Oral arguments requested in Tampa
A federal magistrate judge gave the attorneys for Christian and Bridget Ziegler of Sarasota until Jan. 14 to provide a provide a response to an emergency motion by the City of Sarasota, seeking to preserve evidence related to the litigation that the couple filed against the city in November 2025, The Sarasota News Leaderhas learned.
Further, the city’s attorneys have requested oral arguments on the emergency motion. That filing came on Jan. 6, which was the same day they filed the emergency motion.
The city’s attorneys — James O. Williams and Abigail M. Lenhart of the firm Williams, Leininger & Cosby of Jupiter — asked for 30 minutes to make their concerns known and to allow the Zieglers’ attorneys to respond.
Magistrate Judge Amanda Arnold Sansone issued her order on Jan. 7, the News Leader learned through a review of the docket for the case, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, in Tampa.
As the News Leader has reported, the Zieglers filed a civil rights complaint against the city and two Sarasota Police Department detectives in regard to the 2023 sexual assault case against Christian Ziegler. The couple contends that their reputations have not recovered from that investigation, which revealed their engagement in sexual activity with other women.
Moreover, they argue that Christian — who served one term on the Sarasota County Commission — “continues to struggle and he has failed to achieve the same levels of business he attained prior to the [Sarasota Police Department’s] investigation.” The complaint also says that it cost Christian and Bridget Ziegler “hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees” to win a state court case that they filed in the aftermath of the law enforcement agency’s investigation.
In their emergency motion, Williams and Lenhart contend that “certain evidence … is currently at risk of destruction pursuant to a state court order. [The federal court] is asked to exercise its inherent authority and authority under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to preserve evidence necessary for the fair adjudication of claims and defenses in this case,” the motion continues.
The motion points to “electronic materials and data seized pursuant to the search warrants that form the basis of this [federal action] alleging unconstitutional search and seizure.”
Williams and Lenhart explain that the 12th Judicial Circuit Court “has ordered this evidence to be destroyed. Unless this [federal] Court issues an emergency preservation order, the evidence will be irretrievably lost, causing irreparable prejudice to the City’s ability to defend [against the Zieglers’ complaint].”
They requested a ruling on the motion by Jan. 28.
Further, Williams and Lenhart remind the court that the basis of the Zieglers’ lawsuit is their allegation that Sarasota Police Department officers “violated their civil rights by obtaining and executing overly broad digital search warrants [and accessed] privileged marital communications in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.”
On March 15, 2024, they continue, the Zieglers filed a complaint in the 12th Circuit Court, “seeking a declaration that the seized electronic data from Mr. Ziegler’s cell phone, Google Drive account, and Meta/Instagram account obtained from executing the search warrants are not public records subject to disclosure.” The couple “also sought to regain exclusive possession of this material” and a court order that would stop the city “from publicly disclosing the contents of the seized items.”
The Zieglers won the Circuit Court case, Williams and Lenhart acknowledge, with the presiding judge “concluding that the three search warrants executed by the City of Sarasota Police Department violated the Fourth Amendment, and therefore, all data seized pursuant to the warrants constituted Mr. Ziegler’s private property, was not a public record under Florida law, and must be returned to him.”
Williams and Lenhart emphasize, “Critically, the state court ordered that the ‘return’ of Mr. Ziegler’s property be accomplished through the destruction of the original and all copies of the seized data in possession of the City of Sarasota Police Department and the State Attorney’s Office for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit.”
Yet, they continue, the 12th Circuit Court order in that case “forbids the City from publicly disclosing the contents of the data seized pursuant to the search warrants. … Critically, a strict reading of the state court’s order would prevent [the city’s attorneys] from even discussing the contents of the electronic data seized under the warrants.”
Potentially putting the city in an ‘untenable position’
The city’s attorneys stress that the Circuit Court order “encompasses the entirety of the electronically stored information (‘ESI’) seized pursuant to the three warrants, including but not limited to text messages, call logs, photos, videos, web browsing history, cloud-stored files, account records, Cellebrite extraction data, and internally archived investigative materials uploaded to Evidence.com. Only a narrow subset of materials was excluded from the destruction order: (1) a video voluntarily given to police by Mr. Ziegler; (2) fourteen (14) law enforcement photographs documenting the exchange of the video, and (3) data previously publicly released by the City or the State Attorney’s Office.”
Williams and Lenhart also point out that the 12th Circuit judge’s order is on appeal before the Florida Second District Court of Appeal, with oral arguments scheduled for Jan. 28.
Further, they note that if the ruling of the appellate court affirms the Circuit Court’s order for the destruction of the materials, the Zieglers “will be the sole possessors of that evidence,” putting the city “in the untenable position of defending a federal civil rights action concerning the contents and scope of a search without possession of the seized materials and without the ability to account for or describe them.” Thus, Williams and Lenhart contend, the Zieglers “will be free to selectively characterize what was seized, reviewed, or retained as part of the City’s investigative file. This asymmetry creates due process concerns, as the City and its officers would be required to litigate the legality of a search and seizure based on allegations about evidence they no longer possess, cannot reconstruct, and cannot independently verify … Such a scenario undermines basic principles of fairness and adversarial testing, transforms the litigation into a one-sided evidentiary contest, and creates a risk of compromised integrity of the evidence.”
Moreover, they point out, “The data at issue is not merely tangential to the claims and defenses in this action; it is the central evidentiary record of what was actually seized and how it was seized, and further provides background information regarding the grounds for the search warrants. This case challenges the constitutionality of the electronic searches themselves, and without access to the seized data, the City and the defendant officers will be unable to demonstrate or contest what materials were collected, how the warrants were executed in practice, or whether the alleged constitutional violations occurred as pleaded.”
Yet another issue, Williams and Lenhart cite, is the Zieglers’ allegation that the search warrants were overbroad. That claim “necessarily places at issue the manner of the searches, including precisely what portions of the cell phone and accounts were examined, what data was extracted, what data was seized, and what data was not seized or incorporated into the City’s investigative file. To defend against an overbreadth claim, the defendant officers must be able to explain with specificity what they did and did not do during execution of the warrants. Without retention of the electronic data, the City and its officers will be unable to establish even the most basic facts about the searches. [The city and the officers] will be unable to identify what content was included in the investigative file, and cannot meaningfully rebut allegations of unconstitutional conduct without access to the very materials that reflect how the search was conducted.”
Williams and Lenhart point out that even though the “entire contents of Mr. Ziegler’s cell phone were searched, the entire contents were not seized as evidence. The preserved data is therefore essential to demonstrate the difference between searching the device and seizing evidence from it. Destruction of the data would thus irreparably prejudice the City’s defense by eliminating the only objective record of how the warrants were executed and what content was actually seized.”