Kraft One-Ups Brady’s Departure

simplyeric

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Perfect.
Fuck up a sex-worker’s life in order to try to mildly inconvenience a billionaire.
That seems like a good prioritization.

If it was really to go after some greater good, fine. But I don’t see what greater good this could achieve.
 

nighthob

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I think that the only possible “greater good” is the permanent destruction of the video data of wrinkly old men getting the beef jerky special.
 

eustis22

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Smatters.

Kraft and massage parlors is a meme now.

More so after TMZ lets go of the tape.

I don't think its making The Fappening.
 

nighthob

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Smatters.

Kraft and massage parlors is a meme now.

More so after TMZ lets go of the tape.

I don't think its making The Fappening.
On the other hand if the masseuse had a red dye job it could serve as the basis for the new Ginger Lemon Party website.
 

DavidTai

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https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/05/02/judge-suppresses-surveillance-video-in-case-related-to-robert-krafts/

In the six-page ruling, Judge Roberts finds that no effort was made to avoid monitoring or recording innocent activity. “[T]he innocent client was treated the same by law enforcement as the criminal element they sought to capture,” Judge Roberts wrote.
[snip]
So why would a failure to protect the innocent benefit the potentially guilty? Because, as Judge Roberts writes, video surveillance constitutes an “extraordinary method of searching for evidence of criminal activity,” requiring “high levels of responsibility” to be met in order “to avoid the intrusion on the activities of the innocent.”

When law enforcement fails to meet this standard, “[t]here is no other remedy but to suppress the evidence gathered.”
[snip]
This ruling presumably will apply to all Martin County cases. The question for Kraft (and the rest of the Jupiter County defendants) will be whether that same reasoning will be applied by judges in the neighboring jurisdiction. Ultimately, the question becomes whether the Florida appeals courts agree that the manner in which the search warrants were executed requires all videos generated by the searches to be kept out of court.
 

InstaFace

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why would there be multiple county jurisdictions here? Did the facility sit across two county lines? Were all defendants charged in their home county rather than the county of the alleged offense?
 

LoweTek

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I believe they were investigating a prostitution "ring" that encompassed multiple spas in a few jurisdictions
Nope they were investigating a (weakly alleged) human trafficking ring and no such charges were filed. They would never get a video surveillance warrant for the misdemeanor activity for which they brought charges.

Between the video surveillance of innocent people as ruled in Martin County and the questionable need to video in a massage room when you're basing your warrant on women sleeping in the spa and the shaky ground associated with the warrant the chances are the Palm Beach County judge will rule the same. If he doesn't we're headed to appeals.
 

Cellar-Door

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I bet it never gets released, Sunshine laws don't trump the 4th ammendment, and anyone who publishes it is getting sued in Florida, where the Hogan decision happened. I would be unsurprised if the end result of all this is Kraft walks away clean, and at least 1 person in the Police department or State's Attorney office loses their job for leaking footage.
 

Rovin Romine

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I bet it never gets released, Sunshine laws don't trump the 4th ammendment, and anyone who publishes it is getting sued in Florida, where the Hogan decision happened. I would be unsurprised if the end result of all this is Kraft walks away clean, and at least 1 person in the Police department or State's Attorney office loses their job for leaking footage.
The 4th just suppresses the use of the video at trial. Furthermore in FL, access to public records is a constitutional matter.

As I noted somewhere upthread, there are likely dozens of copies of the video already out there, provided in response to discovery demands from various criminal defendants.
 

Bowhemian

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So whose fingers were they? His own? The massage lady? A third party?
Inquiring minds want (but don't really need) to know.
 

Cellar-Door

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The 4th just suppresses the use of the video at trial. Furthermore in FL, access to public records is a constitutional matter.

As I noted somewhere upthread, there are likely dozens of copies of the video already out there, provided in response to discovery demands from various criminal defendants.
I was referring more to the amorphous "right to privacy" that courts have generally extracted from the 4th (and others), I don't think it unlikely that Kraft's lawyers can put together a winning argument that the state cannot invade a person's privacy, and then when disallowed at trial, publish it to the world at large. Though the state constitution may indicate that Sunshine trumps privacy, I'm not sure that the federal courts would agree. Also I wonder after Bollea who is going to be willing to publish.
 

Leather

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I bet it never gets released, Sunshine laws don't trump the 4th ammendment, and anyone who publishes it is getting sued in Florida, where the Hogan decision happened. I would be unsurprised if the end result of all this is Kraft walks away clean, and at least 1 person in the Police department or State's Attorney office loses their job for leaking footage.
Sunshine laws are constitutional because the public’s right to be aware of how their institutions arrive at their decisions is a reasonable infringement on any “penumbra” right.

Just think of what you are saying, that people who engage in criminal activity are due greater protection than society’s best guard against corruption and abuse of power because gosh, what they did was really embarrassing.

