The owner of a small newspaper in Marion, Kansas, a city of fewer than 2,000 people, is suing the city, local police department and other defendants after police raided his home and newspaper office last summer. has filed a lawsuit.
On Monday, Marion County Record owner Eric Meyer said: lawsuit The U.S. District Court in Kansas found that various public figures violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights in public and private matters when they raided his home and office in August 2023. he claimed. During those raids, investigators apparently included computers, servers, hard drives, and even the reporter’s personal cell phone, as Blaze News previously reported.
of Raid Meyer’s house and a firm associated with Kari Newell, a prominent Marion businessman who was seeking a liquor license for his restaurant. However, Mr. Meyer had received information that Mr. Newell had been driving illegally with a suspended license after being convicted of drunk driving; This could have jeopardized the application.
Meyer’s newspaper, the Marion County Record, did not publish anything about Newell’s past, but Meyer contacted then-Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody and Marion County Sheriff Jeff Soies, and local law enforcement agencies They said they would investigate whether Newell knowingly allowed Newell to drive. Suspended license.
Newell recently asked Meyer and another Record reporter to leave a coffee shop during an event for Republicans, but later accused Meyer of obtaining personal information in an “illegal” manner. did.
Within days, all five Marion Police Department officers and two Marion County Sheriff’s deputies raided Meyer’s home and the Marion County Recorder’s Office. The prerequisites for the search warrant were “Kari Newell’s identity theft” and “illegal computer activity.”
Meyer claimed in his lawsuit that the raid was carried out in retaliation for unfavorable publicity against former Marion Mayor David Mayfield and former Mayor David Mayfield. chief codyHe resigned after footage of the raid allegedly showed him rifling through a reporter’s file about his past work with the Kansas City, Missouri, police force.
Meyer has always maintained that information about Newell’s past was lawfully discovered because his driving record is public. But the complaint says Cody misrepresented the law regarding such information in the search warrant authorizing the raid.
Marion County District Court Judge Laura Vier signed the search warrant, but then almost immediately invalidated the search warrant by crossing out the line requiring a notary public’s signature, stating that Chief Cody had issued the search warrant “in my presence.” He claimed to have sworn an oath to the truth of the content. According to the complaint, Cody did not actually do that.
Meyer said he also plans to add a wrongful death claim to the lawsuit in connection with his late mother, Joan Meyer. Joan Meyer co-owns the record with his son and was at his home during the raid last August. “I’m not stupid,” she told officers that day, her complaint said. She said: “I’m 90-odd years old and I know what’s going on. And what’s going on is completely illegal.”
She predicted she would be killed in the raid and warned the officers: “It would be murder.” Within 24 hours of the attack, Joan Meyer died of an apparent heart attack. She was 98 years old.
The suit does not specify the amount of economic damages sought in the raid, but Meyer said he would seek $5 million in wrongful death claims.
“The last thing we want is to bankrupt our cities and counties, but we have a strong commitment to our democracy, to countless news organizations and citizens across the country, to the First Amendment and to our citizens. We have a duty to challenge this egregious and unreasonable violation of Section 4 and the federal laws that restrict newsroom searches,” said Eric Meyer.
Meyer also said he would donate “punitive damages for community projects and activities that support cherished traditions of freedom.”
The lawsuit names a number of defendants, including the City of Marion, former Mayor Mayfield, former Police Chief Cody, Deputy Marion Chief Zach Hudlin, Sheriff Soez, the Marion County Commission, and Detective Aaron Kritner. Blaze News has reached out to current Marion Mayor Michael Powers, Chief Hudlin, Sheriff Soys, and Marion County Commission Chairman David Mueller for comment. There was no reply.
But days after last year’s raid, Marion police argued in a first-person Facebook post that the officers’ actions were ultimately “justified.”
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