. They "know the law" and therefore have no excuse. The fact that only one person is being charged despite several others participating in this is just yet one more miscarriage of justice.
“But the special prosecutors also concluded that police — despite their misunderstanding of evidence, a rushed investigation, and faulty and unlawful search warrants — didn’t commit any crimes by investigating a baseless suspicion of identity theft or carrying out the raid.“ https://kansasreflector.com/2024/08/05/special-prosecutors-p...
The changes against the chief are for asking a witness to delete text messages after the raid
No, they don't. They are police officers, not lawyers. Exactly this causes many problems when, sorry to speak this way, testosterone meets incompetence in law enforcement.
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why?
The US Supreme Court has repeatedly held the opposite - that police officers are immune to prosecution for their ignorance of the bounds of their powers unless explicitly informed.
IANAL; I believe you are referring to the second prong of the qualified immunity (QI): "right infringed has to be "clearly established" at the time of the official's conduct."
We should maintain QI but this second test needs an update.
Also not true. They have a duty to enforce the law as they understand it (noting that verification is just a phone call away), which may be better than average due to training and experience, or not.
Either way, your duty is to cooperate with law enforcement. If they are wrong, the only proper place to determine that is the courts. If they are right, you'll still have avoided a "resisting" charge
> No, they don't. They are police officers, not lawyers.
How do you enforce laws that you don't know or understand?
Think about it. These guys mobilize themselves to use force to achieve their goal. How is step 0 of this whole process not "check if what we are about to do complies with the law"?
If they mobilize themselves to use force to achieve a goal through illegal and criminal means, they are not different than organized crime.
This is true for almost anything. 99.9% of the people out there know, for example, that killing another person is illegal. Your logic makes no sense here
They are saying police should be held to the highest standards, as enforcers of the law. The punishment for an enforcer should be higher than a punishment for a lay person.
I hope that’s not the last charge levied. A police raid designed to retaliate against journalists for being journalists should result in more than one tangential prosecution.
There was also a settlement, although civil litigation continues.
> A former reporter for a weekly Kansas newspaper has agreed to accept $235,000 to settle part of her federal lawsuit over a police raid on the paper that made a small community the focus of a national debate over press freedoms.
> The settlement removed the former police chief in Marion from the lawsuit filed by former Marion County Record reporter Deb Gruver, but it doesn't apply to two other officials she sued over the raid: the Marion County sheriff and the county's prosecutor. Gruver's lawsuit is among five federal lawsuits filed over the raid against the city, the county and eight current or former elected officials or law enforcement officers.
> Gruver's attorney did not immediately respond to emails Friday seeking comment. An attorney for the city, its insurance company, the former chief and others declined to comment but released a copy of the June 25 settlement agreement after the Record filed an open records request. He also provided a copy to The Associated Press.
Civil litigation basically means that the taxpayers are on the hook for any damages. I am betting if there were to be personal responsibility, these types are acts would be history.
Medical costs and insurance are already absurdly high
Police force is the largest expense for local governments, doubling or tripping the costs seems like an unwise and inefficient thing to do for a society
> Should computer programmers also shoulder responsibility and be insured like doctors?
Computer programmers aren't authorized and licensed by the government to inflict violence like police officers. Computer programmers are not licensed by the government to prescribe dangerous medications or perform surgeries.
The post office scandal wasn't the programers fault, the fault was on the post for prosecution of individuals for something that was the result of a known bug that they chose to try and cover up instead of getting it fixed. Its also the fault of the law makers for passing law that assumes the computer is always right unless the accused can show otherwise but not letting the accused have access to the program needed.
It’s almost like blaming Glock for police shootings…
It has nothing to do programmers and everything to do with Post Office’s management. If they bought buggy software they had years to seek recourse for that.
And yet many computer programmers and hardware developers, with or without any kind of license or certification, write or design systems that are critical to life and limb; everything including medical systems, airplane systems, automotive systems including drive-by-wire and 'self-driving, engineering systems for design of life critical structures, etc., etc., etc. It's not all low-consequence or recoverable like front end web dev or accounting software. And conversely, many actions of physicians and cops are inconsequential (while many are also life-or-death).
Ordinary developers are effectively just construction workers with a bit more creative freedom.
In al critical systems they are just one part of a chain and all their work has to be verified/validated by at least a few additional actors.
A policeman can just decide to randomly murder someone (and often face no repercussions). While a construction worker or a software developer can cause significant harm as well they almost never have near complete autonomy.
