Another Journalist Sues Over Raid Of The Marion County Newspaper’s Offices

Legal Issues

from the resigning-your-post-can't-make-lawsuits-go-away,-chief dept

The colossal catastrophe that is the Marion County PD’s raid of a small town newspaper’s offices (along with a raid of the home of its 98-year-old co-owner [who died shortly thereafter]) continues to generate national (and international!) headlines.

The PD claimed this was all above-board. Supposedly computer crime laws were broken by local journalists when they sought to verify a tip about a local business owner’s lack of a valid drivers license. Why would this matter? Well, someone whose license had been yanked due to DUI violations probably shouldn’t be handed a liquor license, which was what was happening here.

But there was another twist: the information seemed to be tied to a particularly messy divorce. The Marion County Record decided not to run the story. But it did verify the information (using a public-facing site) and, regrettably, informed the local cops about this particular unlicensed driver (and local business owner).

Then there was another twist. The new chief of police, Gideon Cody, who had taken a considerable pay cut when accepting this position (having moved on [possibly with encouragement] from a more well-paying job in Kansas City), was apparently displeased the local paper was digging into his hasty exit from a big city police force.

Some evidence of past misconduct was uncovered. Journalists from the Record asked for comment. Shortly thereafter, the paper’s offices were raided, using the search of drivers license records as a pretext. Chief Cody claimed this was all above board and that his actions were supported by the local prosecutor. The local prosecutor claimed otherwise when the raid made national news. So did the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which claimed it was investigating the raid. Public records and text messages obtained from the business owner soon made it clear Chief Cody, the local prosecutor, and the KBI were all lying.

The PD and its chief were sued by one of the paper’s journalists soon after. As more information came forward, Chief Cody was suspended. Then he resigned, rather than face the professional consequences of his actions.

But he still has to answer for the civil consequences of his apparently vindictive actions. A second journalist from the Marion County Record has sued the former chief, along with the county that employed him. Phyllis Zorn, who performed some of the verification on the tip about the drunk-driving business owner, has filed her own federal lawsuit — one that offers some more information that might explain why a troubled law enforcement official would decide he could raid a newspaper into silence. (h/t CNN, but only a little, since I had to go get a copy of Zorn’s lawsuit myself because the multi-national news outlet can’t be bothered to include it in its reporting.)

It gets juicy pretty quickly in Zorn’s lawsuit [PDF]. Here’s the (alleged) dirt on former chief Gideon Cody, which may have provided the motivation for his actions.

Marion was in need of a new police chief in 2023. By April, the city had identified three candidates: acting police chief Duane McCarty; Chris Mercer, who works as a fire investigator for the state fire marshal and part time Marion police officer; and Gideon Cody, a captain in the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.

Gideon Cody had experienced a number of problems in his former employment. To the surprise of no one, when the Record reported that Gideon Cody was a candidate for the Marion police chief position, the newspaper began receiving tips about Cody from persons who were afraid to go on the record for fear of retribution by Cody.

According to one source, Cody was “the absolute worst commander I ever experienced,” said “his ego would not allow him to listen to what anyone below his rank said,” and described him as a “toxic/ego-centric commander.”

Three sources told the paper that Cody ran over a dead body at a crime scene. The tipsters also reported that Cody was about to be demoted by the Kansas City Police Department from captain to sergeant because of offensive conduct towards other officers.

Multiple sources reported a conversation in which Cody expressed his disdain for working in dispatch, and said if he had not been transferred out of dispatch he would have found “the skinniest and prettiest girl down there and f*cked her” to force a reassignment.

Nothing Streisands like an unconscionable string of civil rights violations. If Cody wanted his past buried, he probably shouldn’t have assumed he could just steamroll a small-town paper into submission. This is all on the public record now and Cody will have to speak up (either in court or on paper) if he wishes to dispute it. He can’t just duck back into the shadows and pretend this isn’t happening.

Allegedly, Chief Cody thought he could intimidate Zorn into exiting the paper currently investigating his past and firing up a competitor that would provide pro-Cody propaganda.

