Pat Patriot
Well-known member
- Mar 19, 2019
- 2,881
- 0
Getty Images
With Patriots owner Robert Kraft entering a not guilty plea and requesting a jury trial on charges of soliciting prostitution at a Florida day spa, there’s a chance the prosecution of Kraft and many others won’t have enough evidence to even go to trial.
As explained by WPTV.com, the court order authorizing video surveillance at the spa did not expressly permit recording of activities.
“The [search warrant applications] that the police filed with the judge was to monitor and record what was happening the spa,” Jordan Wagner, a partner at the law firm representing more than a dozen of the defendants told WPTV.com. “But in the judge’s order, he only put the word monitor, not monitor and record.”
WPTV.com confirms that the applications “clearly ask” for permission to “monitor and record,” and that the court orders permitting surveillance uses only “monitor” and not “monitor and record.”
“We checked the paperwork,” WPTV.com writes. “The search warrant applications clearly ask for monitoring and recording permissions in the title of the document. However, the judge’s order granting those permissions only uses the word ‘monitor,’ not ‘monitor and record.'”
Martin County sheriff Bill Snyder, who told WPTV.com that law enforcement officials posing as repairmen installed the hidden cameras, insists that the activities were legal and complied with the court orders.
“I can say this unequivocally,” Snyder said. “We followed every protocol that the State Attorney and the judge required.”
The argument apparently will be that Snyder and his associates did not follow “every protocol” because the they exceeded the plain language of the court order allowing video surveillance when monitoring of the cameras became monitoring and recording.
The response surely will be, “Monitoring implies recording.” The response to that surely will be, “Why did you ask for monitoring and recording if monitoring implies recording?”
“We feel if you ask for A, B, and C, and you only get A and B, logic would tell you that you weren’t allowed to get C,” Wagner told WPTV.com. “In this case, they asked for monitoring and recording and the judge’s order only says monitoring. . . . The sheriff’s office has all the reason in the world to say that they did everything by the book because I think that they know that they violated a lot of peoples’ rights, people who were arrested and people who weren’t arrested as well.”
It’s an issue that will be resolved long before Kraft or any of the other defendants will be required to stand trial, and if this argument based on plain language and basic logic prevails, there will be no trial at all, for any of the men charged with soliciting prostitution as part of this specific “monitoring” exercise that became “monitoring and recording.”