This story gets worse with every new revelation.

I’ve been following some of the aftermath. The restaurant owner with the DUI who’s been driving without a license for ~15 years, and wasn’t eligible for a liquor license because of it? She got her liquor license, and there’s been no reports of her either getting her driver’s license back, or getting stopped for driving without a license, or her no longer driving. The County Attorney who should’ve reviewed the illegal search warrant before it went to the judge, and the judge who signed off on the illegal search warrant? Slap on the wrist; I think they both got admonitory letters or something similar. The sheriff who arranged the illegal raid? He hung on in office for a couple months before abruptly resigning with no further comment; the county has resisted firing him because they were afraid they’d have to pay out his severance package, which I suspect they ended up doing just to make the corrupt, sexist asshole go away.

The raid broke the spirit of the journalist who was working on the story about the sheriff; she retired, and I hope her finger healed okay. The deputy mayor who was trying to discretely find out whether it was legal for the DUI restaurant owner to have a liquor license; she was voted out of office in November. I believe the reporter who was working on the story about the DUI restaurant owner, I think she’s still with the paper but she had to take some time off to get over the stress. And the newspaper owner/editor is still there, of course, but the stress literally killed his mother and I’m not sure what that’s done to his spirit, either.

In the end, I can’t help but feel that all the corrupt people in this story got something close to what they wanted, while all the actually moral people each lost something important to them. :(