all right it's been a long day we had second day of depositions today in one of the creepy cop search cases and this is the case on behalf of the Johnson family who when they saw the original creepy cop search video of the police officers inside my other client's house when they saw it on YouTube they got over their fear and decided to come forward about their own experience with these creepy cops and today they got to give their depositions to lawyers for the other side so we started around 10 o'clock this morning and I'm just on my way back back home and back back to the office from having taken those those depositions and overall I think they they went really well and it this was a story of a family who's just at home and they see police officers approaching they go to of course put their dogs away in the bedroom and before they can even get to the door the police officers entered their home really it was supposed to be a knock and talk allegedly according to the police report from the officers but nobody was even able to come to come to come or talk to the officers they just came right in I believe that this has been the mo for this drug task force that they called at the time the special enforcement unit or the seu and as I explained about the first day of depositions where the police officers all pled the Fifth Amendment the ones who showed up the one officer who actually didn't answer some questions about their prior practices and and policies he said something really surprising and that was that even though they were a drug task force which generally is going to be obtaining and executing a lot of search warrants looking for drugs his testimony was that he didn't recall them ever getting one search warrant for the years that he was on this task force and he was exclusively assigned to him and that was really surprising to me and it's obvious now that this drug task force from the the Creek cop search case was designed to really go outside the law so it was designed to allegedly go on these talk knockout talks and what those are supposed to be are these consensual encounters where just like Jehovah's Witness or Mormons or anybody or vacuum cleaners go up to somebody's front door you can knock on it and you can talk to them with their consent so long as they sit there and talk to you and tell you not to to get off the property that's what a knock and talk is supposed to be but the way these guys apparently did their knockout talks is they arrived at somebody's house with information that there would be some illegal drugs inside and they just sort of barged in and intimidated and threatened the people inside the house and then the idea was to get the drugs first and then once you have the drugs you have leverage to use to threaten or or you know otherwise get whoever's in the house to give you more information and then you seize whatever you you were able to find inside the house and you move on to the certification well the family that testified under oath today told a a just really a sad story and that's just that they're home and they have extended family who's visiting from Northern Virginia and this extended family was originally from Peru so they clearly looked Hispanic that when the officers came in they had no warrant they weren't invited to come in two of them came in with guns in their hands they weren't wearing regular police uniforms they were planes plain clothes though at least one of them had tactical gear on in an AR-15 style rifle and they came in and they basically immediately started searching the house and Force the family to sit around the kitchen table they had them call the son who wasn't there at the time and have him get to the house within like 10 minutes which he did and then once they got there threats were made so the threats were made that they would call ins or immigration on the family members who were originally Peruvian all they knew about them was their appearance threatened to call social services to have the children in the house taken from the family they threatened physical violence to the Sun if he didn't open his sake so that is the testimony that happened today and the officers themselves for the most part were unwilling to so far answer details of any questions about what happened or didn't happen at that house there's no doubt that there was not a search warrant they were able to produce a form that was titled permission to search the house that was signed by father and the testimony was today that they had already come in the house prior to that form being signed that they had already searched the house prior to that for being signed that they had been there for you know an hour or two hours before they even presented that form uh demanding that it be signed so I mean the idea with consent is that you haven't signed before you search something not after you so there was a large amount of U.S currency that was seized out of the house there were multiple firearms that were seized out of the house and ultimately no criminal charges were filed against anybody when I had originally sent a foia request about for any documentation that the police had ever been at that house on that day I got nothing it wasn't until the discovery process that we got what was allegedly a police report that noted that they were there on a knock and talk and that They seized the guns and it had the the serial numbers If They seized an amount of U.S currency which they put at like six Thousand Seven dollars where is my client testified that it was more like ten thousand dollars but that is really the danger of these types of units so if you've been following that case this is again the case where the the lawyers for the police officers are trying to stop basically you from seeing ever any of the video depositions of the police officers and we found out why last time um it was time for their depositions because they pled the fifth Amendment over and over and over and over again two two of the remaining police officers who have not been the post yet they're scheduled for later this week if they end up pleading the fifth at least at least one of them is criminal defense defense though I would imagine that might be the case another one of the police officers who was not involved in the original creepy cop search video was involved in the incident at the Johnson family house that we were there about today and he has apparently just completely absconded he didn't show up for his deposition even agreed to do it over Zoom he's in a different state he's not even in contact with with his lawyers so I'm not sure what the deal is with that we'll see basically trying to fit in all these depositions here right up at the end of the discovery period and part of the reason for that is because we kept pushing back and pushing back and pushing back these depositions because the officers the lawyers anyways were worried that there was an FBI investigation against the officers so the next step is we have trials coming up early 2023 we'll probably have some oceans flying back and forth waiting to hear from the federal court what the what the response to their motion is going to be regarding video depositions and whether they could be released even after the case is over I've talked to some of the leading legal Minds around the country on this and they don't see how it would be constitutional for a federal court at this point to try to control beyond the kit when the case is over you know who can and cannot release public records public information video depositions from a civil lawsuit so I'll definitely do an update video on on what ends up coming out of that issue so anyways it's been a long day hopefully get another video or two done this week we've got some other cases that I'm working on big Second Amendment case was filed I'm going to be local Council on that with a national gun rights organization where we're going to challenge where we are challenging the 18 to 21 year old ban on purchasing handguns that's a big case I'm excited to be a part of that another big case having to do with severe corruption correctional system involving sexual abuse of of women who are in state custody that is there's some big news there and I'll explain that hopefully within the next day or so we'll be filing soon so make sure you subscribe if you're if you're into this sort of stuff and you want to both follow along on these types of cases and also keep up to date on on civil rights law and things that interest me so until then remember freedom is scary deal with it and I'll see you next time