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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32435 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.

With the concept of adverse inference existing in US law non-criminal law, it seems strange that a mere settlement, instead of verdict finding the City responsible was reached.

According to an article in the linked article, the trial court determined that "he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally." That isn't all that helpful.

Plus, the plaintiffs might have a tough time prevailing on appeal, given that this is a civil rights action and their claims -- that the city violated their procedural and substantive due process rights and that the city effected a taking of their property -- are clear stretches under current jurisprudence. And there also might be problems proving causation re damages.

Finally, after trial the attorneys fees award would likely be much larger than the damages, so I would not be surprised if the city agreed to settle for damages + attorneys' fees to date.

Yeah, unfortunately there's an absolute charlie foxtrot when it comes to deprivation of rights where the government ignores or merely assists a bad third-party actor: Castle Rock v. Gonzales Warren v. DC, Lozito v. New York City and Riss v. New York (cw: rape, cops being bastards) are just high-profile examples of the general rule against the public duty to protect any individual meaning basically anything, with DeShaney v Winnebago County (cw: child abuse, 'cops' being bastards) showing how close the state's assistance and negligence could get even in the most extreme of harms.

That's why the motion to dismiss phase of this case had already reduced to some esoteric theories of a "right-of-access" taking and "nuisance", while explicitly blocking any direct due process or conventional takings torts. And honestly I'm not sure how strong those theories could have gone.

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