The KSHB 41 I-Team obtained three affidavits in relation to the raids on Marion County Record, the newspaper owner’s home and the city vice mayor’s home.
The affidavits, provided by the attorney for the newspaper, lay out what evidence police used to get a judge to sign off on the warrant to search the properties.
if you look into statistics of how many warrants are actually denied, you might be shocked. i wont, cuz ive seen it... but its <1% in some places.
the judges, and actually more acutely important in this process, the DA are a part of the corruption.
DAs are elected, and so, their motive already suspect. . they also have to work daily with the police department, and so, have incentive to be 'on their side'. the judges half the time are asleep doing whateverthefuck the DA is feeding them, and of course, no cop is every wrong for good-ol-white-boy reasons (this is not a southern phenomena) .
so imagine your typical small town with all this mild corruption and zero accountability on 'issued warrants'. welcome to the u-s-of-a
I've never quite understood why almost the whole American justice system is elected. I mean it's just asking to be abused when appointees are beholden to the money and power that got them elected in the first place.
I’ve never understood why people think having even fewer restrictions on how the justice system works, having even less public accountability and having an entire branch of government appointed by another branch with zero recourse for the public, could somehow result in LESS corruption.
Have you just not thought about this at all? Are you trying to tell me the Senate used to be less corrupt? Because oh boy
You wanted an answer to why judges aren’t appointed but, “that fosters corruption, look at this exactly comparable example of appointed government officials that get to decide law” and don’t think it’s related?
That is undoubtedly why the Marion County Attorney has now withdrawn the search warrants because, to use his own words, ‘insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.’
Then why did the county attorney issue the warrant if there wasn’t enough evidence? Sounds like Marion county is corrupt.
Please see my reply to someone else's comment below (it's too long to subject people to twice). The short version is a mess of various people's greed, fear and corruption.
Yeah fuck that, they got caught and now just want to "withdraw" the search warrant that should've never been issued?
Nah we're gonna need to look into this a bit more. Why was the warrant issued? Who signed off on it? Who was the supervisor in charge when the raid happened? I'm concerned that there's more corruption and other invalid warrants.
Dig up all the dirt on these corrupt good ol'boy fucks. I guarantee this isn't the first time.
Anyone who’s spent time as the focus of the police or around our court system is aware of what a joke search warrants are. The police just need to claim they have a confidential informant who saw something. That’s sadly enough in most of the country. Funny, the CI is nowhere to be found when they don’t find anything on the search and it’s the warrants credibility is questioned by someone with enough money to have a lawyer investigate. Then if they do find something someone who needs a minor charge to disappear definitely saw whatever needed to be seen for the warrant. It’s insanely corrupt. The unreasonable search and seizure part of the US constitution is violated hundreds of times a day.
To top it off, they awarded those under investigation an extra month of PTO and a settlement for the PTSD they experienced for being under such scrutiny!
Small town pissing contest becomes nationwide concern because once again police show everyone that they believe they are the law. The irony in this is the paper never even had to publish the story to get it out. The cops did that with their actions.
It's really amazing. Literally everyone in the US would have continued to not know or care about these people until this blew up - and it's all their own doing! It's like the Streisand Effect, but without the subjects already being in any way already known or noteworthy.
So someone at the newspaper obtained a driving record from state computers, possibly illegally. And someone at the newspaper threatened to publish a story about it.
Doesn’t seem like enough to tear apart the whole organization but I’m no lawyer.
ETA: Corrected above, not an officer, a restaurant owner. Athos78 and teft explain it pretty well in the replies.
The newspaper received a tip about a local business owner saying the business owner had been driving without a license.
The paper didn’t publish said info but they verified the info in a state website which is perfectly legal. The newspaper also reached out to the cops saying they had received this info.
At no point was anything illegal done until the cops illegally raided a newspaper.
One correction: The driving record was for a restaurant owner, not a police officer.
The whole thing is shitty. The restaurant owner had a DUI years ago, which she was hiding because she really wanted her restaurant to get a (very lucrative) alcohol license. She was also repeatedly driving on a suspended license due to the DUI, something that the the local cops knew and completely ignored. Possibly because the DA's brother owns the hotel the restaurant is in, and once they have an alcohol license he can raise the rent, maybe by an indecent amount. Oh, and multiple people have alleged that the police chief left his previous paid-twice-as-much job in Kansas City due to multiple serious accusations of sexual assault.
The Marion Record had investigated both the DUI and the sexual assault allegations, but had decided not to print either story due to journalistic concerns (they suspected the divorcing husband may have illegally accessed his wife's accounts to send them copies of the DUI information, and none of the people bringing up the police chief's alleged history would go on the record and the KC police personnel department wouldn't give any information either).
Some locals says that the Record is "too aggressive" in it's reporting, while others think that revealing this kind of thing is what newspapers are supposed to do. And in the meantime, the restaurant owner has gotten her liquor license, the hotel owner can (presumably) raise the rent, and the police chief got to keep the newspaper's computers for five days - including (just ever-so-conveniently) the computer that contained the information the paper had on the people who were saying the police chief had left because of the sexual assault allegations. But I'm sure he never tried to find that information in the five days they had the computers because that would've been unethical, wouldn't it ....
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