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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?

Because there's no crime to speak of. The only thing that comes close is Obstruction of Justice, but that only applies in criminal cases, not civil. Spoliation of evidence in a civil case is shitty, but it's a civil wrong, not a criminal one, and the appropriate punishment is sanction by the civil court.

Washington has an evidence tampering criminal statute. Although the statute says physical evidence, there's at least once case where someone was convicted for trying to break a cell phone to hide incriminating text messages. I'm sure a creative prosecutor can find way more relevant statutes.

Those are all very good points. I wouldn't say that a conviction here would be easy, but prosecutors have chased after plenty of far more ethereal charges before (and sometimes won). All I was saying is that if officials are not being prosecuted here, it's not because the statute is lacking. Compare that to the Loudoun County Schoolboard issue, which was stymied by the lack of a witness tampering law on the books in Virginia.

I hope you understand that I'm not disagreeing with you.

All I was saying is that if officials are not being prosecuted here, it's not because the statute is lacking.

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