“I Take No Pleasure in This Result”: A Federal Judge Found a Police Officer Lied and a Constitutional Violation Occurred — and Nobody Pays

By Don Matthews | We The People News

Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, in Marbury v. Madison, that "it is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is." I want to open with that line because this story has two federal judges in it, and only one of them actually did that duty. The other one signed his name to a two-page order adopting the first judge's work without saying anything at all.

Here is the sentence that should stop you cold. Magistrate Judge Andrew M. Edison, reviewing my civil rights case against Galveston police officer William Osteen, wrote this in his July 14, 2026 Report and Recommendation: "I take no pleasure in this result. The record shows that Osteen lied to Judge Tollison. That is disturbing." A federal judicial officer, in a written order, found that a police officer lied under oath to another judge — and called it disturbing in his own words. Not my characterization. His.

A federal judge ruled my rights were violated. Nobody pays for it anyway.

It gets worse, and I mean that in the most literal, doctrinal sense. On the seizure of my vehicle after my August 2023 arrest — towed and later auctioned off while friends stood at the scene ready to take custody of it themselves — Edison didn't equivocate. He wrote: "Because it was unreasonable to impound Reardon's vehicle, Reardon has stated a constitutional claim for unreasonable seizure." That is a federal judge finding, as a matter of law, that my Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

And then Officer Osteen and Sergeant Doraty walk away from it completely. Not because the violation didn't happen. Edison already found that it did. They walk because of a doctrine called qualified immunity, which requires a plaintiff to point to an earlier case with nearly identical facts before a violation counts as "clearly established" — and Edison ruled I hadn't found one specific enough. Read that sequence again: the court says yes, you were wronged, and also, no one has to answer for it, because no other citizen's nearly identical wronging happened to get published in a law book first. That is not an edge case. That is qualified immunity doing exactly what qualified immunity was built to do — and it is exactly why this doctrine has become one of the most criticized rules in American constitutional law, across the political spectrum, for exactly this reason: it lets a court find your rights were violated and still leave you with nothing.

Why the lie didn't matter either

You'd think a judge calling an officer's own sworn testimony a lie would be the end of the government's case. It wasn't, and understanding why is its own indictment of how thin the actual protection is. Edison found that even without Osteen's inconsistent statements about smelling alcohol and Reardon's pupil size, there was still enough separately-established probable cause — a lane violation, a refused field sobriety test — to justify the underlying DWI arrest. So the lie, however "disturbing," didn't change the legal outcome, because the law only requires the government to have one true reason among several, even when one of the other reasons offered was false. A citizen can prove an officer lied to a judge under oath and still lose, as long as prosecutors can point to something else that would have gotten there anyway. That is the system functioning as designed, and it should bother you exactly as much as it bothers me.

Then the district judge did none of that work himself

Whatever you think of Edison's reasoning — and I think qualified immunity is a doctrine that lets institutions protect themselves at the direct expense of citizens it wronged, in writing, on the record — at least he did the reasoning. Thirty-three pages of it. He engaged with the lie. He engaged with the seizure. He cited the doctrine, named the precedent, showed his work.

On July 28, 2026, I filed nine written objections to that recommendation — objections a citizen is statutorily entitled to have reviewed fresh, from scratch, under 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1)(C). I want to be precise about what those nine actually were, because precision is the whole point of this piece. Only one of them — Objection No. 1 — asked the court to reconsider an actual legal conclusion, and even that objection didn't demand outright reversal; it asked the court to either decline to adopt the qualified-immunity recommendation or, in the alternative, allow narrow supplemental briefing on a single legal question the R&R hadn't had adversarial argument on. Three more (Objections 2, 4, and 5) asked only that dismissed claims be entered without prejudice, with leave to amend — I wasn't disputing Edison's legal reasoning on those, just asking for the normal chance to fix a pleading defect. One (Objection 3) asked the court to preserve Edison's own finding that "the record shows that Osteen lied to Judge Tollison. That is disturbing" and to order a narrow hearing on it, while explicitly telling the court myself that "the R&R's independent-probable-cause analysis is substantive" — I wasn't claiming Edison got that wrong, I was asking the court not to let a documented lie simply disappear from the record. Three more (Objections 6, 7, and 8) were reservations or outright non-objections — on Objection 8 I told the court directly I did not object to that ruling at all.

