Every settlement against the police should be taken from their pension fund. This is something I've been advocating for decades now, because it creates an incentive not to do things like this. Right now, good cops don't patrol bad cops because it won't affect them. By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly.
So I would place a good amount of blame at the feet of the judge, who should be more knowledgeable about legal questions. I think cops should have a general understanding of the law but I doubt the legality of online memes comes up much.
So I don’t think it is catastrophic that the police came to the judge with this issue. The problem is the judge rubber stamping something that should’ve been rejected.
Second problem I see is that this took 37 days to resolve, which is also incredibly slow. So it really magnified the earlier mistakes.
That said, I’m not against liability for cops in general. I just think in this particular case I blame the judge more.
Even if the man did make the meme I'd say it should qualify as free speech
"Justice delayed is justice denied " is an important principle that appears to have been forgotten in the west
I think there’s an amendment about that or something but I’m not a lawyer.
It's also "the punishment is the process". It's often a feature, not a bug.
Surprisingly, this isn't unusual. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/02/784225337/south-carolina-magi...
Best solution would be to simply require licensing and conduct standards to be a police professional similar to that required for Registered Nurses.
How is that hedged against, in practice? Most departments have their SOPs for emergency mode driving, for example mine said "You can exceed the speed limit by no more than 20mph, and subtract 5mph for any confounding condition, such as fog, rain, nighttime without streetlighting" and "You must come to a stop or to a sufficiently slow speed that you can affirmatively clear your passage through an intersection without incident." Stay within those guidelines and the department and their insurer agrees to indemnify your personal liability. Outside of those, you're on your own.
That's tangential. I have no problem saying "police pension funds are responsible for these compensation claims". Then the fund itself can decide whether they want to police themselves better, seek insurance coverage at their expense, or (ideally!) both.
You'd need to have it either impact their pension payments in a way that cannot be backfilled or more directly force the police officers themselves to carry liability insurance (far better).
Of course tax dollars pay their salaries as well, but if an officer became uninsurable then it weeds them out eventually.
- Individual Officer liability insurance.
You scrap Qualified Immunity; and instead claims could be made against the specific Officer's insurance. This would be a nationwide insurance system, and their premiums would follow them as an individual from job to job/location to location.
If departments want to compensate Officers for liability they CAN, but ultimately it would come out of that department's payroll/budget unlike now where lawsuit settlements don't even hit the police department's balance sheets at all.
The police are an organ of society (if you don't live in an authoritarian shithole), so the society that gives them the power of pit and gallows is ultimately accountable for their behaviour.
While that would be nice, it seems like extremely wishful thinking.
Maybe ask a wrongful termination lawyer how things would actually play out?
Oh boo hoo. The official in question here isn't some rank and file rando, it's the sheriff who the taxpayers in question duly elected.
I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
in some sense you might be right because instead of this 91$ being taken per resident directly from their wallets, what would happen is the de-gradation of the services because of lack of funds, so your roads,clean drinking water and everything needed for a govt would have 91$ less per resident.
and then when those same quality of roads decline and other negative things happen, the same community might find scapegoats of its the problem of X,Y or Z and the sheriff is their vocal voices against the X,Y or Z.
So you might be right, also y'know what's the worst part is? It's the assymetry, these sheriffs might continue to get re-elected because of the above reasons I gave and they would continue doing un-just things.
And then it is upon the onus of the person (in this case the tennessee man) who was jailed unjustfully and who would have to file a lawsuit and win. Things perhaps could've turned out differently or taken more longer and imagine the man who might've been jailed for more time.
Either way, I think because of all of these reasons, its a systemetic problem but the result of it is that the society has become too polarized and so weirdly incentivized that you can get thrown into jail for memes. I imagine these things might continue to happen but atleast a legal precedent might've been set now (not sure about how American law works).
It would've been pretty clear to anybody that there was no real case here, but the way these rural areas work is that they never expect any attention or pushback. They're used to their little corrupt fiefdoms slipping under the radar. These people in rural TN also live in a bubble of others with the same politics, and they surely overestimated the power of their ideology to win the day.
So it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop.
The scary thing however is that for every case you see like this that goes viral, gets national attention, and has a victim who is aware of his rights and wins... how many small town sheriffs are out there getting away with it?