To use a similar example, in my state, you can build your own custom car or airplane from scratch and get it approved, no mechanic or engineering license needed.
Also, if you aren't working as an engineer for another company but are self employed, it's not a bad idea to get some form of errors and omissions insurance, which is comparable to the malpractice insurance doctors get.
I have a note on my desk "If there is a bad tech option." It's a reminder not to get mad when my boss or their boss decides something stupid. Like using GraphQL to upload large amounts of data. Or deciding a 5 person team should be developing micro-services. Or moving everything to tailwinds.
As a developer I don't have the power to stop these bad decisions. I just have to stew in them. Holding me responsible for the bad code that gets written to kludge past the bad decisions.
Better I suppose than the company that had me build a rails app to move millions of records an hour, hosted on their personal windows laptop. (yeah rails on windows)
>Front end web dev? Nah, who gives a shit. Embedded system that's fail deadly? Um, yes.
More likely that a frayed power cord (or one of a thousand other things) on your laptop will catch fire while you're on the client premise, causing thousands in damages, or that same laptop has some sort of trojan/virus that you spread through the client network, and you're on the hook for remediation.
IME, most of the time that's why an independent consultant needs business insurance. The quality of the work is generally handled by the contract.
This scenario seems borderline Palsgraph v. Long Island Rail Road [1].
There is liability / duty of care / grounds to sue for negligence only when the injury / damages were directly related to the nature of the business, not when there is an incidental freak accident which happens to occur on the premise.
What does front end dev work have to do with the statistical random chance that wires somewhere in the building are frayed?
Was “ adversarial oversight” a typo? Why would you want an adversarial anything with a department as crucial as the police? A solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways is maybe what you meant.
In this sense "adversarial" has the same meaning that it does with respect to the relationship between the defense and the prosecution in a courtroom setting -- the best outcome is going to be achieved from the equilibrium of distinct organizations with incentives balanced against each other.
It's precisely because of the importance of policing that we don't want the people responsible for oversight and discipline of the police to have a "solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways" -- there needs to be an arm's length relationship, with the watchdogs incentivized to monitor for wrongdoing, and the police somewhat afraid of being called out by them, certainly not buddy-buddy with them.
It's the only way that he can guarantee that the information is distributed in its original form and not through the victim's bias. So I'd argue that from his perspective, that was definitely the best (read as: most democratic) option.
If they're going to push to arrest peaceful marijuana users and ruin their lives with a drug charge then the people involved in this raid should see the inside of a cell at least as long as someone up on possession because what the raid plotters have done is more corrosive to a free society than anyone smoking weed at a concert.
> It is unprincipled to be okay with one and not the other.
The principle is very clear: officers of the law are given monopoly on the use of force by the state. That state-enforced monopoly on force comes with an enormous amount of responsibility and that responsibility means that breaches of trust should be prosecuted with prejudice.
The other situation is a private entity making a decision about what kind of content it wants to host on equipment that it pays for.
We can talk about whether certain companies are too big to have full freedom to make that call, but creating a parallel between that and state-ordained police officers wielding guns barging into people's homes to intimidate them into shutting up is either naive, ignorant, or disingenuous.
> The principle is very clear: officers of the law are given monopoly on the use of force by the state. That state-enforced monopoly on force comes with an enormous amount of responsibility and that responsibility means that breaches of trust should be prosecuted with prejudice.
I don’t disagree with that aspect but also think it doesn’t invalidate what I said. After all, corporations operating the digital public square also have monopolies over a certain kind of power and that power and responsibility is far greater than any individual police officer given their reach.
> but creating a parallel between that and state-ordained police officers wielding guns barging into people's homes to intimidate them into shutting up is either naive, ignorant, or disingenuous.
At the scale these tech companies operate, their influence over our our political process and daily lives is far more dangerous. Freedom of speech and press are part of the first amendment in the US for a reason - a free society depends on that right and any violation of it is bad. In my view the end effect on suppressing journalism and speech is the same, whether it is a censorship friendly tech giant or a police officer breaking the law, and therefore the parallel makes sense.
> also have monopolies over a certain kind of power
But they don’t. Or at least these are completely different types of ‘monopolies’ that don’t necessarily have that much in common
> Freedom of speech and press are part of the first amendment in the US for a reason
It only applies to the government though. If taken to the extreme limiting the rights of a social network/other tech platform to spread missinformation or propaganda is a violation of their freedom of speech that’s not clearly compatible with the first amendment.
