The judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the raid of a newspaper office in Marion, Kansas, is facing a complaint about her decision and has been asked by a judicial body to respond, records shared with CNN by the complainant show.
The judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the raid of a newspaper office in Marion, Kansas, is facing a complaint about her decision and has been asked by a judicial body to respond, records shared with CNN by the complainant show.
I don’t know about going nowhere. The higher courts generally get pretty grumpy about lower courts going mask-off like this.
Nothing for them to quash at this point since the county attorney withdrew the warrant. I don’t really forsee her getting impeached or being declared without capacity and she has qualified immunity for civil damages. Hope she doesn’t get reelected.
Edit: unless she’s shown to have signed off without the affidavit. That could get her into trouble. I don’t think they can prove that though.
If the warrant was withdrawn, doesn’t that imply that the police who executed the withdrawn warrant were illegally searching and seizing?
The penalty for searching without a warrant is that evidence acquired is inadmissible. Sometimes. Sometimes not even that. Typically, that’s fucking it. So it doesn’t really matter that the search was illegal once the property is returned. Mostly, the penalties for the police are just political ones.
If there are some provable damages, the person who’s civil rights were damaged might be able to sue, though with qualified immunity even that is a very, very uphill battle. SCOTUS rules against plaintiffs in cases like that routinely because the SCOTUS is very, very pro-police. They routinely rule that making things harder for the police & prosecutors is too high a price to pay for protecting civil rights. See, for example, Van Buren vs US or Arizona v. Gant.