Cody soon became aware that the Record was looking into his background in Kansas City. This infuriated Cody and he later suggested to the plaintiff that she leave the paper and start a competing paper in Marion. He promised her that he would invest with her and would enlist a number of others to do so as well. The plaintiff laughed off the suggestion, not understanding the depth of his anger at the Record. When Ms. Zorn disclaimed any interest in his proposal, she was moved to Cody’s enemies list.

Provable in court? Maybe not! It’s not like Cody is going to admit to any of this if it’s true. But it does suggest he had other reasons than the supposed computer crime violations to engage in his raid of the newspaper’s offices. Even if none of this is true (or can be proven), Chief Cody should never have decided to roll up on the First Amendment like a SWAT team at the wrong address. This is not going to end well for anyone involved in this insanely stupid series of events.

There’s an entire nasty soap opera contained in this filing. How much of it will be useful to lawsuit remains to be seen, but it certainly makes for entertaining, if somewhat depressing, reading. Odds are this lawsuit will need to be amended before a court will consider it seriously, but it does provide a lot of details that haven’t been made public previously.

For instance, the detective ordered by Chief Cody to write a “preservation warrant” to serve to the paper’s internet provider refused to sign it. Detective Christner stated the PD had “no legal authority” to obtain these records. (However, he also stated that if the PD wanted these records, it would be better off just searching the paper’s offices, rather than approaching a third party. He also personally participated in the search he seemed to feel was at least a bit out of Constitutional bounds.)

The lawsuit also claims Chief Cody lied on his warrant application to search the paper’s owner’s home, falsely claiming the document he’d seen was obtained illegally from a government website when, in fact, it’s completely legal for anyone to search the Kansas Department of Revenue website using any personal information they’ve obtained, so long as they fill out the search form using the name of the person performing the search (as Phyllis Zorn did when she sought to verify the information provided by the paper’s source).

The lawsuit also claims the forensic search of Zorn’s computer — performed during the raid of the paper’s offices — was sloppy, vague, and predestined to generate “evidence” of whatever crime Chief Cody hallucinated the journalists had committed.

In accordance with this requirement, Marion County Sheriff’s Det. Aaron Christner connected an external drive via a USB port to reporter Phyllis Zorn’s computer in the Record’s newsroom. He then executed a software application titled osTriage, which he had previously loaded onto the external drive.

The program allows a user to conduct a keyword search on the connected computer and its storage media, thereby allowing a user to make a determination in the field as to whether the device was used in the commission of a crime. But the keywords selected for the preview search of the Record’s computers were so vague and indistinct they constituted a sham search. For example, one of the keywords was the word “vehicle,” while another keyword was the word “Kansas.”

None of the “hits” from the “preview search” of Phyllis Zorn’s computer were even suggestive of a crime. Instead, it is obvious the keyword search terms were a sham and were never designed to comply with the search warrant’s requirement that officers conduct a preview search “to exclude from seizure those which have not been involved in the identity theft.” The name searches produced false “hits” 100% of the time.

Even with these broad terms, the detective was unable to get enough hits to generate probable cause. It didn’t matter. Zorn’s computer was seized, along with the paper’s servers and computers/devices owned by other Marion County Record journalists.

Chief Gideon is gone. According to Zorn’s lawsuit, he “fled the jurisdiction” shortly after resigning. Zorn and her lawyer suggest he’s hiding out in Hawaii.

It doesn’t really matter where he went. He may not ever have to answer these accusations directly, but he’ll always be known as the wayward cop who left one force in disgrace, took a pay cut, and soon left that police force in disgrace. This is a particularly ugly chapter in the history of US law enforcement. Just because it happened in a small Kansas town doesn’t make it any less of a travesty. If Gideon Cody truly felt these searches were justified, he’d still be running the county’s police force. Instead, he’s in the wind, behaving more like a criminal on the run than a career cop.

Filed Under: gideon cody, journalism, kansas, marion county, marion county pd, phyllis zorn
Companies: marion county record