That being said, the law in my state allows law enforcement to redact or withhold information if, in their judgment, it “offends common sensibilities.” But that is narrowly construed and a blurry video of, frankly, fairly mundane-in-2019 sexual activity that doesn’t actually show any point of contact probably wouldn’t be protected.
 

TheoShmeo

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Sunshine laws are constitutional because the public’s right to be aware of how their institutions arrive at their decisions is a reasonable infringement on any “penumbra” right.

Just think of what you are saying, that people who engage in criminal activity are due greater protection than society’s best guard against corruption and abuse of power because gosh, what they did was really embarrassing.
But if that evidence was gathered in a way that makes it inadmissible, then that the evidence is really embarrassing weighs heavily in favor of not releasing it.
 

Leather

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But if that evidence was gathered in a way that makes it inadmissible, then that the evidence is really embarrassing weighs heavily in favor of not releasing it.
I’m not sure about that. With the caveat that I am not intimately familiar with Florida’s law but one that’s similar: We are talking about two different situations: evidence presented in court (which becomes public immediately, generally) and information maintained by a law enforcement agency as investigative data, which typically starts out protected and becomes generally public once the investigation closes (which could take years, depending on how the law defines “closed” in regards to appeals and statutes of limitations).

If the LEA has information as part of an investigation that ends up being illegally obtained, that does not (as far as I know) relieve the LEA from releasing it in response to a public records request. Rather, they are on the hook for any laws they broke in obtaining it and damages that result from it. The remedy is not to sue based on an improper release of records, but on the basis of the improper collection in the first place.

Now, someone could seek a court order to withhold the release (as one always can) based on statutory exceptions (eg the one I posted above, or that the release would result in harm to the subject of the information), but like any law, that’s where the devil in the details lay and depends on how risk averse the LEA is and who’s looking for the information. News organizations are by now pretty well versed in these laws and will seek an order to compel for information’s release if they smell bullshit.
 
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Cellar-Door

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Sunshine laws are constitutional because the public’s right to be aware of how their institutions arrive at their decisions is a reasonable infringement on any “penumbra” right.

Just think of what you are saying, that people who engage in criminal activity are due greater protection than society’s best guard against corruption and abuse of power because gosh, what they did was really embarrassing.

That being said, the law in my state allows law enforcement to redact or withhold information if, in their judgment, it “offends common sensibilities.” But that is narrowly construed and a blurry video of, frankly, fairly mundane-in-2019 sexual activity that doesn’t actually show any point of contact probably wouldn’t be protected.
This is irrelevant in this situation. The police also taped plenty of men who did not engage in criminal activity, the sunshine law sees no distinction between the Kraft portions of the recordings and those of men who simply got a massage. If a website asks for the full tape, they will get the innocent and those accused of crimes together. If they choose to publish for example video of men undressing who did not engage in alleged misdeeds? What if the police inappropriately put a camera in a person's house to investigate a potential crime.... on the camera they capture footage of a public figure engaging in sex.... should whatever the new Gawker is be able to obtain that footage under Sunshine laws and publish it?

Kraft's argument is more far-reaching than simply people engaged in criminal activity. Sunshine laws are good, there is no particular reason that illegally obtained surveillance would be in the public's interest. It does not reflect on corruption or abuse of power. A judge is more than capable of correctly determining that distinction and protecting the interests of private citizens.
 

Leather

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This is irrelevant in this situation. The police also taped plenty of men who did not engage in criminal activity, the sunshine law sees no distinction between the Kraft portions of the recordings and those of men who simply got a massage. If a website asks for the full tape, they will get the innocent and those accused of crimes together. If they choose to publish for example video of men undressing who did not engage in alleged misdeeds? What if the police inappropriately put a camera in a person's house to investigate a potential crime.... on the camera they capture footage of a public figure engaging in sex.... should whatever the new Gawker is be able to obtain that footage under Sunshine laws and publish it?

Kraft's argument is more far-reaching than simply people engaged in criminal activity. Sunshine laws are good, there is no particular reason that illegally obtained surveillance would be in the public's interest. It does not reflect on corruption or abuse of power. A judge is more than capable of correctly determining that distinction and protecting the interests of private citizens.
You're acting as if this is some new development merely because it implicates the owner of your favorite football team and you're thinking about it for the first time.

The answers are: LEAs should not keep information on innocent people as part of an investigation file because, by definition, that information would not be part of an active investigation. It should be purged per LEA's internal procedures to prevent what you're describing from happening. If they are not doing so, well, then that's another check that the legislature and public at large should be re evaluating the oversight of its law enforcement agencies. But devil's advocate point is, from a LEA standpoint: "We need to keep everything because we don't know what is/is not relevant." But the issue here isn't the sunshine law; it's the data collection practices of the LEA.

