On August 11, the Marion County PD — with the assistance of the Kansas Department of Revenue, the county sheriff’s office, and (for some fucking reason) the local fire marshal — raided the office of the Marion County Record, along with the home of its co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer.
The raid was prompted by the very expansive reading of two state laws, one involving identity fraud and the other involving computer crimes. The first response from nearly everyone but Police Chief Gideon Cody was a denial of knowledge, much less involvement.
But as reporters kept digging into the story, the denials — starting with the county attorney Joel Ensey’s claim of innocence when he asked a court to quash the warrants — began to unravel. The DA claimed he’d never seen the warrants prior to their service. But an email exposed this lie, showing Chief Cody had informed of his plans to search the paper’s office, as well as sent him copies of the warrants he planned to deploy.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) strode onto the scene, presenting itself as a force of good, here to get to the bottom of this pile of constitutional violations.
Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has oversight of the KBI, told reporters on Aug. 16 that the KBI “was not notified of the searches prior to their taking place.”
That statement is, at best, misinformed. Perhaps Kobach just didn’t know. But the KBI sure did. It, too, had been informed of Chief Cody’s unconstitutional plans. Not only that, it apparently approved of them, as Jessica McMaster reports for KSHB:
Text messages obtained by the KSHB 41 I-Team reveal Gideon Cody claimed the Kansas Bureau of Investigation was “100 percent behind” him one day after the raids on Marion County Record and two homes.
The text messages, provided by a source and independently verified by KSHB 41, are between Cody and Joel Ensey, Marion County Attorney, who revoked Cody’s warrants within days following the raids.
More evidence of KBI’s involvement and prior knowledge. And more evidence of the county attorney’s prior knowledge and direct involvement.
Now, it could have been that Chief Cody was putting words in the mouth of the KBI. But if so, he was doing it constantly. A text sent to county attorney Ensey on August 9, two days before the raids, said “KBI will be lead in the investigation.” One day after the raids, Chief Cody sent Ensey another text referring to KBI’s apparent support of his actions.
The final message from Cody on the subject of KBI and the newspaper raid stated KBI was taking its own route with the investigation. Not an investigation of the raids themselves, mind you.
Cody sent another response: “They want to use an independent lab not affiliated with [the] government for forensics, and they appear to be taking this case over. I will let you know.”
So, the staties wanted to do their own digging into the seized electronics using an “independent lab,” whatever that means in this context. The KBI never got a chance to do it. The court ordered all devices and data returned to paper and its employees before they were ever in the hands of the KBI.
Additional emails obtained by KSHB contain even more evidence of foreknowledge and approval, if not direct involvement.
One day before the raids, Todd Leeds, KBI special agent, sent an email to a Marion police officer. He wrote, “Did you guys execute this today?”
The police officer responded, “No. My understanding is that the county attorney wasn’t in the office today.”
The subject of that email is, “Additional SW for Eric Meyer’s Residence.”
Given these facts, it would make zero sense for KBI to be allowed to engage in an investigation of the Marion County PD and its actions. It has already let everyone know what it thinks about what happened here and seems unlikely to discover anything damning when doing so would mean damning itself.
Multiple sources confirm an outside law enforcement agency has joined Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the events surrounding the raid on the Marion County Record newspaper.
Eric Meyer, publisher of Marion County Record, Deb Gruver, former reporter of the Record, and Ruth Herbel, vice mayor of Marion, told the KSHB 41 I-Team an agent with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has reached out to them about the case.
According to those who spoke to KSHB after speaking to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent, CBI is definitely not digging into the actions of the newspaper or its employees. It wants to know why this investigation was initiated by the Marion County PD and why it decided the best plan of action was an all-day assault on constitutional rights.
Hopefully, the CBI will expand its investigation to include the KBI, which is certainly far from blameless. This debacle — every small part of it — needs to be dragged out into the sunlight. The last thing the KBI should be allowed to do is creep back into the shadows while everyone’s paying attention to an outside agency and its apparently far more competent investigative work.
