United States | News & Politics

As someone who followed this case very closely back in the day, thank you for posting this!

"This is just the first shoe of two shoes to fall. This is the county portion of it. The city was the main instigator of this raid."

Marion County has about 12000 people in it, so that's about $250 per person. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's per person meaning a family of 4 with 2 kids owes $1000, in a county where the annual median income is under $35000. None of which will be covered by insurance, since the raid was illegal.

The settlement with the city is going to be worse: they have notably more liability in the raid, and the town only has about 1100 residents, so any settlement is going to be extraordinarily painful for the people living there - especially as they'll be paying for both the county settlement and the city settlement.

The raid has essentially torn the town apart. There are still a lot of people who view Meyer as a meddling outsider; who vehemently support the police chief and the restaurant owner; who believe the guardrails the judge and county attorney were minor things; and who think Meyer should just let things go once the cops were caught out. And there's a bunch of people who think Meyer is just being a good journalist; who vehemently support freedom of the press; who think that everyone who didn't conduct due diligence contributed to the failures seen; and who think that, unless there are substantial penalties, segments of the population will continue to view it as a minor matter blown entirely out of proportion, and that authoritarians and good ol' boy networks will be emboldened in a time of decreasing freedoms.

Eric Meyer himself has been torn on the penalties, saying that he has to live there, see the little this affects every day, and knows how hard life there can be; but that noticable and painful penalties have to be pursued as a deterrent against similar actions in the future. He taught journalism and journalism ethics for years, and the combined responsibilities and freedom of the press is something that he believes very strongly in.

Again, thank you for posting this article!

Monday's agreement stems from the August 2023 search of the Marion County Record, as well as the home of the paper's publisher and a councilwoman, seizing reporters' cell phones and computers, among other items. The raid triggered widespread condemnation from news organizations and press freedom advocates.

Great that they're getting restitution, but how many editorial decisions at other newsrooms were chilled in the intervening years?

For people who might have missed the original event, not followed it closely enough for the various details the emerged, or just want a refresher, I've written the following from things that I remember from the original case (this is from memory, so minor parts of this may be wrong, but the overall story should be correct):

There was a restaurant where some local politician was holding some kind of meet-and-greet, and he'd explicitly invited the Record to cover the event. The restaurant owner didn't like The Record (they dug up and reported news, not just fluff like who won the Little League game and who was getting married) and kicked them out of the restaurant. The paper wrote that they'd been kicked out, which upset the restaurant owner more because it made both her and her restaurant look bad at a time that she really really wanted to look good to the public.

The restaurant owner was getting divorced, and her husband anonymously mailed The Record proof that she'd had (?multiple?) DUIs sometime like 15 years earlier, had never completed the formalities to "complete" the DUI sentence and get her license reinstated, and had been knowingly driving illegally for the past 15 years or so. The restaurant owner was desperate that this not get out, as she was in the process of applying for a liquor license for her restaurant which, if granted, would substantially raise her profits. Between the politician dust-up and the potential DUI story, she was anxious and ready to go after the Record.

The paper received the tip-off about the restaurant owner's DUI and confirmed it with a search on the state's open record database, something that any member of the public can freely do. However, they suspected the tip came from the husband and were concerned about the legality of his actions, and reported the tip to the local cops. They did not publish anything about the illegal driving until that information came out in the aftermath of the raid.

Gideon Cody, the police chief, was new on the job, having freshly retired from the Kansas City police force, saying he was interested in working someplace less hectic. In truth, he was under investigation in Kansas City for sexually harassing his co-workers and subordinates in the force (and, imo, had also likely harassed suspects in the past as well). He "retired" just before they would have kicked him off the force and, since he "retired", he got to keep his pension.

Several people who had worked with Cody in Kansas City contacted the Record when it was learned he was applying for the job in Marion. The Record did an initial investigation and Meyer tried to warn the city council to do a more thorough background check on Cody before hiring him, but they hired him anyway. The Record felt that the story still wasn't complete enough to justify publishing yet and were continuing to work on the story.

Cody had found out about their investigation. When he found out about the restaurant owner's driving record being searched, he decided to use it as a justification to target the Record. He convinced the restaurant owner to complain about the intrusion into her life (I can't remember how official the complaint was). He approached the county attorney [who happens to be a cousin of the restaurant owner and knew about her applying for the liquor license] and told them he needed a search warrant. Iirc, Cody phrased it as an urgent matter, that the newspaper might "destroy records", and he'd get the actual evidence for the search warrant to the County Attorney in the next day or so. In casual good ol' boy fashion (and ignoring the heightened burden of proof needed to target journalists and publishers) the attorney approved the search warrants for the deputy mayor and her house (the restaurant owner wrongly suspected her of being the leak); the newspaper itself; and the house of Joan Meyer, the 98 year old former head of the paper (and still nominally involved), where her son Eric (the current head of the paper) had moved in to help take care of her.

Having obtained illegal (no burden of proof documents provided, and not meeting the higher burden of proof needed for journalists), the search warrants still needed to be signed off on by a judge. He went to the County Judge (a position that, incidentally, doesn't need to have a background in law) that night and convinced her to sign off on the illegal warrants. iirc, they raided the paper a few hours later. I'll note here, as it doesn't seem to quite fit anywhere else, that the judge had also had a prior conviction for drunk driving, which I found slightly ironic.

Having gotten the illegal search warrants, the raids went forward. Instead of targeting just the journalist who was working on the story, they targeted the entire paper because Cody wanted to know how far the paper was on the story about him, and also who had been snitching on his sexually harrassive past. And it just exploded from there.