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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32420 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.

Is Alex Jones the appropriate comparison here? IIRC, Jones was perceived as causing harm because unrelated people harassed the people he was talking about, and the highly unusual scale of the penalty was justified by claiming that he failed to comply with the court's instructions in delivering evidence to the plaintiffs. Here the scale of the harm is much higher, and the connection to those committing it plausibly much more direct.

Does it really come down to "government agents are above the law?"

The scale of the punishment had exactly zero to do with his failure to comply with discovery. That failure resulted in a default judgment on the issue of liability alone.

The scale of the harm is not greater here. The parents were subjected to years of egregious harassment. In contrast, the CHOP was in existence for less than a month.

  • -14

Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ? It may not have lasted long, but there was quite a bit of damage.

In the western legal tradition, violent crime is not a tort, or at least not exclusively a tort. If Brown murders Jones, the case is The State of Maryland vs Brown not Jones vs Brown. This is because violent crime causes lasting damage to the social fabric. I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric. The knock on effects of delegitimizing the state's agents of violence are where most of the damage was.

Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ?

Yes, but the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.

I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric

Yes, absolutely. But, again, the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.

The issue raised by the OP was why the two lawsuits led to differing amounts of damages. How "bad" an event is in the abstract is rarely an issue in a lawsuit. A lawsuit is about whether the defendant wrongfully caused damage to the plaintiff.

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