Prosecutors Announce Plan To Criminally Charge Police Chief Who Led Raid On Small Kansas Newspaper
[Extremely War Boys voice]: Oh, what a lovely mess!
The problem with a story like this is that a recap will run a couple thousand words before you even get into the new stuff. To quote another cult classic movie, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody led the raid of the local newspaper (Marion County Record) after speaking to a business owner about some alleged “theft” of her personal info. The business owner was seeking a liquor license but a tipster had told the paper that this person also had a problematic DUI record of her own.
That business owner said some stuff about this at a city hall meeting. Somehow, Cody got involved. The paper decided to abandon the story — even after it had independently verified the tip via a third-party website providing access to driving records — because the tip had originated from the business owner’s estranged spouse.
This same paper had also been asking Gideon Cody about his decision to abandon his more high-profile and better-paying job in Kansas City to become the chief of small police force in a small town.
All this came to a head when Cody decided he was going to avenge his friend (the business owner has since shared private text messages between her and former police chief in which he not only told her about the planned raid, but also told her to delete any messages between the two after the raid was completed) and take care of the burr under his particular saddle.
The paper’s offices were raided, which included pretty much every bit of electronics (including journalists’ personal phones) seized by the Marion County PD. (For some reason, a deputy from the sheriff’s office and a local fire inspector were also involved in the raids.) So was the home of the co-owners of the paper, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer whose strenuous objection to the invasion of her home undoubtedly contributed to her death two days later.
Everyone involved in the raid sought to distance themselves from it once the paper and its journalists started complaining. The local prosecutor claimed he had never seen, much less given his blessing to the search warrants — something that was proven to be a lie shortly thereafter. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation also claimed it had no previous knowledge of the impending raids — something also shown to be untrue. The judge handling the warrants was not only a friend of the business owner central to the case but apparently had some impaired driving problems of her own.
The fallout continues. Lawsuits have been filed. (One settlement has already been obtained.) The people involved with this raid have been doing all they can to recede into the background. The judge who signed off on the warrants was investigated by the court system. And Gideon Cody himself rode off into the sunset shortly after this became national news, providing this as part of his resignation letter:
I do not want to defend my actions to the Council and I do not want for everyone to have to formally discuss any discipline.
Good news, Gideon! You won’t have to “defend your actions to the Council.” HOWEVER, you will need to defend your actions. This is the latest in the Marion County raid debacle, coming to us from Sherman Smith of the Kansas Reflector:
Special prosecutors plan to charge former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody with a low-level felony for his actions following the raid he led last year on the Marion County Record and the homes of the newspaper publisher and a councilwoman.
The full report [PDF] lists plenty of options for criminal charges, but according to investigators, they only have evidence to support a charge of “Obstruction of Judicial Process.” The rest of the findings clear Cody of other potential charges, as well the officers who accompanied him during the raids. The report was compiled by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
As to KBI’s input, the report (and recent interviews with KBI officials) makes it clear it was aware of Cody’s actions but did nothing to dissuade him from pursuing these searches. However, since it’s far more convenient to do so now that Cody is no longer a fellow law enforcement officer, KBI officials feel comfortable saying how uncomfortable Cody’s raid plans made them feel.
KBI special agent in charge Bethanie Popejoy told investigators that Cody called her two days after the raid while she was in church service. She stepped outside to take the call.
She said Cody told her: “This is a mess. I really wish you guys would take this over.”
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s a little f***in’ late for that now,” Popejoy said.
Although KBI agents had agreed to join Cody in the investigation before the raid, they had not yet reviewed evidence at the time of the raid. Popejoy said when she first read the search warrants several days after the raid, she was “shocked, angry, disappointed, (in) disbelief.”
Cody, faced with intense national scrutiny, asked the KBI to issue a public statement defending his character. Popejoy declined.
Somehow, I doubt this charge will stick. Despite the report being very critical of everything that happened, it also arrives at the conclusion that most of what happened was actually not unlawful. And that’s probably the most disappointing conclusion an investigation like this can reach — something that says it’s going to happen again because cops can violate rights without violating laws. And if they do these things at the same time, they’re more than likely going to be able to be immunized in civil lawsuits. But if Gideon Cody can’t escape these lawsuits because his rights violations were so obvious and egregious, it’s absolutely mind-boggling that the combined forces of prosecutors and two outside law enforcement came to the conclusion all of this was very legal, even if it was extreme inadvisable.