Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit

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768 pointsceejayoz515 comments

The fact that taxpayers and not the police themselves have to pay the settlement is the worst part of this.

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.

How would this work? Where do the money for their pension fund come from? Would taking money from it result in them receiving smaller pensions?

Maybe it would make officers turn in the bad apples, since they insist "one bad apple" each time these issues arise.

Do they still insist that? My unstudied feeling is that the current go to is "The officer acted in line with established department guidelines. We commit to reviewing the guidelines in light of this situation" with no accountability on any side to actually do anything.

How do you "turn in" a sheriff? It's an elected position

You take it to the public, and the public recalls the sheriff.

The indictment was already public, it's national news. That's why we're talking about it. I don't see any recall election planned.

Recall or arrest them. Once workers realize how poor leaders effect their livelihood explicitly, the problem tends to solve itself. Doubly so when we're talking about police unions here.

You report them to state police or the FBI?

Report that he arrested someone? That's already public information.

Report that he committed misconduct - in this case, a clear civil rights violation. Are we playing dumb?

Report it to who? The Trump Administration? The arrest is public information already.

You are now repeating yourself. Scroll up.

Well many government pension funds are horribly underfunded, so likely it would just add to the underfunding till eventually the government would bail it out. It is an expensive, inefficient way to try and solve the issue - when they screw up this bad, you fire them - this is how every other organization works.

That's a lot of liability for police. They would likely buy insurance against it.

And insurers doing their due diligence and charging based on potential for liability would go a long way to mitigating abuses.

Best solution would be to simply require licensing and conduct standards to be a police professional similar to that required for Registered Nurses.

Or barbers.

The reason we have licencing for barbers is that existing barbers wanted it and persued regulatory solutions to protect their market.

Existing police officers do not want this.

Municipal insurers already do that

It seems like municipalities just past the insurance costs onto taxpayers.

The problem is that if elected officials are not comfortable confronting police unions about their conduct then any cost you pass on to the union or the officers is potentially just passed on to tax payers. Not that I disagree with any idea to hold police more accountable. You just have to address the issue from more than one direction.

For municipalities --- requiring that individual officers secure their own insurance would have far more effect on behaviour and standards.

Is privatising ethics enforcement like this a good idea?

As opposed to doing nothing?

Alternatively: Make the insurance come out of the collective pensions of the police department.

The trick is to somehow ensure all the other officers (A) care about avoiding the cost while (B) are not motivated to collectively lie for one-another.

It's not hard to imagine: Officer X does something bad through incompetence, Officer Y tells the truth about it, and then all the other officers take revenge on Y for "being a snitch" and "screwing our pensions."

Once that pattern is in place, it continues even when Officer X is committing crimes, not just making mistakes.

Except that’s how cops already act even without that incentive.

My point is that it's quite possible add the pension mechanism and make things even worse, if it isn't done carefully in conjunction with other policies.

Yes, it's a good idea to try it as an a/b test in a finite run of municipalities.

Otherwise we are just doing the same things and expecting different results.

Right now in many police abuse scenarios there is no system in place that is recognizable as a working ethical system, bringing policing into some ethical system, even if just financially self motivated is definitely an improvement over nothing.

Seems better than the status quo, where there is no enforcement at all and instead taxpayers are hosed.

The public sector has been failing at this for decades. How can privatization be worse?

That depends on what you think of existing liability insurance coverage, such as the one commonly sold to physicians.

The way I see it, if you are not granting immunity, and also creating the possibility of financial penalties, then you're creating an opportunity for arbitrage via pooling risk. I'm not horny for the "free market", but I think there have to be cogent reasons to ban such insurance, and I can't think of any.

less ethics and more accountability. But a public audit committee is more than welcome to join in as well.

Municipalities would be free to put up the money to insure officers whom they wished to hire, but which insurance agencies find too expensive/problematic to insure.

