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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32440 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.

Why won’t there also be criminal proceedings for the people who destroyed evidence?

Ever heard of Qualified Immunity? It protects state agents from consequences of conduct which, if done by a peasant, would otherwise result in criminal sanctions. Detectives can lie on the stand, prosecutors can hide exculpatory evidence, jail officers can scald the skin off a prisoner, cops can even kill people, and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

edit: this answer was incomplete, I expand upon it here.

Qualified immunity only covers civil trials, so in theory criminal charges wouldn't be impossible. One of the parts that makes Jessop go from tragic to tragicomedic is the detective in charge of the search, who almost certainly would have been involved in the alleged theft, had already plead guilty to other on-duty-crimes by the time the case had gone to the 9th Circuit. Of course, there's no private right to bring criminal charges in California, and criminal law isn't particularly focused on making people whole, so gfl.

((Also, technically, prosecutors fall under prosecutorial "absolute immunity", as do judges fall under judicial absolute immunity, which manages to be worse: even clear and knowing violations of well-established law can not be brought to heel in civil courts, so long as those actions are done under their official duties. But that's mostly a nitpick, given that "knowing violations of well-established law" might as well be a black hole.))

You're correct, I linked to a more complete answer.

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