Under the pretense of a computer crime investigation, the Marion County PD — led by then-Chief Gideon Cody — raided the offices of the Marion County Record, as well as the home of its 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer. Joan Meyer died one day after the raid, one she strenuously objected to while her home was filled with law enforcement officers.
The raid quickly made national news. Shortly thereafter, the raid of a small town newspaper by cops became the subject of international reporting. Once the headlines started hitting, government figures moved quickly to distance themselves from this debacle.
The underlying incident began with local business owner Kari Newell, who was seeking to secure a liquor license for one of her businesses. At the same time, Newell was in the midst of a combative divorce. Her estranged husband allegedly tipped off the Marion County Record about her prior arrests for driving under the influence, as well as driving without a license. The newspaper tried to verify these allegations. First, reporters talked to the Marion County PD. Then it used a third-party site to look up Newell’s arrest record.
County prosecutor Joel Ensey was the first to step away from the wreckage, declaring the warrants to be short on probable cause. He also asked the judge to issue an order directing the PD to return seized electronics to the journalists. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation announced it was now looking into the raids and the warrants supposedly justifying these raids.
The fallout just kept coming. The city council refused to discuss the debacle in council meetings. Chief Gideon Cody promoted himself to ex-chief by resigning rather than having to (publicly) justify his actions. Further investigation by other news agencies uncovered the fact that the city and PD discussed this raid using private email addresses and personal phones, leaving no permanent record of these communications.
Every bit of this reeks of corruption — the sort of small-town corruption where the perpetrators feel the locals are far too few, or far too weak, to fight back. And it gets worse. Sherman Smith and the Kansas Reflector have been digging into whatever they’ve actually been able to obtain with public records requests. And those documents show everyone was in on it… including the supposed neutral party now performing its own investigation of the raids: the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody enlisted the support of local and state law enforcement officials in the days before he led raids on the local newspaper office, the publisher’s home and the home of a city councilwoman.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Kansas Department of Revenue, Marion County Sheriff’s Office and the Office of the State Fire Marshal — along with the county attorney and a magistrate judge — were complicit in the Aug. 11 raid or knew it was imminent. But in the days that followed, they largely downplayed their involvement.
A whole bunch of people with government power using the public’s money conspired to violate rights apparently because they all believed — however temporarily — they might get away with it. When the small town paper fought back, most of those involved did everything they could to pretend they weren’t complicit.
That means a whole lot of people have been caught lying or, at the very least, pretending their refusal to directly address their involvement somehow absolves them of culpability. Here’s a brief summary of damning information the Kansas Reflector has obtained:
We now know there was also a KBI agent and his supervisor who had advance copies of the search warrants. A sheriff’s detective who wrote the search warrants. Department of Revenue staff who treated the reporter’s actions as criminal. And a fire marshal’s investigator who participated in the raid even though he seemed to realize it was unlawful.
I cannot even comprehend why a fire marshal decided he needed to assist in a police department raid, much less why he continued to do so when it became apparent the whole thing was a vindictive violation of rights.
The prosecutor who supposedly stepped up to rescind the warrants while claiming he was unaware of them has been revealed as a liar, coward, and an idiot. This is what he thought he would get away with if he distanced himself from this as soon as it became apparent the blowback would be too big to be ignored.
Cody, the police chief, had notified County Attorney Joel Ensey of his investigation in an Aug. 8 email, and sent copies of the search warrants to Ensey before taking them to a magistrate. A day after the raid, Ensey told Cody he would need to get a district court judge to sign the warrants so that the evidence seized during the raid could be reviewed by law enforcement outside of Marion.
“I also believe with the scrutiny this will receive, another judge reviewing the warrant would be a good idea, especially with some of the new information learned during the search,” Ensey said.