It's easy to just lock up people for similar trumped up charges and expect that nobody with resources will ever notice or care.
So... collective punishment?
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
> civilians who find themselves in the midst of an international armed conflict or military occupation and are in the hands of a foreign power
Penalizing a group of people for the actions of a few is the very definition of collective punishment, and is universally condemned in the civilized world for very good reason. If you can't get such a fundamental thing through your head, ask your AI agent.
It’s pretty toxic that people don’t want to take responsibility for their own government in a democracy. In this case, it’s especially bad, given the sheriff is elected by the people directly. But I’d go even further and say even where control is less direct, we need incentives for voters to take this stuff seriously.
Adding a line item to their property tax bill showing how much is paid into settling lawsuits will not make people think that they should demand more accountability. They will think that it should be harder to take legal action against the police.
I think part of the problem here is that this is usually hidden from visibility (intentionally) by officials because it reflects negatively on them.
It may make the news for a day or two, never get seen by the majority of voters, and get swept away later under the deluge of distraction most "infotainment pretending to be news" provides.
---
Go further and just list all government settlements/court judgements underneath the elected official in charge of the branch responsible.
Still, this idea bears merit for other reasons. Americans routinely underestimate how much money is spent on Social Security, healthcare, and debt payments, and overestimate how much money is spent on education and infrastructure. More clarity into that could help build real political momentum to actually balance the budget.
Perry County is home to 9,126 people as of 2025. Which means this was $91 per resident.
If citizens had granular voting power (i.e. liquid democracy), this would make more sense. As it stands you get to vote for team red or team blue once in a while and hope that their votes impact that line item you’re concerned about.
And quite frankly even if you're a hard-line rightwinger, the way this administration treats your money is so objectively bad, you have to be brainwashed to deny it.
There is literally no legal mechanism for anyone to hold a police officer responsible for anything. This is enshrined in the highest levels of the law and there is literally no way to undo it without a constitutional amendment or a supreme court decision. Citizens also have no influence over either of those mechanisms. Literally nobody has influence over the supreme court.
This isn't a matter of voting. The police are literally outside of the law and above consequence. This was set up by a panel of unelected judges without any possibility of influence by the people.
Do you seriously not undersrsnd how any of this works? This is not a problem that can be fixed with votes. This problem exists outside of the law and out of control of any and all elected officials. A constitutional amendment is the only conceivable way in which the people could overturn this decision.
It'd be better for law enforcement to be a licensed position and for civil rights violations like this to result in loss of their license which would strip them of their ability to work in the field anywhere in the US.
That'd solve the whole resign->move over one town/county->repeat cycle for officers too
* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.
For police in particular, the unions prevent a lot of police accountability, and because of the power that police wield over the population, I am comfortable saying I support unions EXCEPT police unions. At best they should be ballot initiatives.
If I go further down my rabbit hole of systemic issues, I think citizens should be more involved in community policing in large populations.
Police unions don't have the power to stop state prosecutors from filing charges on officers, or the power to stop a jury from finding an officer guilty, or the power to stop a judge from sending a cop to prison for their crimes. Those are the main problems standing in the way of police accountability.
Where police unions do end up giving too much protection for police it's in contracts that get approved by government officials when they shouldn't have been. Police unions can ask for unreasonable things, but when they do our governments should be telling them to fuck off instead of rubber stamping whatever they ask for.
Police, like almost all workers, still need unions though. Police can still be subjected to things like unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, insufficient training, low wages, and poor benefits. Police should be able to unionize to prevent being exploited. Local governments should refuse to cave to their unions unreasonable demands such as those that prohibit anonymous complaints, or purge disciplinary records to prevent identifying repeat offenders, or reject body cameras, or allow officers to use paid vacation time to cover unpaid suspensions.
Police unions get a lot of attention as being the main thing preventing police accountability but they really aren't. The problems are much deeper and eliminating the unions will not solve them.
the rub: police unions are highly political machines and heavily involved in electing rubber-stamp politicians. it's a quid-pro-quo relationship that we seem to have a very hard time breaking out of in the united states.
re: police requiring unions: i have to disagree with you. american policing originated from two antilabor arms: slavecatchers and union-busters. they wield power over non-police union labor and implement it on every level from the individual to the systemic. they are class traitors by choice and by definition and do not deserve protection, because they are the physical arm of the body we require protection from.