On August 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown answered all nine — the one live legal fight and the eight that weren't fights at all — with the same single sentence: the court "has carefully considered the objections… and adopts it as the opinion of the court." An objection asking to reconsider qualified immunity got the identical, wordless treatment as an objection where I told the court myself I had no objection. That is not a court weighing competing arguments. That is a court that did not, on the visible face of its own order, distinguish between the objections that fought and the objections that didn't. The only original legal reasoning in the entire two-page order concerns whether I could file a third amended complaint — and the answer was no, because I had already been given a late second one. That is the sum total of what an Article III judge personally contributed to a case built around a documented lie to another federal judge.

A system that finds a lie, calls it disturbing, and lets it go anyway is a system with a real doctrinal problem. A system where the one branch of government whose sole job is independent judgment can't be bothered to write more than a sentence reviewing that outcome is a system protecting itself at every single layer — first through a doctrine that shields the government from consequences even after wrongdoing is found, then through a review process that rubber-stamps the first court's work without checking it. Both things are true, and I want a reader to sit with both of them rather than pick the more comfortable one.

You do not get to change probable cause after the fact

Here is the part I want to say as plainly as I can. The entire reason I was arrested that night, the entire reason a felony blood warrant was issued, the entire reason a grand jury indicted me for Driving While Intoxicated Third Offense, and the entire reason I sat in pretrial detention for eleven months while my vehicle was auctioned off out from under me, was one specific, sworn, written claim: that Officer Osteen smelled a "moderate odor of alcohol" coming from me. That is what is in his affidavit. That is the probable cause the government swore to, in writing, to a magistrate, to get the warrant that started all of it.

That specific claim turned out to be false. The blood test came back with zero alcohol. And under oath, months later, in front of Judge Tollison, Osteen admitted it himself: he could not smell alcohol on my breath. The one sworn fact that justified taking my liberty and my property didn't hold up.

A government does not get to lose that fight and then quietly go looking for something else after the fact to keep the outcome anyway. Probable cause is supposed to be judged by what an officer swore to at the time, not retrofitted months or years later once the original claim collapses under its own lab results. I lost a year and a half of my life. The government sold my car at public auction. My name was run through the press as a felony DUI defendant on the strength of a claim its own author later admitted, under oath, wasn't true. And a federal magistrate judge who found, in writing, that this same officer lied — still let him walk, and a district judge who never independently looked at any of it let the whole case die with one sentence.

Edison's own footnote catches one more thing worth naming: my Mississippi probation was revoked on November 3, 2022, for violating a banishment condition that — by the court's own earlier order — didn't take effect until November 14, 2022. He wrote: "Taking Reardon's allegations as true, it is unclear to me how Reardon's sentence could have been revoked… for violating a banishment condition that did not take effect" yet. A federal judge, reading my own account, couldn't make that timeline add up either.

What happens now

The appeal clock runs thirty days from the August 10 final judgment. I am filing. Whatever the Fifth Circuit ultimately says about qualified immunity, about a magistrate calling a police officer's testimony disturbing and still ruling for him, about a district judge who adopted thirty-three pages of analysis with one sentence of his own — at least three appellate judges will have to look at it and say why, in writing, on the merits. That is the bar the system I've just described did not clear. I intend to make the next court clear it.

— Don Matthews, founder, We The People News

Source documents:
– Magistrate Judge Edison's Report and Recommendation, Dkt. 90 (July 14, 2026) — the 33-page opinion containing the "I take no pleasure in this result… That is disturbing" finding and the vehicle-seizure ruling.
– Judge Brown's Order Adopting the R&R, Dkt. 93 (August 10, 2026) — the two-page order that closed the case.
– Final Judgment, Dkt. 94 (August 10, 2026) — the one-paragraph judgment of dismissal.
– My nine objections to the R&R, filed July 28, 2026, court-stamped by Clerk Nathan Ochsner — read them yourself and see which ones were real fights and which weren't.