- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but why did the police quote Null a figure for the body cam footage at all? For the footage to be used in court at all it would have to be edited and minors redacted, right? And I doubt anyone had to do much work to make the footage available for viewing at the court house.
Was this just the police telling Null to go away without saying it? It just doesn’t make sense that they’d need $5k+ to pay for editing, redacting, etc, when it’s work they do anyway to prepare it for court.
Use of bodycam footage as evidence in a criminal trial is different than release of bodycam footage as a public record. But that said, if it was used as evidence in court and then requested after use in court by any person.....what was provided to that person would have to be redacted.
Since Nicholas entered a plea deal instead of doing a full legal battle I would guess that only a small amount of the bodycam footage, if any, got edited and censored at all. Since he plead and got probation there was no longer any reason to edit and censor any more footage and just as a cost saving measure it would not be done unless something made it necessary to do so.Okay, so was the footage at the court house redacted? If so, who did it, and who paid for it?
The bottom line is that the quoted price is nonsensical. The footage is either presented in court, and therefore free to the public, or it isn’t presented as evidence and therefore practically impossible to access. The only situation where it’d make sense to pay is if the police department would like to release it but doesn’t want to spend the resources redacting the footage. But in this case, the police department (or sheriff’s office, whatever) doesn’t want to release it. So why quote a price on the body cam footage?
@Tiki Bar Man 2 was the footage redacted at the courthouse?
Remember that Minnesota is also very backwards in terms of how they handle bodycam footage and Candied Yoshi is a backwater town in that kind of of state. This means that processing fees to edit and censor things like bodycam is very much in their interest to further stymie access to it but there are more causes. To further explain the reason for the fees, yes, the Minnesotan courts still have a duty to make records accessible to the public unless some other interest overrides that duty.
The problem lies in what is considered ''accessible to the public'' here. Technically, on the most technical level, having access to court records only at Minnesotan courthouses on their internal systems, while supervised by court personnel, is considered ''accessible to the public'' since anyone technically could travel to a Minnesotan courthouse and request specific records and accessing records outside of this method can be challenged and delayed to the point of needing a lawyer to get anywhere.
This means that they do not have to censor and edit everything but only the things used for full court proceedings or requested to be accessed/released outside of the system as viewing things in a closed system while in a courthouse, often under supervision of court personnel, has different requirements to releasing a full video redacted and edited only to protect minors and such.
Since the average person would not bother travelling out of their way to a Minnesota courthouse just to see things like the state of a druggie hoarder-den, most evidence would only receive the bare minimum processing since no one is going to request or receive it.