But as copies of the newspaper were being delivered around town on Aug. 16, and new subscribers streamed into the newspaper office, Ensey claimed he had reviewed the search warrants in detail on Aug. 14. He said there was insufficient evidence to support the raids and that items seized would be returned.
The prosecutor already knew what was in the warrants when he told reporters he had only now reviewed the affidavits and determined them to be unsupported by probable cause.
The records obtained by the Kansas Reflector also show the Kansas Bureau of Investigation opened its own investigation into the journalists and the paper’s owners. It did this following the Marion County PD’s request for assistance, one written by Chief Cody and emailed to the KBI on August 8.
While it never carried out any searches of its own, the KBI was thanked personally by Chief Gideon Cody for its “support” during the so-called investigation and raids. The documents also showed the KBI lied about its involvement in this shitstorm.
Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has oversight of the KBI, told reporters on Aug. 16 that the KBI “was not notified of the searches prior to their taking place.”
As for the ancillary presence of a fire marshal, there’s nothing to report because the marshal’s employer is either completely unable to explain his presence or simply would rather not talk about it.
A spokeswoman for the Office of the State Fire Marshal didn’t respond to questions for this story about why the legal memo is attached to Mercer’s report, or why he agreed to join an unlawful raid.
The legal memo — one from a law firm that firmly states the protections afforded to journalists under federal law — is attached to the fire marshal’s narrative of the search of Joan Meyer’s home. This narrative does no favors for local law enforcement officers, who are shown to be little more than thugs intimidating a 98-year-old woman just because they had a piece of paper saying they could.
This is a series of unforced errors that clearly indicates most of Marion County’s so-called public servants aren’t capable of serving the public, much less trustworthy enough to continue to collect paychecks signed by the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving. Chief Cody has decided to exonerate himself by walking away from the mess he created. County attorney Joel Ensey has now been exposed as a liar and an opportunist. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has made it clear it doesn’t care about the rights of the state’s residents. It’s garbage all the way down and all the way up.
And it’s how things are in most of America, despite constant efforts to reform law enforcement. The law is the law… unless the law might prevent cops from doing what they want to do. At that point, all bets are off.
One can only assume the Marion, Kansas police department felt this would never be this big. Overconfidence is a killer, as the MPD can surely attest, albeit after the fact.
The raid of the Marion County Record is now international news, thanks in large part to the flagrant First Amendment violations. Then there’s the fact that the co-owner of the newspaper — 98-year-old Joan Meyer — died a day after the Marion PD raided her home in search of evidence of apparently non-existent crimes.
Facts were in short supply immediately following the raid. The affidavit for the multiple search warrants were unavailable. The Marion PD said things about probable cause that were almost immediately proven false. And the judge who signed off on the warrants was in no hurry to turn any info over to the Marion County Record, much less those whose interest had been drawn to the case.
There was apparently no probable cause for the raids. That much was admitted by county prosecutor Joel Ensey, who issued a statement announcing the withdrawal of the warrants, as well as a request that the Marion PD immediately return the items seized, which included the (now-deceased) Joan Meyer’s internet router, as well as the paper’s data server.
According to the sworn statements, the Marion PD believed it was constitutional to raid the paper’s office, as well as the paper’s co-owner’s home. The supposed (but admittedly non-existent, at least according to the county DA) cause for action were suspected violations of two Kansas laws. The first involved identity fraud. The second was the far-more-nebulous “used a computer during a crime” statute.
The backstory is this: the paper received information about local business owner Kari Newell, who was seeking a liquor license for a business despite having been arrested for drunk driving and driving without a valid license. This information was given to the newspaper, which verified it using publicly available arrest records. It never published this information because — as became clear later — it felt it was being used as a pawn in divorce proceedings involving Kari Newell.
The paper did, however, contact the local PD. That appears to have been a mistake.
Also included in the speculation was the fact the paper was preparing an article detailing Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody’s past history of misconduct. Again, nothing had been published but the PD had been approached for comment, giving Chief Cody a heads-up on the paper’s plans to expose his checkered past.
