By: (AP) Los Angeles County is paying $40,000 to a newspaper to settle a lawsuit over a 2002 search warrant that district attorney's office investigators served at the paper's headquarters.
The search, which was part of an investigation into corruption allegations involving the city of South Gate, shut down the Metropolitan News-Enterprise for about three hours. The district attorney's office had maintained its search warrant was permissible because it was looking for a specific business record, but federal law and a Supreme Court decision narrowly restrict searches that interfere with news operations.
"You had 11 armed investigators invading a newsroom for nothing," Roger M. Grace, the paper's editor and co-publisher, said Tuesday.
The daily, which specializes in legal news, eventually learned that the investigators were trying to get evidence of whether South Gate city funds were used to place a legal notice related to a recall election, Grace said. Since the notice had not been paid for at the time of the raid, the paper had no evidence to prove who paid for it, Grace said.
The newspaper sued District Attorney Steve Cooley on claims that the search warrant was overly broad and that Cooley libeled Grace by allegedly saying he refused to cooperate with a judge's order.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge dismissed Grace's libel claim in 2003.
The settlement approved by a county board Monday resulted in the district attorney's office changing its policy on searching media organizations to strengthen privacy protections, Grace said.
"What happened on May 2, 2002, could not happen again," Grace said. "They simply failed to follow the law, which is rather shameful on the part of the district attorney's office."
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