Should Kansas Legislature respond to Marion police raid on newspaper? Democrats say yes.

Two top Democratic lawmakers want to change Kansas law in response to a raid by Marion police on a local newspaper that has been heavily criticized by First Amendment advocates.

House Minority Leader Vic Miller, D-Topeka, and Rep. Jason Probst, D-Hutchinson, on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to make it more difficult for law enforcement to get a search warrant.

Instead of needing a magistrate judge's signoff, police and sheriff's deputies would have to get a district judge's approval.

"I'm not here to trash magistrates," said Miller, who previously served as a municipal court judge. "I'm here to call attention to a situation that deserves attention, and this is simply a device to do that."

The idea, which has not yet been drafted into formal legislation, is the first legislative proposal announced following the Aug. 11 raid of the Marion County Record, the home of its editor and publisher and the home of the town's vice mayor.

Police seized computers, cellphones and other materials as part of an investigation into alleged identity theft, but the Marion County attorney later released the items because police didn't have sufficient evidence of a crime.

That warrant was approved by Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, who spent nearly 18 years as a prosecutor before being appointed to the bench in 2022.

A Topeka woman, Keri Strahler, filed a complaint against Viar with the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct. A panel will meet next month to determine whether the judge violated the code of conduct, according to a letter from the commission Tuesday.

"This is probably not the solution to stopping what we saw in Marion, but it is definitely the start of the conversation," Probst said. "We need to have a conversation about judicial review of search warrants."

Miller said he hasn't discussed the proposal with anyone in law enforcement or the judicial system about how it could affect their operations.

"That's why we have hearings," he said.

Some officials caution a wait-and-see approach on Kansas raid response

Retired Topeka Police Chief Ed Klumpp, who is now a lobbyist for multiple law enforcement organizations, declined to opine on how the proposal could affect law enforcement without seeing bill language. But he did explain more generally the reason magistrate judges are used for search warrants.

"Generally, the reason magistrates are used is because in the rural areas, there is not a ready availability everywhere for a district court judge outside of court hours when there's a need to get a search warrant," Klumpp said.

Some rural areas can lean heavily on magistrate judges. In the 15th Judicial District, which covers seven counties in the far northwest corner of the state, there are only two fully fledged district court judges on the bench. The district has six magistrate judges.

State law does put more limits on a magistrate judge's search warrant authority compared to a district court judge. In addition, magistrate court judges only can preside over trials involving misdemeanor or traffic offenses, but can hold preliminary hearings in felony cases.

"A search warrant signed by a magistrate judge is more restricted in where you can serve it than it is a district court judge," Klumpp said. "A magistrate judge can only sign a warrant to search within that magistrate's court jurisdiction. A district court can be used anywhere in the state."

Currently, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation is continuing to investigate the possibility that a Record reporter and a local city council member illegally used an online Kansas Department of Revenue database to look up an individual's driving record.

That person, local bar owner Kari Newell, was seeking to get a liquor license. She was allegedly driving without a driver's license since a DUI conviction.

A KDOR spokesperson told the Associated Press on Monday that it was legal to access the database used by the Record reporter.

KBI investigation into Marion County raid remains ongoing

KBI Director Tony Mattivi said Tuesday the investigation remains ongoing and there is no timetable for its completion. It was not currently probing the raid itself, he said.

Rep. Stephen Owens, R-Hesston, who chairs the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, said he would rather wait until the KBI has completed its work before weighing whether a legislative response is needed.

"I'm certainly not to the point that I'm going to say one way or another whether there was or there was not wrongdoing," he said. "It certainly seems that there were quite possibly some missteps and some poor decision making. But even then, I'm just real hesitant to cast any judgment until I have all of the information."

Requiring district court judges to sign off on all warrants, Owens said, would potentially add an "additional level of scrutiny."

"The central idea," Probst said, "is to slow down law enforcement from being able to get a warrant and then move immediately into searching and seizing property without judicial review. The system as it's designed right now, if it works and functions as it should, is designed to slow down that process so that there's time for review and deliberation on whether that's justified or not."

But even if a documented issue emerged with how Viar signed off on the warrant, Owens added that he didn't believe that necessarily meant cracking down on all magistrate court judges was the answer.

"I think that we've got to be careful not to make a complete new policy based on the potential actions of one (person)," Owens said. "If we have decades of proof that has shown that the system works out well."

The Democratic proposal wouldn't change qualification requirements, such as requiring a law degree, or otherwise affect how magistrate judges are selected.

"I don't think that's the problem," Miller said. "No, I'm not going to take one isolated event and say we need to overhaul the process of selecting them."

Miller said he will try to come up with other ideas and is reaching out to other legislators for proposals of how to prevent similar events in the future.

"If nothing can be done when someone ignores the law, what's to keep them from ignoring the law?" Miller said.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas Legislature could respond to Marion police raid on newspaper