This is now just troubled water, albeit water that flows under an international bridge. The small town show of force is news everywhere, which makes it much more difficult to pretend this is anything more than a handful of constitutional violations in service of — at best — a local business owner.
In addition, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) has been called into action, preventing the Marion PD from engaging in a perfunctory (and, presumably, exonerative) investigation of itself. Prosecutor Joel Ensey has shrugged off his alleged ties to Kari Newell and her businesses to call bullshit on the raids.
That leaves everyone still hoping to salvage something from this debacle scrambling. And now that everything’s on the table following the rescinding of the warrants and the release of affidavits and recordings, the desperation of those involved is so palpable those following this case can show us on the doll where the story inappropriately touched us.
We’re five hundred words in and we’re just getting to the latest developments. Let’s begin with the footage from (now-deceased) Marion County Record co-owner Joan Meyer’s home, which shows her (correctly) confronting MPD officers for their intrusions on her rights:
There are six officers. There is one 98-year-old woman. The case being “investigated” involved alleged computer-related crimes. What possibly justified this show of force, much less the underlying search that apparently required six cops in bulletproof vests to show up and wave their flashlights around during a daytime search in an adequately lit home?
Two state lawmakers, the Kansas house Democratic leader, Vic Miller, and Democratic state representative Jason Probst, a former newspaper reporter and editor in Hutchinson, said they plan to pursue legislation dealing with search warrants next year but are looking for other ideas as well.
“I don’t want this to fade away until we’ve addressed it,” Miller said during a statehouse news conference.
Fantastic. But strike while the iron’s hot. If you don’t, this will just become history that can be easily ignored, rather than an indictment of law enforcement’s ability to impose its will to convert “enshrined rights” into “non-existent rights.”
The WGA East and the NewsGuild-CWA are calling the recent police raid of a tiny newspaper in Kansas “an affront to the constitutionally protected rights of journalists and news media workers.” In a joint statement, the unions are demanding that the Marion County Police department “be held accountable for its raid of the Marion County Record newspaper” in Marion, Kansas.
[…]
The Society of Professional Journalists also weighed in. “By all accounts, the raid was an egregious attack on freedom of the press, the First Amendment and all the liberties we hold dear as journalists in this great country,” SPJ National President Claire Regan said during an emergency board meeting last week to approve funding to the newspaper.
Both City Council member Ruth Herbel and the newspaper have said they received a copy of a document about the status of the restaurant owner’s license without soliciting it. The document disclosed the restaurant’s license number and her date of birth, which are required to check the status of a person’s license online and gain access to a more complete driving record. The police chief maintains they broke state laws to do that, while the newspaper and Herbel’s attorneys say they didn’t.
Herbel, the city’s vice mayor, presided over the City Council’s meeting Monday, its first since the raids. It lasted less than an hour, and Herbel announced that council members would not discuss the raids — something its agenda already had said in an all-caps statement in red followed by 47 exclamation points. She said the council will address the raids in a future meeting.
The 47 exclamation points did not matter. The raids were discussed. Council members (including a potential mayoral candidate) apparently refused to wholeheartedly condemn the PD’s actions, but at least Herbel was on board with ending Chief Cody’s career in Marion, Kansas. And it followed statements from the government agency indirectly involved in this shameful series of events making it clear the access the cops called “illegal” was actually completelylegal.
While Herbel said after the meeting that she agrees that Cody should resign, other City Council members declined to comment. Mike Powers, a retired district court judge who is the only candidate for mayor this fall, said it’s premature to make any judgments.
The meeting came after Kansas Department of Revenue spokesperson Zack Denney said it’s legal to access the driver’s license database online to check the status of a person’s license using information obtained independently. The department’s Division of Vehicles issues licenses.
“The website is public-facing, and anyone can use it,” he said.