It's not "privatising ethics enforcement" at all - it's just letting the free market put dollar amounts on the actual cost of staffing reckless officers. The actuaries won't be reading textbooks on ethics, they're going to look at the same thing they do for drivers: history of violations, incidents, etc.

versus what we have now, no or minimal ethics enforcement.

We had a police officer run down a young lady in a crosswalk while responding to a non-critical call without running lights or sirens. The officer was eventually fired but only because body camera evidence from the vice president of the officers guild surfaced where he was mocking the victim.

Ended up costing seattle taxpayers $29m.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/family-student-killed-by-sp...

Heaven and earth had to be moved in order to get the officer off the force.

... the officier is apparently suing to be let back onto the force. I guess his year long paid vacation wasn't enough severance for him.

For which they'd pay with taxpayer's money anyway

Right - but you are not considering that it's possible for a police department to be so bad as to be uninsurable. Even if the police continue to do misconduct, bad departments would get into situations where no insurer will cover them, and they are forced to make changes. It's not a perfect fix at all, but it would be a nice end-around for qualified immunity.

Then the state may do what it has done for habitually dangerous drivers and either make it illegal for private insurance to deny them or create a public option that hemorrhages taxpayer money (so back to where we are now, with extra steps).

Just fire them after the first fuckup. It does not need to be this complicated.

There is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination.

The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.

You meant NLEAD? Trump shut it down. I found no statistics of union agreements.

Would they, or would we just have less police?

Just make them pay for the insurance out of the pension fund. Better yet, make individual officers personally liable for acts outside of their official duties such as civil rights violations and crimes. After the first few cops lose all of their money in court the rest of them will start actually policing themselves.

> make them pay for the insurance out of the pension fund

The pension payments will be increased. There isn’t a good solution for this other than individual liability.

So be it. I was a firefighter/paramedic. One of my state's laws about operating emergency vehicle in "emergency mode" (i.e. lights and sirens) is that the vehicle operator is permitted to disobey any and all road laws[1] provided they are doing so with due regard and with a presumption of fault in the event of any incident, i.e. you are default assumed to be at fault unless demonstrable otherwise. Such liability can transcend department or agency into personal liability against the operator.

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.

They'd just refuse to arrest anyone, sort of like SF cops did when they didn't like the DA. Eventually people decide they want cops with all their problems instead. Don't underestimate the ability of police to look after themselves.

What does your username mean?

What if a majority of taxpayers voted for that sheriff?

Recent history has shown that sometimes people will vote for incompetent criminals but, elected or not, that doesn't mean we shouldn't still hold them accountable for what they do.

Another huge problem with our times is that local media is completely hollowed out. Voter awareness was never amazing but now there is no local paper to highlight abuse or corruption. Every problem becomes a national problem with no accountabillity. Lots of people in the state I live in vote for their sheriff. I would be shocked if one in one hundred even knew who that was.

most local tv news stations being owned by two right-wing conglomerates doesn't help either

> but now there is no local paper to highlight abuse or corruption.

There's indie journalists on Youtube and X exposing fraud and corruption. Follow them there.

Being elected by a majority doesn't negate crimes committed, as much as a certain president would love everyone to believe that. Being elected shouldn't have anything to do with being punished, whether they won by 1% or by 99%

Sure, elected criminals should tried, convicted if guilty, and punished for criminal actions. The votes don't change that. I'm saying something else: Maybe it makes some sense after all for the taxpayers to pay civil damages due to actions of a government officer.

> Every settlement against the police should be taken from their pension fund.

So... collective punishment?

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...

In the current environment, taxpayers are collectively punished.

Yes, collective punishment of the smaller collective who can self-police (cops, no pun intended) rather than the larger collective who can't (citizens and taxpayers at large).

Police aren't "protected persons"

> civilians who find themselves in the midst of an international armed conflict or military occupation and are in the hands of a foreign power

If they don't like it, we could have individual punishment but they have to surrender qualified immunity. Deal?

Nice... I'm always disappointed when I see otherwise "enlightened" people being fine with civilizational regressions like this simply because it's a group they don't like. It's moves like this that chip away at your society.