This is something I have thought of too. We are all interested in living in a safe society; However, there are many people who know damn well they can get away with all sorts of idiotic behavior because the cops aren't looking, but everyone else is. So give everyone else a method to discourage that behavior.
It's one thing to agree that he should be compensated (I agree), but the figure doesn't make much sense. Per the article:
> During his stay in jail, Larry lost his post-retirement job and missed his anniversary — as well as the birth of his grandchild.
That's all pretty rough, but I fail to see how it entitles him to the lavish sum of $800,000. That's roughly half a lifetime's earnings for the typical worker!
> we need incentives for voters to take this stuff seriously.
I have a sneaking suspicion that setting public money on fire is not the best mechanism to achieve this outcome.
I did not expect to read that the victim was a retired law enforcement officer. This whole case is weird. I’m glad he won a settlement but I would like to see some actual accountability.
A priori, it's not "40 days in jail == $800k payday", it's "some unknown number of days in jail and risk of a conviction in exchange for a chance at a payday of unknown value".
Police don't face criminal charges for this.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
For example a UK comedian got arrested for posting a photo he took outside his balcony of a large congregation of citizens of brown skinned complexion from the Indian subcontinent captioned "imagine the smell".
Someone below said it well: "This is the problem with going after 'harmful communication'. It is not something that can be defined precisely, which allows government officials to choose to interpret it in whatever way they want when the enforce it."
So this type draconical speech laws is that it always leads to selective enforcement, it's never an objective two-way street affecting everyone equally, effectively turning into a means for public intimidation(tyranny). One bad joke about one group sympathetic to the government politics can be considered "hate speech" and land you in prison, while the same joke about the groups the government dislikes is just "free speech".
Similarly in Germany if you were to call Merz a corrupt traitor online you'd get visited by the police, but if you were to call a German right wing politician a nazi bitch, then it's just free speech. Hate speech enforcement always ends up a one way street coming from the status quo in power.
What political leaders miss is that the status quo can always flip as history has proven time again, and then those laws they set in place to silence their critics, will then be used against them, and then they'll cry fowl.
Of the 90% many will accept their fault and receive a caution or warning
Edit: and none of those cases would involve pretrial remand/jail
That's a lot of colorful language to say "words hurt".
I could point you to 30 BlueSky posts that would qualify.... posted in the last 5 minutes.
Why do you need to arrest someone just to warn them?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/03/met-police-c...
This is the problem with going after 'harmful communication'. It is not something that can be defined precisely, which allows government officials to choose to interpret it in whatever way they want when the enforce it. Obviously in these cases, the courts ruled against the official's interpretation, but that didn't stop this guy from having to spend 37 days in jail before they released him.
As they say "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride".
While it is good that the UK version doesn't send you to pretrial jail, you still have to fight the charge. You have to respond, spend time in court, hire council, and hope you can convince the courts that your post doesn't fit the definition of incitement to violence.
This has a chilling effect on free speech, even if all the cases are eventually thrown out. This is a tactic the Trump administration has used repeatedly. Go after people in court for things that are clearly not illegal. You make the person fight the charges, both in court and in the public eye, and then the cases are dismissed eventually and the administration moves on. All it does is make people factor this in when deciding how to act; is my act of protest worth having to fight this in court?
> [1] An overt act or conduct in public (or affecting the public) that disturbs the peace, safety, morals, or order (e.g., fighting, making unreasonable noise, using obscene/abusive language or gestures, obstructing traffic, creating hazardous/physically offensive conditions, refusing to disperse).
Our online laws which Americans often seem to view entirely through the lens of free speech are more about public (dis)order. It’s not ideas that are being censored, it’s personal conduct online which may be harassing, threatening, abusive or may create a breach of the peace.
I don't know why HN has become full of authoritarian anti-free-speech apologists. The current political divisions are turning people insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
Even at his age of 60 (I'm getting up there), I wouldn't have made that deal.
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates...
