A weekly central Kansas newspaper and its publisher filed a federal lawsuit Monday over police raids last summer of its offices and the publisher’s home, accusing local officials of trying to silence the paper and causing the death of the publisher’s 98-year-old mother.
The lawsuit did not include a specific figure for potential damages. However, in a separate notice to local officials, the paper and its publisher said they believe they are due more than $10 million.
The lawsuit from the Marion County Record’s parent company and Eric Meyer, its editor and publisher, accuses the city of Marion, the Marion County Commission and five current and former local officials of violating free press rights and the right to be free from unreasonable law enforcement searches guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit also notified the defendants that Meyer and the newspaper plan to add other claims, including that officials wrongly caused the death of Meyer’s mother the day after the raids, which the lawsuit attributes to a stress-induced heart attack.
Humorously enough, they weren’t going to run the story on the sheriff. He was hired as sheriff after getting enough complaints to get him fired in the big city. There sheriff knew they had investigated it though and was sure to dig up their sources on it during the raid.
Story sure got ran after the raid though.
What I find interesting is that this is a federal filing, I’m going to see if I can find the filing to b figure out why.
There’s some rule or something that says you generally can’t raid a newspaper; if the government wants information from a paper, it needs to get a subpoena and go through the courts. I believe there’s a very limited exception if there’s reason to believe the paper is destroying evidence, but that’s unlikely to hold up here given that the newspaper itself has previously informed the police chief about the information being passed to them.
I’m not sure if that’s what they’re going with here, but that’s where I’d start.
Let me know what you find, but I’m guessing it will be necessary in order to sidestep sovereign immunity.
Mostly it seems to be because they’re making a federal civil rights complaint. Gross negligence and civil rights complaints tend to defeat immunity, though I don’t know if that’ll be successful against the city itself.
If they can prove malice on the city’s part, immunity goes out the window. And they may be able to do that.
Gotcha. Looked through some of the complaint. It’s a doozy.