This should have been made available to April, unredacted, as part of discovery. If she is indeed the one releasing it, I don't think she wouldn't need any of these permissions. These are restrictions on the state releasing it to others. April should just be able to dump everything they gave her.
No evidence of a protective order which would prevent public release of discovery material exists.
There doesn't appear to be any legal reason which would restrict her from taking the footage out of her discovery material and making that available to the public. I don't see why, if April wanted to facilitate the release of the footage, she would need to sign a release and go through that process.
There is a practical reason - that her lawyer was provided it and she never obtained the material herself - but that would be as simple as asking him to provide it to her. Since the case was only dismissed a month ago, it's reasonable to believe he still has the data.
That option's broader scope always would have been the best case scenario, but her not doing it doesn't necessarily mean that she isn't cooperating, for any of several plausible reasons:
1. Even without a publicly filed protective order it's possible that her attorney privately agreed with the state that certain discovery materials would be kept between her and her attorney, which under agency principles could be considered binding on her.
2. Back when April was still kowtowing to the qover cult, she may have directed her attorney to delete every copy of bodycam footage in his possession as soon as he got what he needed from it, whether at Nick's urging or just in the belief that it would be good for him.
3. Due to high file size, her attorney might have only sent disclosed footage to her in the form of links to a Dropbox-like software from which she never bothered to download local copies (thanks in part to Nick having never set up internet at the second house), and now by the time that she's motivated to release them, those links are dead and the attorney's own copies are deleted pursuant to whatever his usual retention policy is after a representation has concluded.
4. Even if she could still retrieve copies from her attorney, she could be subject to an NDA which explicitly prohibits releasing bodycam footage in her possession, but which Nick drafted so poorly that her merely expressing that she has no problem with the state releasing it on its own would fall in a gray area where she wouldn't technically violate the NDA, or at least in enough of a gray area where Hardin could advise Null that it'd be reasonably safe for the $6K agreement to include a clause indemnifying her in the extremely unlikely event that a court someday that the NDA was both enforceable and violated.
5. Even if there is no NDA, someone may have conveyed to her legal advice or a legal threat, whether correct or not, that a direct release might expose her to tort liability to the Rekietas, or at least vindictive lawfare from the Rekietas, on some conceivable ground like invasion of privacy, public disclosure of private facts, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc. As long as they come up with something that's not sanctionably frivolous, it doesn't matter whether she'd prevail because the $6K in it for her is nowhere near enough to fund that fight. Going the consent route may have been the only thing that felt reasonably safe.
6. Even if she never contemplated any conceivable legal exposure, she may simply have some moral compunction about affecting the Rekietas' privacy or at least their children's privacy any more broadly than her statutory consent can control. If that's the case we would never know unless she speaks up.
7. This is least likely but just to throw in the kitchen sink, if there's any truth to the speculation that April's attorney was selected by Nick, paid by Nick, and/or even directed to some degree by Nick or by the Rekietas' attorneys, then April could simply be paranoid about reaching out to him for copies at this juncture for fear that he might tip Nick off and provoke him to lash out. This could be undesirable out of some belief that an element of surprise would be helpful to whatever Hardin is up to, or simply out of a desire to be left alone. In this scenario there still remains the possibility of her reaching out to the attorney and doing a direct release at some point in the future depending on whether Hardin's efforts are successful and make her copies a moot point.
The woman Nick likes more than his own wife betraying him. Imagine the spiraling.
And, overall, this is what Harden and Josh are dealing with. It states that Nick would be given notice of any releases. Can he fight it with, say, an injunction? That's my question. Josh hinted at that issue today.
The provision you cite would be the one used to try to force a release if and when the county refuses it, and the notices referenced in that provision would be served in connection with that civil action, not necessarily the same notices referred to on MATI today. Minnesota's one of three states where a civil action can be commenced by mere service of the summons and complaint and the action wouldn't need to be filed with the court unless and until there's occasion for motion practice, so he
could be referring to such an action even if there isn't one visible on MCRO yet, but you'd think that he probably would have mentioned an outright lawsuit if there is one, or that Nick will blab about it as soon as he gets served.
More likely, the county opted to cover its ass by making up some sort of internal process with a paper trail showing that interested parties' concerns were given due consideration prior to any anticipated litigation. For example they could simply insist that as soon as Hardin files the written request for the footage, then the county gives notice to the Rekietas (or insists that Hardin prove that the Rekietas were copied on the request), then the Rekietas are given x number of days to express any written objections that are already anticipated to come through the Barneswalker who presumably was already in touch about previous requests last year, and then the county would express its decision on which portions of the footage (if any) the county would unilaterally release in y number of days absent a court order to the contrary.
Once that sort of ad hoc CYA process is concluded, then it would be up to Hardin to commence a civil action under the provision you cite to try and get more released, and it would simultaneously be up to the Barneswalker to try and get less released under some tortured interpretation of that provision's wording or some other procedural mechanism that's more on-point, possibly a petition for a writ of mandamus ordering the sheriff to cease whatever noncompliance with the bodycam statute is allegedly about to occur, or a regular civil action under the
Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act coupled with motion paperwork for an immediate ex parte TRO enjoining the proposed release until a preliminary injunction can be properly heard and a permanent injunction can be fully litigated. All of that would be visible on MCRO when the time comes.
This would be unironic balldo-pocalypse, and I hope your on the money
But also ironic when his inevitable lashing out would get compared to all the months of pontificating about what is "her story to tell," and all the sanctimonious insistence that everyone respect April's wishes regarding what she wants to keep private or public, and all the late-night babbling on Signal and Xitter about what an egregious cardinal sin it is to "take away her voice," etc. After all of
that, her bodycam consent would provoke his nonstop flailing in the court of public opinion and in
actual court to bury this stronk womyn for having the courage to "speak her truth" to the world. The stench of hypocrisy would get so thick you could cut it with with a knife, and he'll never have the slightest shred of self-awareness that it'd take to notice.