> “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
For example, there are surely dozens of others who are taking plea deals because they can't afford a lawyer to bring such a lawsuit, a few hundred thousand could multiply the impact tenfold.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/supreme-court-ice-r...
More succinctly, down this path lie guillotines.
Also, the body of federal law and regulations is so vast that smart people estimate the average person unknowingly breaks roughly 3 federal criminal laws per day[1], giving the federal government the legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want.
[0] James Duane, You have the right to remain innocent, 2016
[1] Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, 2011.
As the famous Russian saying goes, "Был бы человек, а статья найдется" (Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.)
1. You do not assert the right to remain silent - you must state verbally that you are doing so. Otherwise the prosecution can describe your communication as "refused to cooperate with or answer questions from law enforcement" which is a "negative" finding, whereas the right to remain silent is at least meant to be interpreted neutrally.
2. Beware anything beyond the simplest statement: "Yo, I want a lawyer dawg" can be successfully argued in the (state) Supreme Court as "Defendant asked for a canine attorney. Law enforcement were unable to find one, but had fulfilled their obligation to attempt to provide counsel for the defendant. Therefore, any statements he made after his were done knowing he had no counsel and were as a result admissible."
"OK, before we begin this meeting of the capas of our totally legitimate, not at all criminal business... Is anyone here an undercover officer of the law?"
"Shucks, you got me. I'm FBI."
However, your implied extreme isn't accurate. Lying to suspects can in some cases result in entrapment charges (although it is historically more likely for suspects with power and public office). Etc.
Yes, the current system is injust. No, it's not as bad as you claim.
I’m sure that would never be abused.
The US military is subject to a higher standard, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Penalties for US service members breaking the law or codes of conduct are much higher and much more severe than civilians. The US military makes routine example of law breakers and misconduct.
The US police force, by contrast, is civilian. They are not licensed, commissioned, or subject to additional standards. Certainly not nationwide standards that would bar police removed from their post from finding similar work elsewhere.
We should pay our police officers more, make them undergo nationally standardized training and licensing, and then hold them to a higher standard if and when they break the law.
Police court-martial.
Honest question, is this currently true?
I wouldn't say in most. In many they wouldn't
The current implementation of it- where you need to have "clearly establish" a Constitutional right with a prior case in this region- is based on Pearson v. Callahan from 2009, and it takes a terrible Supreme Court precedent and makes it even worse. This has created the patchwork "no case in the circuit has clearly established that a police officer must not make a warrantless search on a Tuesday in May" sort of quibbling.
The work of legislatures has been to roll back qualified immunity. Colorado, New Mexico, and California have removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. LEO's can still claim qualified immunity for suits under federal law, but they cannot for some suits brought under state law or the state constitution in those states.
The Supreme Court has also, at the same time they've made it harder to hold police to account, made it harder to hold politicians to account, gutting bribery laws and expanding "free speech" to include paying politicians. And the recent idea that a President can't be prosecuted for any "official acts" is also nonsense created by the Supreme Court. This isn't Congress fault, there were laws that prevented it. The Supreme Court just decided that they didn't want to enforce those laws.
The Supreme Court at the root of a lot of the dysfunction in American politics, and somehow still has more respect than they deserve.
> California [has] removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law, it's Connecticut, not California, as the third state which limited qualified immunity.
The real problem right now is how the courts determine if an official was acting in good faith. Right now they are assumed to have acted in good faith unless it has already been “clearly established” that what they did was illegal. This means that the official can argue that they didn’t know that their actions were illegal because no prior case ever dealt with that exact fact pattern. This works far too often and has let a lot of very guilty police get away with their crimes. Still, some police officers _are_ held to account, so it is not actually impossible.
It'd be an interesting thing to see garnishing of wages, deductions from pension funds, or loss of some kind of bonus system to help balance the scales.
If supressing cases or throwing big money lawyers against legitimate lawsuits is cheaper, they will do it. If teaching cops to hide their corruption is easier than rooting out all the corrupt individuals to raise rates, thats what they will do.
I had to spend money to sue the local unemployment office because a bureaucrat there illegally cut off my unemployment payments. They lost and had to pay me back in arrears but that money came from the taxpayers(so me and you) and that asshole who did that is still working there just fine collection golden handcuff paychecks and a gold plated pension when she retires.