And more news surfaced, suggesting this was a string of self-serving events that culminated in the government deciding (as a group) a local newspaper no longer had First Amendment rights. The underlying issue was information about a DUI arrest involving a local business owner. The judge who signed off on the search warrants — the ones the local prosecutor withdrew stating they were not supported by probable cause — has her own history of driving drunk.
The Kansas magistrate judge who authorized a police raid of the Marion County Record newsroom over its probe into a local restaurateur’s drunken-driving record has her own hidden history of driving under the influence.
Judge Laura Viar, who was appointed on Jan. 1 to fill a vacant 8th Judicial District magistrate seat, was arrested at least twice for DUI in two different Kansas counties in 2012, a Wichita Eagle investigation found.
She was the lead prosecutor for Morris County at the time.
On top of all of this, the Marion PD had its facts wrong about how the (supposedly illegal) information gathering was performed by the Marion County Record:
The website Marion Chief of Police Gideon Cody accuses a reporter of accessing illegally is not the website the reporter used, according to Kansas Department of Revenue.
Cody claims in his affidavit the reporter used a website that appears to be the Kansas Motor Vehicles Records search, which requires users to select specific criteria to access another driver’s information.
Cody writes in the affidavit, “downloading the document involved either impersonating the victim or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought. Based on the options available on Kansas DOR records website.”
In the affidavit Cody writes the reporter would’ve needed to select a purpose for the research. Cody didn’t think the criteria applied to the reporter.
The KSHB 41 News I-Team contacted KDOR.
In email, KDOR responded by saying, “the service used in the Marion County situation is KDOR’s free license status check, which does not require you to select criterion for the purpose of checking the status of an individual’s driver’s license.”
This isn’t getting any better for those who hoped there might be a chance to salvage this series of rights violations.
First, there’s the chief of the department, who had been made aware the paper was investigating his misconduct history. Then there’s a local business owner who might have enough sway to induce police activity on her behalf. Then there’s the judge who might feel people shouldn’t be so interested in DUI arrests. Finally, there’s the unverified accusations someone allegedly impersonated Kari Newell to download her info from a public website. And underneath it all runs a nasty strain of recrimination, given that the information was apparently supplied to the newspaper by disgruntled, soon to be ex-spouse.
What it looks like is a conspiracy. It probably isn’t. But it is not inconceivable that a handful of people operating on their own, inadvertently aligned interests, are capable of producing something that looks like a conspiracy. Whether or not something conspiratorial actually occurred is unlikely to be proven without a lawsuit and considerable amount of compelled discovery.
Until then, we can take it at face value: cops abused laws to secure bad warrants to violate rights. And that’s enough to go on for now.
Last week, cops in a small Kansas town decided they’d just toss aside the First Amendment and raid a local newspaper.
There were competing narratives. The first was that the paper was in possession of information related to the drunk driving arrest of local business owner Kari Newell, who had allegedly been convicted of DUI and driving without a license.
The thing is the paper never made this information public. Instead, it verified the information handed to it by a source and then contacted the Marion, Kansas police department.
The second narrative appeared during an interview with the surviving co-owner of the paper, Eric Meyer. This one suggested the raid of the paper’s offices and the home of 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer, were prompted by the paper’s ongoing investigation of Marion police chief Gideon Cody’s misconduct history, which allegedly involved sexual misconduct.
I used the word “surviving” for a reason. Joan Meyer died shortly after suffering through the raid of her paper’s office and the raid of her home. During these raids, nearly every electronic device possessed by Meyer and the paper was seized, including the paper’s servers and Joan Meyer’s personal computer and internet router.
Outrage from Eric Meyer, the owner and publisher of the Marion Record, appears to have reached the KBI [Kansas Bureau Investigation].
On Wednesday, the law enforcement agency announced in conjunction with the Marion County Attorney that the investigation would continue without the examination of any evidence seized during the raid.