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.

> By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly.

While that would be nice, it seems like extremely wishful thinking.

Maybe ask a wrongful termination lawyer how things would actually play out?

I agree, and any time there is a security breach, bug or other employee-caused calamity at a tech company that results in a lawsuit or settlement, the money should come out of employee 401k accounts, stock options, etc. These people need to police themselves. By aligning incentives it will encourage the good developers and force out the bad ones.

Not sure if you're trying to be clever (in which case I'd encourage you to just say what you mean next time), but financially penalizing a company for bad behavior absolutely is one way to pierce the corporate veil and ensure workers aligned with corporate health (through things like stock, continued employment, etc) are also aligned with societal health.

One benefit of a 401k account over a pension is that the individual beneficiary controls the account, and not some other entity who can be sued for something an individual employee had nothing to do with. Indeed, pretty much every personal financial advice thinker would advise an employee not to put their own company's stock in their 401k, in order to avoid a source of company-specific risk.

> The fact that taxpayers and not the police themselves have to pay the settlement is the worst part of this.

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.

> 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.

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).

> 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 it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop.

I was still trying to look at it from a positive way but alas, the situation might be too bleak but yes, nothing meaningful might have came out of this judgement because well, we all know that memes or speech like this isn't crime but oh well, alas.

> 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?

Yes that was exactly my point too. I was trying to point the same thing that there might be so many more people whom we don't even know! who might be going through something similar, whose voices are hidden within the swathes of internet and things.

A sad reality but one which is true. I don't know how one fights against it and certainly this question is way above my pay-grade indeed but something should morally be done to prevent an abuse of people and their rights and freedom by the system which is getting corrupted.

Accountability for police in the United States? That'll never happen.

From what I could tell from the article, an officer submitted a warrant request to a judge and the judge approved it. That request was potentially incomplete because it left out the fact that the victim here didn’t actually make the meme. On the other hand I’m not sure whether omission matters since it would still be protected speech if he made it.

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.

> Second problem I see is that this took 37 days to resolve

"Justice delayed is justice denied " is an important principle that appears to have been forgotten in the west

Not just the west. Posted a couple weeks back here on HN: https://sundaicity.com/blogs/getting-arrested-in-japan

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078647

When people read these links, I encourage them to assume that the author/creator left out part of the story for convenience or due to lack of knowledge (specifically the language and customs around legal issues in Japan).

Her story does not jibe with any of my experiences, direct or indirect, with law enforcement in Japan.

>"Justice delayed is justice denied " is an important principle that appears to have been forgotten in the west

It's also "the punishment is the process". It's often a feature, not a bug.

Rereading the article, another insane detail is the judge setting bond at $2M. I think for any person who actually was motivated to perpetrate a mass shooting, no bond would prevent it. And for most innocent people, $2M might as well be $200M. They’re sitting in jail until trial.

I think there’s an amendment about that or something but I’m not a lawyer.

I believe there are standing precedents about cash bail that state that it should not be used unless there’s a demonstrable risk the defendant will flee otherwise. The problem (one of them anyway) is that as a component of the process, it’s highly unlikely to be challenged to such an extent it makes it to the circuit courts where such precedents are made. Bonds should not be used, in and of themselves, as punishments, or as leverage for prosecution. If a person is a danger to themselves or others, they should be denied bail. If they are a clear flight risk, then the bond should be set accordingly to ensure compliance. If they are neither, they should be released on their own recognizance and afforded the right to fully participate in their own defense.

Edit: also not a lawyer

> That request was potentially incomplete because it left out the fact that the victim here didn’t actually make the meme.

Even if the man did make the meme I'd say it should qualify as free speech

Would you say the same about Alex Jones? Why not?

Jones lost in a civil suit. If you lie about somebody repeatedly and cause them harm you can be held accountable. It's called defamation. That is not the same thing as government abridgement of speech.

It wasn't an elected judge who issued the warrant, but a magistrate, whom the lawsuit noted "is a nonlawyer with no formal legal education."

