Editor:
The Sept. 15 SMDP chronicles the story of a search warrant served by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs’ department upon longtime Santa Monica resident Sheila Kuehl, a sitting Los Angeles county commissioner who coincidentally has endorsed the Sheriff’s political opponents candidacy just a scant three weeks ago.
According to Ms Kuehl’s version of the search and seizure warrant it gave the Sheriff’s department full authority to seize anything and everything , without specificity, that they suspect was relevant to a 5-year-old investigation ostensibly over advertising placement on a bus?
While the department has declined to comment on the action Ms Kuehl, the target of the investigation and warrant, has been forthcoming about the 7 a.m. incident as reported in the Daily Press that strangely included her accounts of the taking of decades-old personal mementos and memorabilia from Ms. Kuehl’s work as an actor?
On the face of it, it would appear that the Sheriff’s department did not discover in Kuehl’s domicile anything in the form of contraband, or incriminating evidence that it could arrest her for or that too would be reported, but TV memorabilia was seized?
It seems to me that while the department may have the right to remain silent about all of this, Kuehl does too but instead she is speaking out about what just occurred. And based on the totality of what the people just don’t know about what just happened to a sitting county commissioner during the closing days of an election cycle?
Maybe it’s high time for the court that signed off on the described free-wheeling warrant to account for the incident in the interests of disclosure, clean government and law enforcement authorities where the county sheriff himself is up for election?
Stewart Resmer, Santa Monica