All of this has added up to Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey announcing that he has formally withdrawn the warrant and has asked for law enforcement to return everything officers seized.
On Monday, August 14, 2023, I reviewed in detail the warrant application made on Friday, August 11, 2023 to search various locations in Marion County including the office of the Marion County Record. The affidavits, which I am asking the court to release, established probable cause to believe that an employee of the newspaper may have committed the crime of K.S.A. 21-5839, Unlawful Acts Concerning Computers. Upon review, however, I have come to the conclusion that insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and items seized. As a result, I have submitted a proposed order asking the court to release the evidence seized. I have asked local law enforcement to return the material seized to the owners of the property.
The matter remains under review until such time as the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the agency now in charge of the investigation, may submit any findings to the office for a charging decision. At such time, a determination will be made as to whether sufficient evidence exists under the applicable rules and standards to support a charge for an offense.
Some good things there. The call for the release of the documents. The call for the release of the seized electronics (albeit on that doesn’t appear to demand law enforcement destroy any copies of data investigators may have made). And the correct call on the incident in question: it appears unlawful, even if the county attorney (for reasons related to his continued employment) isn’t willing (yet) to go on record as calling “unlawful.”
There are some bad things, too. It seems unlikely the KBI will uncover evidence of criminal activity by newspaper staff. But it does allow another law enforcement agency to root around in seized data and try to find some connection between the charge leading to these rights violations, in hopes of turning them into something resembling probable cause.
The county attorney has asked law enforcement to release everything seized. But it’s only a request. That the Marion PD has yet to publicly state it will release the seized devices suggests it’s not nearly as willing to admit it’s in the wrong. Nor is it as willing to make things rights. And that’s going to end up costing county residents their tax dollars, which will be added to the tab already rung up by local cops — one that now includes shattered trust and an extremely damaged relationship with the town it serves.
When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the investigators went beyond simply ignoring other evidence to falsifying the “evidence” they had to ensure the person they picked out for the job ended up in jail.
In 1999, Floyd Bledsoe, a 23-year-old farmhand, was living in Jefferson County, Kansas, with his wife Heidi, their two young sons and Heidi’s 14-year-old sister Camille Arfmann. Bledsoe’s 25-year-old brother, Tom, lived close by. Tom was “partially deaf” and had “certain intellectual limitations,” according to the lawsuit Floyd Bledsoe would later file, as well as a “history of troubling sexual behavior that included pursuing young girls.”
On Nov. 5, 1999, Camille went missing. Two days later, according to Bledsoe’s lawsuit, Tom told both his Sunday school teacher and his parents that he had killed her. Tom’s parents hired an attorney, Michael Hayes, who took Tom to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department that same day. Tom told investigators how he killed Camille and where her body could be found. Hayes turned over the murder weapon — a recently purchased 9 mm handgun. Tom was arrested and charged with homicide.
But Tom would soon change his story, recanting his confession and accusing his brother of the murder.
That led investigators to go after Floyd Bledsoe. And once they were focused on Floyd, they forgot all about Tom. Not only did they refuse to consider his recanting might be a lie, they falsified evidence to ensure the charges against Floyd stuck. Here’s how it started:
Shortly before Tom’s staged recantation,” Tom’s defense attorney “Hayes sought [Bledsoe] out and told him that Hayes was taking Tom off the ‘hot seat’ and putting [Bledsoe] on, or words to that effect.” On November 12, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation (“KBI”) officer, Defendant Johnson, administered lie detector tests to both Tom and Bledsoe. During his exam, Tom recanted his confession and incriminated Bledsoe. But Tom “failed the question” of whether he shot Camille, and was so overcome with guilt immediately after the lie detector test that he confessed again to killing Camille. Nonetheless, the KBI officer told Tom that he should continue lying to implicate Bledsoe.
Floyd Bledsoe, however, passed his lie detector test. KBI investigator Johnson stepped in again to interfere with the investigation.
