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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and now they all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:

The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit that took aim at officials’ handling of the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protests and further ensnared the former mayor and police chief, among others, in a scandal over thousands of deleted text messages. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office filed notice of a settlement Wednesday in U.S. District Court, just three weeks after a federal judge levied severe legal sanctions against the city for deleting texts between high-ranking officials during the protests and zone that sprung up around them, known as CHOP.

[...]

Attorneys for the more than a dozen businesses that sued the city, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, sent a series of letters to the city in July 2020 — after another lawsuit over the violent police response to the protests — demanding that any evidence pertaining to the city’s alleged support and encouragement of the zone’s creation be retained, according to the court docket and pleadings.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications, sending the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims and dismissing three others. In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city for the deletion of tens of thousands of text messages from city phones sent between former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.

The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys.

In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city

I'm imagining the judge as some sort of Godzilla-sized ant creature spewing jets of hot acid across Pioneer Square, BLISTERING hundreds of bystanders! And permanently CRIPPLING many more! Disfigured and mamed for life! Let's hope the judge doesn't start SLAMMING people into the pavement, EVISCERATING and GUTTING them with his mandibles, or BLASTING them with additional acid streams.

The absolute state of modern journalism.

And yet I still don't know what the sanctions actually were. Deleting text messages that are pertinent to a case is destroying evidence, which is a crime, right? So the people who did it are going to prison, right? Right?

I mean, that certainly could be the prompt behind a political cartoon.

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