I’ve seen the story in a few places; here’s a link to The Hill:
Backstory is that a journalist left a recording device running after a meeting of the country commissioners, hoping to record a violation of the open meetings act.
Hooboy, did he get a recording, of two or three people, all allegedly county officials, including the sheriff, lamenting that they can no longer lynch Black people “because they’ve got more rights than we do”.
They also talked about getting a contract hit on the journalist and the journalist’s son, with one saying that he would provide a backhoe to dig the graves, and another saying he knew a couple of real hitmen who would take the job.
Governor of Oklahoma has called on all of them to resign. The FBI is investigating.
"Just talkin’ " is a defence to a criminal charge.
Unless an investigation shows that someone started to take steps to actually do anything… which might trigger a conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights.
And there’s an interesting prisoners’ dilemma take to it, given that there were three or four people supposedly recorded…
Sure they can, unless maybe the audio quality is exceptionally bad. Financial institutions have been using automated voice authentication for years. How admissible that is as evidence is another question, however.
I think things are moving a bit quickly, and some of the news outlets are being more careful than others. Seems to be the local ones that are quick to put a names to the recordings.
I’d have a hard time actually charging them with anything based only on this conversation.
However, this isn’t just about the law, but it’s also about politics. I don’t have to want my sheriff in jail to not want him to be my sheriff anymore.
Sad to say, this will actually probably boost their poll numbers.
Oh, but they do, don’t they. The voters knew who these people were when they elected them.
Rachel Maddow played some parts of the recording on her program last night. It certainly didn’t sound like the whole conversation was some kind of ironic joke – what I heard seemed essentially in earnest.
Apparently leaving his phone to record them might have been illegal if I’m reading this correctly. IANAL. I hope that doesn’t come into play against the reporter who broke the story.
What resilience it must take to be a black person living in a community like that. I’d understand if someone in that position coped by just trying to steer clear of white people in general.
If it was a violation of the open meetings act, did they have any reasonable expectation of privacy? In other words, if they continued to meet to discuss official business, that should legally be an open meeting. The fact that they were illegally trying to hide their meeting shouldn’t affect the rights of a reporter to record the meeting: illegal secret meetings have no legal expectation of privacy.
At least, that’s the way I hope the law comes out.
What more rights do they fantasize that Blacks have over whites? Reminds me of trump musing, a long time ago, how if he was just starting out, it would be easier if he were Black. How does that saying go? When you’ve been on top, equality feels like oppression.
It’s not clear that it was anything more than a conversation among colleagues after the meeting, or that any official business was being discussed. The reporter was trying to catch them at it, but he caught them at something else.