The St. Johns County Sheriff's office violated Fourth Amendment rights of an attorney and her client by listening in to their private conversations in an interview room and stealing a document from the attorney's hands.
So ruled the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in a decision posted earlier today.
At issue were our Federal Wiretap Act and our Fourth Amendment.
The case was brught by attorney Anne Marie Gennusa and her client, Joel Sutrdivant, who were both represented by Jacksonville attorney William Sheppard, Bruan DeMaggio, Matthew Kachergus and Elizabeth Louis White.
When an attorney and a client are speaking in an interview room and the client is not charged with the crime, they have a reasonable expectation of privacy: listening in is a violation of the Fourth Anendment, a civil rights violation. When an attorney is holding a statement and a deputy grabs it out of her hand, that's a civil rights violation, too.
So ruled United States District Court Judge Timothy Corrigan in 2012.
So ruled the United States Court of Appeals today in Atlanta.
The only surprising thing about today's ruling is that our St. Johns County Sheriff, DAVID BERNARD SHOAR and lawyers JOHN JOLLY and MATTHEW CLINE bothered to appeal on behalf of THOMAS MARMO and BRIAN CANOVA.
The trial court awarded no money damages, only injunctive relief and attorney fees.
This appeal was a waste of the public fisc.
Sheriff SHOAR is ethically impaired.
Sheriff SHOAR had termed this the "most frivolous lawsuit" he'd "ever seen."
Sheriff SHOAR had stated, "It is cases like these that cause members of the public to be very critica of the effetivness of our civil justice system in America."
No Sheriff SHOAR, it is crooked cranky Sheriffs like you.
And all your works and pomps.
And all your camp followers.
And all your scared deputies, who do evil to keep their jobs.
It is also the current and former members of your Department, who long posted hate speech on the St. Augustine Record, its Talk of the Town website, and on MICHAEL GOLD's www.plazabum.com and www.shamefulpeople.com.
What a lugubrious goober. SHOAR knows not that he knows not that he knows not, and he's been elected thrice, twice without opposition, because our somnolent, somnambulistic St. Johns County Democratic Party, not unlike our St. Johns County Sheriff's Office, is reminiscent of Jimmy Breslin's "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight."
This same Sheriff refused to recuse himself on November 2-3, 2010, when Deputy Jeremy Banks' girlfriend, Michelle O'Connell, was found shot to death with his service pistol. Supervising an investigation that was a stench in the nostrils of the Nation, Sheriff DAVID BERNARD SHOAR pronounced it a "suicide."
SHOAR is a criminal, and his credibility is in shreds.
The trial curt decision was written by U.S. Distridt Judge Timothy Corrigan, appointed by Presideent G.W. Bush in 2002.
The appeals decision was written by Senior Judge Joel F. Dubina of Alabama, who was appointed a District Judge by President Reagan and an Appeals Judge by President G.H.W.Bush.
The appeals decision was joinned in by:
Senior Judge Emmett Ripley Cox, appointed by President Reagan and is a native of Cottonwood, Alabama; and
Judge Adalberto Jordan, a former federal prosecutor, former U.S. District Judge in Miami and was appointed by President Obama in 2012; he was born in Cuba and clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
A federal grand jury needs to investigate Shoar's civil rights violations.
Now.
The whole world is watching.
CNN and NBC News Dateline are next.
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