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A reporter at Arizona's most-watched television news station says Gilbert police illegally seized his cellphone and threatened to access its contents by "brute force" after he was unlawfully arrested while covering the death of a Chandler police officer in April.
In a 28-page motion filed Thursday in Gilbert Municipal Court, attorneys representing journalist León Felipe González Cortés of Univision Arizona, based in Phoenix, say police also violated his First Amendment rights as a reporter and derisively referred to him as "compadre" in reference to his Latino heritage.
Police have held the phone for more than a month, and attorneys for the town and the police department have "gone silent" and refused to discuss returning it, the complaint states.