Judge rejects Herbel’s bid to cite new evidence
Staff writer
A federal judge has denied a request by lawyers for former Marion City Council member Ruth Herbel to reinstate civil rights violations alleged against several people involved in a police raid Aug. 11, 2023, on her home.
The Record’s newsroom and the home of the Record’s co-owners also were raided that day.
Herbel’s case against the City of Marion and former Police Chief Gideon Cody will go forward as will portions of her case against sheriff’s detective Aaron Christner and Marion officer Zach Hudlin.
However, her case against Marion County, former Marion Mayor David Mayfield, and Sheriff Jeff Soyez will not.
Judge Holly Teeter dismissed those cases Oct. 4.
Herbel’s lawyers sought to reinstate them after release 13 days later of nearly 50,000 pages of investigative documents from the Kansas and Colorado Bureaus of Investigation.
However, Teeter denied that request Friday, ruling that Herbel’s lawyers had been aware the documents existed as early as Aug. 15 and could have filed a motion to allow her complaint to be augmented once the documents were released.
Much damaging evidence supporting Herbel’s theory that Soyez and Mayfield might have played a more significant role than they claimed in the raid emerged from the KBI and CBI documents and from depositions and delayed release of documents under the Kansas Open Records Act.
However, Teeter said Herbel’s attorneys failed to ask the court to allow their complaint to be amended to include possible new evidence.
Teeter’s ruling quoted precedents as stating: “Plaintiffs in suits of this type may have good grounds for seeking a reasonable period of time within which to gather and synthesize newly available information. But in that event, they should notify the court of their supplemental investigation so that the court may consider delaying its ruling in anticipation of the filing of an amended complaint.”
Teeter said her dismissal of portions of Herbel’s suit Oct. 4 “was not meant to be a dress rehearsal.”
“Plaintiffs are not necessarily entitled to revisit dismissed claims just because new evidence appears,” Teeter wrote. “The court appreciates the somewhat complex circumstances of this dispute. But these complexities don’t warrant relaxed procedure in this litigation.”
Citing the failure of Herbel’s lawyers to request permission to amend her complaint or to ask for a delay in a ruling on a motion to dismiss it, Teeter added:
“Plaintiffs might now regret some or all of these decisions. But regret about strategic decisions does not warrant reconsideration. Procedure matters.”
Attorneys representing the Record and others who have filed suits similar to Herbel’s say Teeter’s ruling will not affect their cases.
“This really sucks,” Herbel told the Record. “I’m really disappointed and have lost all faith in the judicial system, especially judges.”
Teeter, who had never before been a judge, was appointed to the federal bench in 2018 by President Donald Trump despite having a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association.
In 2022, she ruled that a public school teacher could disclose to a student’s parents the student’s preferred pronouns without the student’s permission and that a school district’s policy against disclosure constituted religious discrimination against the teacher and interfered with parents’ “constitutional right to raise their children as they see fit.”