You’re ignoring the “for a reason” part. Freedom of speech and press are principles that are in the first amendment but also exist independent of it, and are older than the US. We should strive to have those values enforced everywhere, not just in the government - but especially at large companies that are immune to competition in many ways. And especially in social media, which is basically a utility for the digital public square.
> If taken to the extreme limiting the rights of a social network/other tech platform to spread missinformation or propaganda is a violation of their freedom of speech that’s not clearly compatible with the first amendment.
It’s not a violation of their freedom of speech, just like regulating cellphone carriers is not. Social networks are just utilities or common carriers. Like your phone service, they should be obligated to provide service and not deny it, independent of content.
Also, the label “misinformation” doesn’t mean anything much these days. It’s just an empty label used to attack opposition, and it is rarely used when the misinformation aligns with the platform owner. Propaganda thrives when different sides’ ideas aren’t given a fair chance, like on most social media platforms. Propaganda is literally a systematic attempt to manipulate public opinion, which is what social media companies are doing when they implement vast moderation/censorship programs that reflect their employees biases.
> Freedom of speech and press are principles that are in the first amendment but also exist independent of it, and are older than the US
The constitution was written by the same people who brought you the Alien and Sedition Acts. It’s rather clear that we take the document much, much more seriously than its authorsever did (for whom it was mainly just a collection of nice sounding principles and vague guidelines).
Not much changed in the next 100 years. The Sedition Act of 1918 was not struck down as unconstitutional. Something like that would be inconceivable these days.
The current interpretation of the first amendment is pretty modern and “freedom of speech” in the way we understand it at least is not something that ever existed on a large scale at any point in the past.
> We should strive to have those values enforced everywhere, not just in the government - but especially at large companies
How? Do large corporations, their employees, CEOs etc. lose their rights to freedom of speech themselves when their organization surpasses a specific revenue limit?
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation about whether we need to treat the major platforms as public utilities and force them to provide equal access. There are good arguments to be made on both sides and it's worth airing them.
What I object to is your framing in the initial comment that it's unprincipled to oppose police suppression of speech but not oppose platform refusal to project speech. That's just the popular but mindless internet attitude of "anyone who disagrees with me is not just wrong but bad", and that attitude is far worse for public discourse and freedom of expression than anything the platforms are doing.
They don’t need to even show up - they can just block your journalism from ever being seen, all from the comfort of their plush offices, and so it doesn’t matter if you keep your computer. That’s what makes the algorithmic/censorship powers of social media platforms (TikTok, X, Meta, YouTube, whatever) far scarier.
Make every prosecutor, ag, judge, and lawyer involved go to jail. A bunch of law school white collar imbeciles are going to wash their hands clean of this despite their participation.
I'm honestly surprised this has led to charges. I eagerly await the qualified immunity argument against this.
Before we get too excited, there's lots of ways this can go wrong. People don't understand just how rigged the justice system is not to prosecute authority figures including the police. For example:
1. Manu jurisdictions require felony charges to first be approved by a grand jury. This is meant to protect citizens from spurious felony charges. The grand jury proces empanels a group of people, just like a jury, but they'll only hear evidence that the prosecutor presents. There is no defense counsel. The defendant is not present. Anyone interesting in pursuing a prosecution is not present.
So what can go wrong? A prosecutor can intentionally bring a weak case and then hang their hat on the grand jury denying to pursue charges. It happens all the time.
Why would a prosecutor do this? Because they rely on the police for prosecutions. If a prosecutor gets a reputation for locking up the police then their police witnesses start getting sick and missing court dates. And that prosecutor's conviction rate goes down, which ultimately is the only thing they care about.
2. Judges often either have a prosecution bias or they outright work for the benefit of the prosecution. There can be multiple reasons for this. Many judges are former prosecutors. Depending on your state, judges may be politicians effectively as they have to campaign for their position or their name is on the ballot to extend their term so narratives like "tough on crime" start appearing.
There are three big recent examples of this:
1. The YSL trial in Georgia. The judge had ex-parte meetings with witnesses and the prosecution with no defense cousel present during which a witness was coerced to testify for the prosecution by the judge. That judge was ultimately forced to recuse themselves because thsi was such an egregious breach of the rules;
2. The Karen Reed trial in Massachussetts. This wasn't on the news much but was covered heavily on social media, particularly Tiktok. The list of sins by the prosecutors and judges are really too great to enumerate.