All civil servants need a form of direct accountability with consequences for their mistakes at work, especially when malicious and repeated. Currently they're untouchable and the taxpayer foots the bill for their mistakes with no repercussion.
This wasn't some honest mistake. This was a deliberate violation of a citizen's civil rights. This was a crime, and the only reason it's treated so lightly is because the criminal is an officer of the law.
But who am I kidding, even him losing a single day's pay would be a victory here. Nothing will actually happen to him.
The suit was filed against Perry County, TN, not the state or federal government. A quick google says that its budget is $33M, so in fact this is a very impactful settlement for the county.
Today, the parties announced in a joint statement that Larry will receive $835,000 in exchange for dismissing his complaint.
“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” said Larry.
Ultimately the US lacks some sort of Federal "inspectorate of police" that would be able to ban people from being law enforcement officers or at least require e.g. retraining or restriction of duties, without leaving it up to frankly corrupt local authorities.
Double-edged sword though when the Feds get captured by the Party, though.
I don't think this is true, or at least it's not entirely true.
Various states and law enforcement agencies have an office of the inspector general which at least should provide some oversight. We also have the courts and individual officers and agencies can be sued in the court of law which also provides a means of oversight. You seem to be suggesting that everything is corrupt, corrupt local authorities, corrupt feds captured by the party. I think that level of perceived corruption is not reflected in operational reality.
Some states or local police organizations do in fact look at past police records for applicants. There's a bit of variation here, but it's probably a bit better organized than, say the EU where outside of other bureaucratic hurdles I don't believe there is any real way to stop some German citizen who should be banned from being a police officer from moving to Estonia and being a police officer. Though perhaps I'm wrong and there is an EU-wide database that all countries and their police forces use?
I know the UK isn't in the EU, but I just bring that up as I think it may be a bit closer of an example.
So, not very much, and I suppose you can argue about whether it's meaningful, but it is a consequence.
No they won't face anything like that. Police lawyers will claim they were just enforcing hate speech laws to protect the country's leadership from far right supremacists and will be let go scuff free. You also won't get anything remotely close to $835,000 from the state for being falsely imprisoned. You're lucky to get maybe 5000 Euros for your trouble.
In Germany for instance the politicians are protected by dedicated law against negative comments from the public. You can't even call them fat or they send the police after you. Sure, you won't get locked up for the fat comment, but the point of the police going after people with mean comments is only intimidation, to get people to self censor and stop criticizing the leadership and accept the propaganda like obedient cattle.
Americans with their 1st, 2nd and Nth amendments, have an overly rosy view of the EU justice system which is far more lenient to law enforcement abuse of power and speech crackdowns. It's why you easily saw Americans attacking and throwing rocks at masked ICE officers in the US, and why Germans would never dare touch a law enforcement officer in their country, because the courts would never tolerate public attack on law enforcement and challenging the state authority.
Eh, just fire him and garnish a portion of his future wages to pay back the cost to the city.
> In most European legal systems a law enforcement officer overstepping his legal authority would face criminal charges for it
Do you have a recent example?
Victory would be if the Sheriff and others involved actually went to jail.
Until that happens, expect other power-trippers to keep doing such things. After all, what do they have to lose? Not a penny! Since the fine comes out of the pool of money that taxpayers collected!
What level of taxpayer due dilligence are you envisioning here?
No, he did not literally campaign on those specific words.
Did he align himself with people who have and continue to violate the First Amendment (among many others)?
Yes.
> What level of taxpayer due dilligence are you envisioning here?
About 5 minutes.
Basic responsibility sits with those who commit the act.
If you elect someone who crashes your economy, who suffers those consequences? Maybe this isn't so much of a "who should suffer the consequences" but maybe more of a "who does (logically) suffer the consequences".
“I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right,” Kirk said about the attack on Pelosi, who suffered a skull fracture after being hit in the head with a hammer. “But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day? Why is it that you’re able to trespass, second-degree murder, arson, threaten a public official, cashless bail. This happens all over San Francisco. But if you go after the Pelosis, oh, you’re [not] let out immediately. Got it.”
