So let’s review the Banana Republic case in Marion County, and how it has all worked out thus far.
You’ll recall that the cops there raided the newspaper office and the home of the newspaper publisher. Their rationale was the notion that a reporter had obtained some information in an illegal manner. Which was, to put it mildly, an extremely flimsy premise to go marching into a newspaper office and turning the place upside down.
Well, a year later, what we have is an in-depth report conducted by independent prosecutors clearing the journalists and charging the police chief with a crime.
That report, which came out Monday, was done by Barry Wilkerson, the Riley County Attorney, who was appointed by the state attorney general. He and his investigative partner, Sedgwick County prosecutor Marc Bennett, are to be commended for the care and attention to detail with which he conducted the investigation, as well as the conclusion it reached. To me it was obvious from the beginning – you can’t prosecute reporters tor doing their jobs, and you can’t have the cops marauding through newspaper offices in some sort of Third World attempt to intimidate, or even conducting a Keystone Kops dragnet, hoping to stumble into something they could use in their phony-baloney “investigation.”
It’s worth saying that the mother of the newspaper publisher died the day after the raid. There were awful consequences immediately.
It’s also worth saying that the newspaper had been conducting its own journalistic investigation of the police chief, who had a checkered past. I’m not much for asserting motive, but let’s just say he would be predisposed to want to go after the paper if somebody gave him even a half-baked premise. Which is what happened.
That can’t fly in a country that believes in the First Amendment, and in fact it didn’t. Police Chief Gideon Cody is going to be charged with obstruction of justice. The search warrant that they had obtained from a rookie judge was baseless and should have never been issued; that much was determined pretty quickly.
Cody and other officials, meanwhile, face multiple civil lawsuits for their conduct. The process there will also play out as it should. I can’t say for sure who’ll win those cases, but – again – this is America, and our system of justice is built on solid ground, and you just can’t have a Banana Republic police raid on journalists they don’t like. People have to be held to account.
That’s begun to happen, and for that, I’m grateful. The wheels of justice grind slowly, as they say, but the system is working.