And having a full accounting of what an LEA has obtained illegally is absolutely in the public's best interest. Are you serious? And laws still protect witnesses, victims, etc... in certain circumstances. If this shit outrages you, then the focus should be on the behavior of the LEA, and how to fix it.

When the public is alerted that government is behaving against the public's interest and is shocked at what they find, you don't cut off the mechanism that allowed the public to find out about it in the first place.
 
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Leather

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For the record: there is of course the related issue of media’s ethical responsibilities on what they choose to publish. And I think that withholding for to threatened physical harm, for instance, is a valid reason to withhold information, and the fact that 45,000,000 people might know your name is a valid consideration in certain circumstances.

But a guy getting a handie and a thumb up
the butt is just embarrassing. It’s not dangerous that people know about it. That doesn’t mean it’s ethical to publish it, but again that’s a separate issue and we can’t start dialing back sunshine laws because of Gawker.
 

snowmanny

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Everyone has ethical responsibilities. I don't think holding press conferences and acting like you won the Super Bowl because you caught one of the 50,000 old men in Florida paying for a handjob that day is particularly ethical but whatever. It's legal!
 

Cellar-Door

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You're acting as if this is some new development merely because it implicates the owner of your favorite football team and you're thinking about it for the first time.

The answers are: LEAs should not keep information on innocent people as part of an investigation file because, by definition, that information would not be part of an active investigation. It should be purged per LEA's internal procedures to prevent what you're describing from happening. If they are not doing so, well, then that's another check that the legislature and public at large should be re evaluating the oversight of its law enforcement agencies. But devil's advocate point is, from a LEA standpoint: "We need to keep everything because we don't know what is/is not relevant." But the issue here isn't the sunshine law; it's the data collection practices of the LEA.

And having a full accounting of what an LEA has obtained illegally is absolutely in the public's best interest. Are you serious? And laws still protect witnesses, victims, etc... in certain circumstances. If this shit outrages you, then the focus should be on the behavior of the LEA, and how to fix it.

When the public is alerted that government is behaving against the public's interest and is shocked at what they find, you don't cut off the mechanism that allowed the public to find out about it in the first place.
I don't really care about Kraft, this is just the first time I became aware that Florida explicitly has sunshine laws override privacy protections, that's pretty rare from the state laws I have seen.

As to the first... my reading of the Sunshine provision in the FL constitution is that would not be permitted. Once you have it, you can't get rid of it, nor should we want that, it facilitates real corruption if LEAs can internally decide what is and isn't a valid record. Hence why having a judge make the determination on release is a more sound way of serving the Sunshine purposes without overly infringing on personal privacy.

As to the second...there is a big difference between knowing what has been obtained illegally and making the contents of the illegally obtained information public. Sure it is a LEA problem, but the idea that we just say... "oh well, LEA screwed up, nothing we can do about it, guess we just need to make everything that they got public" is insane and not at all in-keeping with the intent of the law. Now maybe that is the intent (I doubt it) but I'm not sure it would stand up to real scrutiny, as it opens up avenues for clear abuse of the law.
 

Leather

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Like I said: there are legal exceptions to what becomes public. Do any apply? I don't know, and that is frequently litigated. Like you point out, there are frequently countervailing public interests at stake, but as the old saw goes: bad facts make bad law. You don't want to start poking holes in open government laws based on a high profile example of the law maybe not being perfect. It does happen from time to time where a highly sympathetic individual asks for public information to be withheld because it's about them, or a loved one, and its highly sensitive even if it's not legally protected. The correct approach, IMO, is to accept that these instances are the exceptions, not the rule, and are the unfortunate cost of having a robust public access/oversight law. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", all that stuff. Because once you start giving government (and law enforcement in particular) the discretion to say "Nah, we think this is inappropriate/not important enough to release" it threatens to make the rest of the law moot.

But as applied here and without getting into a slippery slope argument full of hypotheticals, I'm not weeping tears of sadness for a grown-ass man who made the decision to knowingly engage in illegal activity and now is faced with real life consequences of that action. This is not the hill to die on.
 

Jimbodandy

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I don't really care about Kraft, this is just the first time I became aware that Florida explicitly has sunshine laws override privacy protections, that's pretty rare from the state laws I have seen.

As to the first... my reading of the Sunshine provision in the FL constitution is that would not be permitted. Once you have it, you can't get rid of it, nor should we want that, it facilitates real corruption if LEAs can internally decide what is and isn't a valid record. Hence why having a judge make the determination on release is a more sound way of serving the Sunshine purposes without overly infringing on personal privacy.

As to the second...there is a big difference between knowing what has been obtained illegally and making the contents of the illegally obtained information public. Sure it is a LEA problem, but the idea that we just say... "oh well, LEA screwed up, nothing we can do about it, guess we just need to make everything that they got public" is insane and not at all in-keeping with the intent of the law. Now maybe that is the intent (I doubt it) but I'm not sure it would stand up to real scrutiny, as it opens up avenues for clear abuse of the law.
I hate to chime in just to "like", but I have to compliment you and drleather2001 for a great discussion. This is really informative.
 