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/viral-claims-about-charlie...
Here's the actual video, which I think makes it clear that he's joking and he follows it up with the point he made above.
But it should not get paid from taxpayer money, instea the offending officer ahould pay it
Thus, the appropriate remedy should put pressure on the conduct of the whole local government, whose use of tax-payer funds is accountable to the electorate. Punishing just the one officer by depleting his private resources won't move toward systemic reform.
And finally, on the principle of the matter, the officer can't and doesn't jail people on his own power and private authority as a citizen. He does so on the power and authority of the government that grants him his office. His actions as a private citizen did not harm the man. His public actions as an agent of the government harmed the man. In other words, the government did wrong, through the officer.
I know it gets more complicated, especially with larger cities--and doubly so where states have control over police departments or similar. But in general, in a great number of cities and localities, this judgment alone would have a big impact on oversight and governance of the department, probably even if the governing body also disliked the plaintiff's political views. $835k is almost 3 mills of property tax revenue in my city. So, that's my $0.02.
My doctor is required to carry malpractice insurance. Those who commit repeated egregious mistakes become uninsurable.
Make cops do the same.
Try electing more sensible politicians and put more checks and balances into work to stop this from happening again if you don't want your tax money wasted on this.
Yes, but it should never have even gotten to evaluating whether the speech was 1A protected. Even if it wasn't, it wasn't remotely illegal, threatening or anything. The content never needed a 1A exemption. The arrest was illegal for selective prosecution before we even get to 1A.
> the offending officer ahould pay it
There should definitely be consequences for such gross misconduct under color of authority but it's not just the arresting officer. The victim was in jail for over a month. That means, at minimum, in the first couple days a local prosecutor decided to charge this case AND a local judge didn't toss it out. One cop can be negligent, stupid or evil but those other people are also officers of the law with more training and higher pay. They are there to stop individual stupidity before it turns into systemic calamity - and they abjectly failed in their duty.
And to say the least, I doubt the officer has $800K.
They do not mention what their cut of that will be, but since they also do not specifically state they were working pro bono, I'd imagine it'll be around 40-50%.
But elsewhere on their website, on the Submit a Case FAQ, they do say very clearly: "Will this cost me anything? No. FIRE is a charitable, non-profit organization and does not charge for any of its services."
"Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC"
We need to tame the impulse to throw people in jail for doing things we dislike, not just point it at different targets.
I see several comments saying that criminal charges should be brought over this. That is not the way.
Some who are in jail should not be. Some who aren't in jail should be. If I locked you up for a month over a meme, I'd go to jail for years.
Turning it into an escalating back and forth of each side trying to imprison the other, is not conducive to the kind of change we need. To take a recent example, while I don't particularly like James Comey or Letitia James, I don't think they should have been targeted. That kind of stuff is what happens when it escalates to each side calling for the other side to be locked up.
you're implying that the two sides are morally and legally equivalent, and both are just engaging in retaliatory squabbling. that is a ridiculous implication
one "side" routinely flaunts the law, steals from the public, abuses and ignores the courts, and has a complete disregard for civil rights, legal procedure, and credibility. it uses the DoJ as a personal henchman, stringing up frivolous charges targeted at political enemies.
the other "side" is trying to enforce the law.
Agreed. Cases this knowingly frivolous, for example, should be treated as the criminal kidnapping or false imprisonment it would be if any other citizen perpetrated it.
You are demonstrating what I think will be one of the most pernicious outcomes of the Trump administration's transformation of the Justice Department: the blurring of lines between law enforcement, criminality, and corruption as the institution is debased and public trust is lost.
What kind of mindset do you need to have where you think the only way to prevent someone from doing something is via the threat of imprisonment after the fact? The vast majority of people don't do this, and that's because they don't have the power to do it, not because they don't want to.
Makes sense.
They falsely claimed he'd made an actionable threat. We can't remove their power to request warrants and arrest people for legitimately threatening others, right?
They misused power.
Nobody should have this power, and then abuse of power wouldn't be an issue.
Much of our legal system is based on the incarceration or individuals who are deeply compromised and have zero choice in their actions, pardons need to become more commonplace until a more mature approach is taken here.