Defendant Johnson falsified the results, however, inaccurately reporting that Tom had been truthful in denying his involvement in the murder, while Bledsoe had been deceptive in denying that he was involved. Based on those false polygraph results, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Tom…
Tom’s story was the “central piece” of the prosecution’s evidence during Floyd Bledsoe’s trial. According to Bledsoe, prosecutors withheld anything tying Tom to the crime, fabricated a statement from Floyd that undercut his alibi, did not disclose inculpatory statements made by Tom to Floyd’s lawyer, and refused to search Tom’s home or collect any other physical evidence that might have linked Tom to the murder.
After sixteen years in prison, DNA testing cleared Floyd and implicated Tom Bledsoe. Tom Bledsoe committed suicide shortly after this evidence was obtained, leaving behind a suicide note apologizing for framing his brother — a note that mentioned the county attorney (Jim Vanderbilt) “made him do it” and told him to “keep his mouth shut.”
Floyd Bledsoe sued the involved officers for violating his rights. The lower court refused to grant immunity to the officers, noting that the allegations raised by Bledsoe discussed police actions clearly established to be unlawful. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court arrives at the same conclusion.
The officers raised several arguments for being allowed to walk away from this wrongful conviction. The court doesn’t like any of them, including this attempt to portray the railroading of an innocent man as nothing more than the good faith efforts of law enforcement officers just trying to do their job.
Appellants assert that Bledsoe’s claims are facially implausible because there is an equally possible innocent explanation for their charging Bledsoe—that they honestly, but mistakenly, believed he had killed Camille and that, at most, they were negligent in investigating the crime, which is not actionable under § 1983. […] Similarly, Appellants assert that they are entitled to qualified immunity because, at most, they were mistaken in believing Bledsoe was guilty of Camille’s rape and murder, and their investigation was at most negligent.
Wrong, says the Tenth Circuit. What Bledsoe alleges far exceeds the innocent actions of cops mistakenly going after the wrong perp.
Those arguments mischaracterize Bledsoe’s allegations. Bledsoe alleges that Defendants fabricated false evidence against him, knowingly suppressed exculpatory evidence that would have proven his innocence, and facilitated his arrest, pretrial detention and trial without probable cause to believe he was guilty. None of those alleged actions, by definition, can be done mistakenly or “innocently.”
It’s pretty tough to “innocently” ignore a suspect’s multiple confessions, failed lie detector test, and previous interactions with the murder victim. In fact, the court says, there’s enough in Bledsoe’s allegations to suggest the opposite of innocence: a conspiracy to violate his rights, one participated in by officers, investigators, and prosecutors.
Bledsoe can move forward with his lawsuit. All but one claim survives the multiple defendants’ appeal of the lower court ruling.
For the foregoing reasons, then, we conclude that Bledsoe adequately alleged that each Appellant participated in depriving him of his constitutional rights and that, except for the failure-to-intervene theory, the alleged constitutional violations were clearly established by 1999. Said another way, except for the failure-to-intervene claim, each Appellant was on notice in 1999 that their conduct, as Bledsoe has alleged it—suppressing exculpatory evidence that would have shown Bledsoe’s innocence, fabricating evidence to use against him, and using that evidence to arrest, detain and prosecute him for a crime he did not commit—was unconstitutional. The district court, thus, correctly denied each Appellant qualified immunity on Bledsoe’s substantive constitutional claims, and on his conspiracy and personal participation theories of liability.
This puts Bledsoe closer to obtaining some form of justice for the injustice he spent 16 years subjected to. And this overwhelming denial of qualified immunity to multiple law enforcement defendants on multiple counts will perhaps result in a settlement being offered before this goes much further in court — something that may force the involved entities to hand over evidence showing how much they screwed this innocent man. And that evidence may show this sort of behavior was routine. There’s no reason to believe it isn’t. Everyone sued here seemed pretty comfortable railroading an innocent man, which suggests violating rights was just considered part of the job.