3. Alec Baldwin's trial for the death of a crew member on the set of Rust. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. They hid bullets in a file of another case so the defense would never see it. This led to the case being dismissed with prejudice, rightly so. This is what's called a Brady violation [1]. Now because that was a high-profile case that happened. But sometimes the Brady violation is ignored. In a famous Supreme Court case (Connick v. Thomson [2]), the Supreme Court ruled that if just one prosecutor in an office does a Brady violation then it's fine. It's not a systemic problem. Crazy.
Now we have had high profile cases where the police have been successfuly prosecuted, most notably Derek Chauvin. But those really are the exception. We're a long way from a conviction.
There's a lot of unfounded speculation here. But I'll just address the one set of claims that have cited documentation, which turn out to be unfounded upon examination of the citations.
> In a famous Supreme Court case (Connick v. Thomson [sic]), the Supreme Court ruled that if just one prosecutor in an office does a Brady violation then it's fine.
The first paragraph of that decision [0] contradicts the claim. Thompson had two convictions against him overturned because of a single Brady violation. The Brady violation was not fine, and the court system recognized that. After all, Brady itself is a SCOTUS decision that holds that the eponymous action by the prosecution is unconstitutional under Due Process. Thompson received his due process upon review.
On a topic unrelated to the constitutional question of the Brady violation, Connick v. Thompson asked whether Thompson was due civil damages because of a systematic failure of the DA's office to train its prosecutors, which he failed to show.
> I eagerly await the qualified immunity argument against this.
As I understand it, there won't be any qualified immunity arguments made against these charges... qualified immunity is about civil lawsuits, not criminal charges.
Correct, police have no statutory immunity from criminal prosecution, except where a statute explicitly states it (a few statutes say "Except when committed by a peace officer in his lawful duties" etc).
OTOH, judges are mostly ex-prosecutors, and if I were this cop I would take a bench trial and gamble on the judge acquitting me regardless of the evidence. As one judge said to me, on the record, "police officers are allowed to commit crimes to gather evidence."
My understanding is that there were no changes for the actual raid, but "with felony interference in the judicial process" due to actions taken after the raid.
"In Monday’s report, prosecutors highlight a section of state statutes indicating that charges against Cody might be related to statements made by former Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell that Cody urged her to destroy evidence of text messages the two had exchanged."
A conviction would likely only result in probation for a low level felony he is no longer in a position to repeat offend in.
https://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dion-lefler...
"We can safely assume the video recording is accidental for two reasons: 1) At the start of the conversation, Cody warns Newell, “We can’t write anything” to each other and she replies “Yeah, I know, I understand.” And 2) Immediately after he hangs up, Cody video-recorded himself taking a leak in the men’s room at a Casey’s General Store."
https://www.kake.com/features/special-content/untold-story-k...
"The day after we completed this interview, Newell revealed the chief had asked her to delete text messages between them after rumors began that they were romantically involved. She says there's no truth to those rumors, but she deleted the texts anyway - then immediately regretted it."
As non American it looks to me like this: you can't decide to arrest police chief for doing something but you can investigate it. He obstructed investigating, he gets a charge. Investigation ends, maybe other charges.
I guess it can be tricky to prosecute local police because it has to be interference from outside and people don't like that?
It's just super hard to prosecute police, because who do you report the misconduct to? If you go to the officer's police dept, they laugh at you. If you go to the local prosecutor -- well, they need the police to give them cases and evidence -- they laugh at you. If you try to go to the Sheriff, they laugh at you. If you go to the State Police or the FBI they tell you they don't have the resources and you need to go the police dept or prosecutor.
It's an unwinnable game. The only way to get traction is with media coverage.
Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. The offense is punishable by a range of imprisonment up to a life term, or the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and the resulting injury, if any.
This is essentially the Federal Government biggest single gun against local corruption - as I recall, it's what officers who beat Rodney King were eventually prosecuted under.
It doesn’t work that way. If it did, the current Supreme Court could be prosecuted for impending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, which was decided by a previous Supreme Court.
Sort of tangentially related the San Mateo County sheriff flew 4 deputies across the country to raid a car manufacturer as a favor to one of his donor buddies because his custom batmobile was delayed:
The headline (in 2017) attempts to make the case that "Trump could be even worse" than obama in abusing the espionage act. Did history prove that? I found cases where his administration used it, but unclear if it was worse
