Somebody blundered
It turns out the warrant was fraudulent. Oops.
Earlier this week, state police in Florida conducted an armed raid of COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones’ home, seizing her electronic devices and pointing guns at her kids, in retaliation for the fact that she blew the whistle on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ COVID coverup.
DeSantis says he didn’t know about the raid. Everyone else says ha.
The state claimed that the raid was justified because Jones was suspected of hacking into an internal network to send a message to state employees about COVID. But now it turns out the message was simply sent to an email address that it had made publicly available. This means the warrant was fraudulently obtained, which in turn means a whole lot of people are in trouble.
This means one or more people in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lied to a judge in order to obtain a warrant. It means police were sent to carry out a fraudulently obtained warrant. It means Rebekah Jones has the mother of all civil suits, if she wants it. And it means the people who fraudulently obtained the warrant are in danger of going to prison.
Other than that…
Screechy, you’re a lawyer right? Given how hard it’s been to hold people to account for bad warrants leading to people dying, I would have thought the risk of serious individual consequences here would be tiny? What QI precedent is there on this subject for whichever Circuit Florida is in?
Nice to dream though.
Well at least she’ll get her kids’ college funds out of this experience.
I was expecting there to be questions about the basis for the warrant.
I wasn’t expecting the whole thing to fall apart in two days.
Rob,
Appreciate the question, but my knowledge about qualified immunity is fairly superficial. I’ll keep my eyes open for any good summaries I see, though.