Leather

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I hate to chime in just to "like", but I have to compliment you and drleather2001 for a great discussion. This is really informative.
It's messy, and something that seems really dry until you actually start unraveling all the implications and you start to see how ingrained in society these laws really are.

The laws are never perfect, and in a general sense I agree with with Cellar Door that some stuff just seems fundamentally unfair and fucked up. I get it. But the question is "How do you make the law better without making it worse?" And, by the way, there's the related question of "Once you figure out how to do that, how do you make the legislators actually enact the legislation?"

Because here's the problem: legislators do not want to touch sunshine laws with a 10 foot poll, except for very narrow and specific fixes that almost never relate to law enforcement. Why? Because:

A) if you are in favor of providing added exceptions for public release of information, you get branded as anti-transparency by many powerful players like, oh, the newspaper association and every watchdog group in your state. And that doesn't play well with the voters.

B) if you start whittling away privacy protections, you get labeled as "anti privacy" and here comes powerful players like the police lobby, public employee unions, and the ACLU. And here come all the horror stories of what information *could* get out in such-and-such an example and you're a monster for suggesting it.

So it's gridlock.
 

MalzoneExpress

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Like I said: there are legal exceptions to what becomes public. Do any apply? I don't know, and that is frequently litigated. Like you point out, there are frequently countervailing public interests at stake, but as the old saw goes: bad facts make bad law. You don't want to start poking holes in open government laws based on a high profile example of the law maybe not being perfect. It does happen from time to time where a highly sympathetic individual asks for public information to be withheld because it's about them, or a loved one, and its highly sensitive even if it's not legally protected. The correct approach, IMO, is to accept that these instances are the exceptions, not the rule, and are the unfortunate cost of having a robust public access/oversight law. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", all that stuff. Because once you start giving government (and law enforcement in particular) the discretion to say "Nah, we think this is inappropriate/not important enough to release" it threatens to make the rest of the law moot.

But as applied here and without getting into a slippery slope argument full of hypotheticals, I'm not weeping tears of sadness for a grown-ass man who made the decision to knowingly engage in illegal activity and now is faced with real life consequences of that action. This is not the hill to die on.
How do you reconcile this position with “it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer"? Cloak it in whatever "greater good" argument you want, but privacy rights of the innocent could be trampled here. Innocent people could suffer from release of this type of information. If I have to choose between Spock and Benjamin Franklin, I'm going with Ben seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
 

Leather

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How do you reconcile this position with “it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer"? Cloak it in whatever "greater good" argument you want, but privacy rights of the innocent could be trampled here. Innocent people could suffer from release of this type of information. If I have to choose between Spock and Benjamin Franklin, I'm going with Ben seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
Give me an actual example to respond to instead of "what ifs" and "could be thats".

A) who's the party in question;
B) what's the harm being inflicted.

I have a feeling that my response will again be: exert more oversight on the LEA for improperly collecting/keeping information that was not necessary for the investigation of a crime. If privacy rights were violated by the LEA, then hit them on it. But if it's "well they collected some embarrassing stuff, but did do in good faith and because it was necessary" well, sorry, but we need to be able to see how the investigation arrived at whatever conclusions it did, or else you're willing to live with jailing or exonerating people without the public ever knowing why.
 
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Rovin Romine

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Just checking in to endorse pretty much everything Dr.Leather wrote.

Two quick thoughts:

1) There are protections in place against disseminating former evidence that involves children/minors.

2) Most of this stuff dies on the vine anyway, unless someone famous is involved. (Famous usually means rich/privileged, so it's not like they're not already operating with a leg up.) I've seen tons of weird shit on publicly available video, including "completely innocent" bystanders acting very very badly. For nearly all of that, no one cares enough to publish it as part of the public digital record. I'm not saying it does not happen, but in some senses, it's no different than those millions of digitized written police reports. How often does anyone really see them? How often does it impact your perception of someone who lives in your town?
 

Dollar

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Are we still thinking the detectives actually said that? The tweet was deleted very soon afterwards, and there's no explanation on that Twitter account.

edit: nevermind, I now see that the account says they "received a cease and desist letter from Kraft's attorney".
 

eustis22

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Notice how Shaft is the only one fighting the video? the other 99 guys are all "hell; yeah, youporn me, baby!"
 

Rusty13

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There’s like zero chance the video still doesn’t leaked.
Most likely to reddit or some similarly VERY anonymous place. After the Hulk Hogan/Gawker fiasco -- which, unlike Kraft, didn't already have a court order of illegality already in place -- I'm sure Kraft's legal team is already set to pounce on any publication/site that disseminates it.