A rural county in Kansas has agreed to pay more than $3m and apologize over a raid by police on a small-town weekly newspaper in August 2023 that sparked a national outcry over press freedom, the paper’s editor said on Tuesday.
Eric Meyer, the editor and publisher of the Marion County Record, told the Associated Press he is hoping the size of the payment is large enough to discourage similar actions against news organizations in the future.
“The goal isn’t to get the money. The money is symbolic,” Meyer said. “The press has basically been under assault.”
Marion county was among multiple defendants in five federal lawsuits filed by the company that publishes the Marion County Record, its publisher, the estate of his late mother Joan Meyer, the paper’s co-owner, employees of the paper and a former Marion city council member whose home also was raided.
Sheriff Jeff Soyez issued an apology that mentioned the publisher and Joan Meyer by name, along with former council member Ruth Herbel and her husband. Joan Meyer collapsed and died of a heart attack aged 98 the day after the raid of her home, which had left her unable to eat or sleep and “stressed beyond her limits”.
“The sheriff’s office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion county police department’s search warrants on their homes and the Marion County Record,” the sheriff’s statement this week said.
The raid triggered a fresh chapter in a national debate about press freedom, focused on Marion, a town of about 1,900 people approximately 150 miles south-west of Kansas City at a time of a disturbing rise in threats, intimidation and violence towards journalists in the US.
It began when a confidential source leaked evidence that a local restaurant proprietor, Kari Newell, had been convicted of drunk driving but continued using her car without a license. The Record never published anything related to the information because its staff reportedly suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband during their divorce.
Nonetheless, after police notified Newell that the information was going around, she alleged at a local city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which was not true. Newell, who later acknowledged the drunk-driving arrest as well as driving with a suspended license, insinuated that the leak was meant to jeopardize her license to serve alcohol and harm her business, and had police remove reporters for the Record from the meeting.
The newspaper responded with a story to set the record straight. Then came the police raids, authorized by a search warrant alleging identity theft as well as unlawful use of a computer. Items seized by police included computers, cellphones and reporting materials found at the newspaper’s offices as well as the homes of its reporters and co-owners.
Three days after the raid, the local prosecutor said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify it. Experts said Marion’s police chief at the time, Gideon Cody, was on legally shaky ground when he ordered the raid, and a former top federal prosecutor for Kansas suggested that it might have been a criminal violation of civil rights.
Two special prosecutors who reviewed the raid and its aftermath said nearly a year later that the Record had committed no crimes before Cody led the raid, that the warrants signed by a judge contained inaccurate information from an “inadequate investigation” and the searches were not legally justified. Cody resigned as police chief in October 2023.
Cody is scheduled to go to trial in February in Marion county on a felony charge of interfering with a judicial process, accused by the two special prosecutors of persuading a potential witness to withhold information from authorities when they later investigated his conduct. He had pleaded not guilty and did not respond to a text message from the AP on Tuesday seeking comment about the county’s agreement.
