For the Record

Readers here may recall several article I wrote a year ago (almost to the day…) about a police raid on a small town newspaper in Kansas, the Marion County Record.  There's an update, but this is the brief background to it all:

The short version is that it was a major abuse-of-power action that was prompted by a report the paper had done that upset one of the major business owners in town, Kari Newell, and overlapped with getting members of the town council and police department involved.
 
The police not only raided the newspaper offices, confiscating computers, but also the home of the publisher and co-owner Eric Meyer – as well as the home of a city council member, and Eric Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, the paper’s other co-owner Joan Meyer.  She was so stressed out by the raid that she kept telling the police they were going to give her a heart attack.  Sadly, that’s what happened – she had a heart attack and passed away.

 
Special prosecutors were assigned to investigator the matter and completely cleared the newspaper of any wrongdoing.  Meanwhile, lawsuits have been filed against the city, its then-mayor, several town officials and the sheriff, Gideon Cody, who resigned a little over a month later.
 
Well, last week, Sheriff Gideon Cody was arrested for obstruction of justice.  The charge was for persuading a witness to destroy emails and withhold information from an investigation into Cody’s involvement in the raid.
 
Owner-publisher Meyer notes that the charge is only for the cover-up, not for the raid itself, and feels there’s been local political influence in blocking efforts.  However, he said he was “happy something happened, at least.”  He also said that they paper has “probably exhausted all options here” over the raid, there are still those lawsuits pending, and it’s likely that they will pursue legal charges in federal court.
 
For reasons I don’t know I can’t find the articles I wrote about the raid, however this is a good piece about it by NBC News, and it includes video of the MSNBC interview with Eric Meyer.  You can find it here.
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