It's nearly impossible to get paid for malicious prosecution by the federal government. Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Amendment_(1997)
>A 2010 investigation by USA Today "found the law has left innocent people... coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases."[5] The investigation "documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Still, USA Today found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded."[5]
The case in OP would never have settled if it was against the federal government rather than a state. Also, the feds cap the amount paid for wrongful imprisonment at $50k/year, by statute.
We need a way to make the federal government pay out for malicious prosecution cases, just as OP got paid.
See e.g. Douglass Mackey. He posted some misleading memes on Twitter about the election, falsely claiming that people could vote by text, and got arrested and found guilty at trial until eventually the 2nd circuit said that what he did wasn't a crime. Should he be compensated? Should the prosecutor and judge in his case face their own criminal prosecutions?
You'd have to change the law to allow for prosecutions in cases like this, and that change would likely be weaponized in other cases.
I think it's a shame this doesn't come with criminal charges, though. False imprisonment? Kidnapping?
His trouble isn't just from the time in jail, though. It's from all the Trump supporters who harass him as well. Previously, and in the future.
(And let's face it, the outcome here was guaranteed, and the inevitable settlement was always gonna include attorney fees or be done pro-bono.)
You can almost never hold anyone in government accountable. You are forced to sue your own community to get some shred of justice while the actual people who violated your rights face zero accountability.
Tell lawmakers who want your vote this November that you want an end to qualified immunity. Agents of the state should not be less accountable to the laws of the land than regular individuals.
Political opinion is always protected.
Spreading misinformation about elections is broadly legal.
"Are election-related false statements protected by the First Amendment?
Generally yes, but not if they seek to interfere with the process of voting."
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
To those of you downvoting, please articulate why you think something deserves a downvote. As it is, I can only assume rather hypocritical double standards. Someone saying something anti-Trump is ok, but someone saying something anti-Leftist (or Clinton) is not?
(For the record, I 100% am on the side of the guy who was jailed. Just as I am on for the guy who retweeted that meme in 2016. Abusing government power is unacceptable no matter who it benefits.)
In the other, it was false information, a grand jury indicted, and a jury convicted. The appeal rested on the government struggling to demonstrate a) anyone actively fell for the information and b) the conspiracy element. (https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/23-7577_opn.pdf)
Somehow, this distinction is... bias?
If you view one of those cases as a bad result, then chances are you are biased.
That said, if you downvote because you have looked into the cases enough to think that that similarity is not valid, and then you can articulate it (like the person I'm replying too did) then I'd consider that fine. (Assuming they downvoted, they may not have.) I may still think there's some bias there, but it's not uninformed bias.
If you can't articulate a reason you want to downvote, then it's bias and emotion fueling your downvote. Which, I don't consider to be a valid reason to downvote.
As a side note, I think we all need to be aware of how similar the things we hear about the "bad" side are. The comments I see about Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people is pretty much exactly what I saw said about Biden weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people during his administration. I also have seen MANY comments where if you replace "Biden" or "Trump" with the other name, you end up with a comment the other side would make. I think that should trigger some self-reflection. I know I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it.
There are no double standards. Take my downvote.
The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy by Jessica Pishko
Digging further[0]: "Morrow and Weems have been sued in their personal capacities and could “be on the hook for monetary damages,” a press release from Bushart’s legal team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said. Perry County, Tennessee, is also a defendant since it’s liable for unconstitutional acts of its sheriffs."
So, it sounds like most of the burden is placed directly on the shoulders of the guilty "officers of the law".
0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/man-sues-cops-wh...
But this is a civil case.
> Weems admitted in a later interview that he knew at the time of the arrest that Larry’s Facebook post was a pre-existing meme that referred to an actual shooting that took place in a different state, over 500 miles away. But Weems and Morrow left out that extremely important context from their warrant application.
When it comes to whether a meme is a threat, the image largely speaks for itself and there’s no way you can reasonably read that meme to be a threat.
It’s clearly political and taking sides and potentially offensive, but there’s nothing to suggest anyone is going to take to violence. The judge should have seen the picture and denied the warrant.
1. Make Trump meme 2. Go to jail for N days 3. Profit ($22k per day)
Nice ;-)
