United States | News & Politics

The aftermath hasn't been pretty, and it feels like the bad guys won.  Cody was allowed to continue on the job for about 3 more months before public pressure finally convinced the City Council to fire him - they didn't want to have to pay out the penalty required by his contract.  He got to keep his pension from Kansas City and quietly slipped away for a while in the aftermath.  He was eventually tracked down and he's currently up on a felony charge - not for the raid itself, or lying about the search warrants, or anything like that.  He's being charged for encouraging the restaurant owner to delete some texts they'd exchanged.

The restaurant owner got her liquor license approved, even though Kansas law should have prevented one from being issued to someone with an unresolved DUI.  Joan Meyer died from the stress of the raid.  Several of the Record's employees ended up quitting, also due to the stress of the raid as well as the local harassment they got afterward.  The deputy mayor, who was only peripherally involved, was voted out of office in the next election; and the judge who signed off on the illegal search warrants was easily re-elected.  And Eric Meyer lost his mother, lost his staff, divided his town and his county, and has become an unwilling icon for standing up for rights against a corrupt government and the lax systems that enable them.