Unless you are living under a Humboldt rock, by now you should know that First District Supervisor made a tasteless, sexual and inappropriate remark about a local female business owner last weekend at a Eureka Chamber of Commerce event.
Allen McCloskey sent the following letter about potential litigation to several people and local media including the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, Humboldt County Counsel and Humboldt Grand jury.
Humboldt County Clerk of the Board
Attention: Clerk of the Board, Official Agent of Service
825 5th Street, Room 111
Eureka, CA 95501
RE: Legal Notice of Preservation for Supervisor and “County Acting Agent” Rex Bohn
Dear Clerk of the Board and Collective Board of Supervisors:
Please note that as a matter of ongoing pre-litigation fact finding and as a matter of prudent legal posturing just prior to commencing/filing formal litigation against Humboldt County Sherriff and Humboldt County DHHS, “Humboldt County Acting Agents”, respectively, I need to hereby assert the following request(s) for preservation in anticipation of calling persons, the Clerk of the Board, staff and community members who personally witnessed the egregious-degrading-sexualized and excessively-perverted comments of your “County Acting Agent” County Supervisor, Rex Bohn; and that by way of subpoena in the legal matters forthcoming, I fully intend to compel each party to recount the sexualized-demeaning statements of your “County Acting Agent” and his degrading disregard for other persons; even while presenting in his official “Supervisor Rex Bohn!” modality, at a highly attended public event no less.
By this correspondence, I hereby give notice to the Humboldt County Government, soon to be named “Defendant, and all County Acting Agents-Does 1-50, inclusive” (and Mr. Rex Bohn under cover of private letter via Counsel for McCloskey v. Humboldt County Government) and staff that I am seeking all records relating to the sexualized comments of Supervisor, Rex Bohn. For purposes of this request, the term “records” shall have the statutory definition set forth by California Law and not that of any tribe or outside parties that may seek to influence the outcomes of this request or any future formal legal proceedings.
Now, by chance you contend/construe an understanding that I do not have right to public documents, public recordings or Department Investigatory Documents relating to this matter, the County Government has a duty not to dispose, alter, or otherwise destroy such records, pursuant to the laws of the State of California; and that McCloskey and Plaintiffs to be named hereby reserve the right to directly challenge any misconstrued understanding resulting in delayed access.
Specifically, this request is for all records made, received, or compiled during the course of any investigations of the matter(s) pertaining to “County Acting Agent”, Supervisor Rex Bohn, including but not limited to, hard copy and electronic communications, video recordings submitted by the public or any recordings retained as a result of an official County Government Internal Investigation in the matter(s).
This request also includes, but is not limited to, any audiotape, videotape, computer database searches, zoom recordings, visual or audio surveillance, electronic documents, including emails, text messages on the matter, in-car messaging data, reports, notes made, received compiled or texted during the course of the investigation or communications between any/all of the parties; but specifically and most notably any/all communications on the matter sent and/or received on any personal device used by County Supervisor and “County Acting Agent” in his official Capacity, if there exists an actual standard of practice of Bohn using his personal device/mobile phone for Government Purposes.
This correspondence shall also be construed as notice that I will file discovery requests seeking certain records from your Government, including the text messages, emails and other communications of your Sitting Supervisor and Vice Chair of your Governing Board. Through discovery requests, I fully intend to obtain from your Government and Staff a number of documents and things, including electronic records on cell phones and documents stored on county computers and computer storage media. As part of my initial discovery efforts, I fully intend to serve the County and its Agents with interrogatories and additional requests for documents and things
Accordingly, I must request that your Government ensure the preservation and not destroy, conceal, or alter any paper or electronic files and other data generated by or stored on the County Government (County) computers and storage media (e.g., hard disks, floppy disks, back-up tapes) or any other electronic data such as voicemails and text messages. As you know, failure to comply with this can result in sanctions being imposed by the court for spoliation of evidence or potential evidence.
In order to avoid spoliation, you will need to preserve and make available the data requested and on the original storage media, or on exact copies of that media (sometimes referred to as images copies or evidentiary copies). Do not reuse any media to provide this data. Electronic documents and the storage media on which they reside contain relevant, discoverable information beyond that which may be found in printed documents.
Therefore, even where a paper copy exists, we seek all documents in their electronic form, along with information about those documents contained on the media. I also seek paper print outs of only those documents that contain unique information after they were printed out (such as paper documents containing handwriting, signatures marginalia, drawings, annotations, highlighting and redactions) along with any paper documents for which no corresponding electronic fields exists.
My discovery requests will ask for certain data on the hard disks, floppy disks and back-up media used in your computers and electronic devices, some of which data are not readily available to an ordinary computer user such as “deleted” files and “file fragments” As you may know, although users may “erase” or “delete” a file, all that is really erased is a reference to that file in a table on the hard disk. A “deleted file” can be as intact on the disk as any active file you would see in a directory listing.
Courts have made it clear that all information available on electronic storage media is discoverable whether it is readily readable (active) or deleted but recoverable. Accordingly, the County and your Government are uniquely obligated to preserve and not destroy all passwords, decryption procedures including software to decrypt the files, network access codes, I.D. names, manuals, tutorials, written instructions, decompression, or reconstruction software, and any and all other information and things necessary to access, view and, if necessary, reconstruct the electronic data I would be requesting through discovery.
In order to assure that the County’s legal obligations are met in the preservation of documents and things, please forward a copy of this letter to all persons and entities with custodial responsibility for the various forms of data referenced in this letter.
I look forward to your timely response and your acknowledgement of receipt and anticipate your public obligation to comply with this legal notice of preservation.
Related post:
https://johnchiv.blogspot.com/2023/01/rex-gary-landergen-and-humboldt-good.html?m=1
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.