Surprisingly, this isn't unusual. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/02/784225337/south-carolina-magi...

US police absolutely hate accountability and fight any effor to impose it very hard.

We already have a system for this; it is used by doctors:

- 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.

Exactly, what's to stop police officers and judges from giving each other retirement payouts by locking each other up?

Those taxpayers are free to elect people who will hold the police to a higher standard.

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.

Their pension is funded by tax dollars, this doesn't change the incentive structure.

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.

Right, but taking from their pension directly reduces their payout when they retire. Not sure what you mean by "cannot be backfilled"; the budget is the budget, and the tax dollars only go where the (non-police) elected officials say.

All in implementation I suppose, but typically pensions _must_ be fulfilled as they are a legal contract with the employees of the state.

If you take money out of a pension (typically illegal) or otherwise forgo payments, limit payouts etc, you must backfill those at a later date.

They're also treated very seriously by most state law, they're usually senior debt that takes precedence over pretty much any other debt a city/county owes. Really hard to get out from under.

>By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly.

Not system will ever work as intended if entire societies are either corrupt and/or stupid. Cops are no different.

Police officers should have to carry some kind of malpractice insurance. If they can't get insurance because they keep fucking up then they should find a new career.

I wouldn't feel too bad about that.

This is what insurance coverage is for. All cities and municipalities carry insurance to cover police brutality and overreach, so worst case their premiums go up a few tens of thousands of dollars a month for the next 20 years or so.

I’ll cut against the grain here and say it’s ABSOLUTELY appropriate for taxpayers to pay the bill here.

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.

I'm with you and have said this a long time. We* are responsible for the government that acts in our name and we should bear the costs of its abuse. The Sheriff did not have the power of arrest that he abused here when we has a regular citizen. We gave him that power and we are responsible for its misuse. That is not to say the Sheriff should not be punished and our criminal laws and criminal system are woefully inadequate for a myriad of reasons at punishing abuse. There is a term for what the Sheriff did - kidnapping. That is never gonna happen, but the civil litigation and damages is rightly against Sheriff Nick Weems not Nick Weems.

* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.

Taxpayers should get a line item on their tax bills that specifically counts the amount of their bill that went toward settlements arising out of police misconduct, so they can see in numeric terms what they're voting for.

I'd vote for that in a heartbeat.

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.

This is a country where people are fine with more of their taxes going into police budgets every year.

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 didn't think about that, and sadly, you're probably right.

While $835k is undoubtedly a lot of money for this man, split among Tennessee's 7M residents, this works out to be less per taxpayer than the sales tax on a latte.

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.

It was the county sheriff and thus the county that was sued, Perry County.

Perry County is home to 9,126 people as of 2025. Which means this was $91 per resident.

> what they're voting for.

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.

Seems like the problem is only having two teams. People should be voting for anyone who's not team red or team blue in this case as otherwise things are not going to get better and both teams will have a race to the bottom (I'd say there's already a winner in that race).

Yes, and if you're not happy with the way the president and the government treat your money you should ensure they are (A) not voted in again and (B) pressure new candidates to use the full extent of the law to punish them.

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.

I'd say it would be more fitting that the individual people named in the suit had to pay the bill. But in that absence of that, having taxpayers pay the bill is the next best way to wake people up about the true cost of incompetent public servants.

I agree with a caveat: the offending agency’s budget should be impacted rather than the general fund. The cost of lawsuits ideally would be itemized in the budget and publicized to show which agencies have legal waste. Otherwise the drag on taxpayers is obscured which gives cover for yet more malfeasance and political opportunism.

You're on the right track - the services of government should be more accountable to the people, and the people should hold some responsibility for the actions of their government.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It falls on We the People to make sure our elected officials are working for us and not giving police unions whatever they want, but we will probably need election finance reforms to make it harder for the unions to influence the outcomes.

Police departments have already been found to do things like force officers to work an unsafe number of hours, commit wage theft in the form of unpaid overtime, engage in harassing and inappropriate behavior including sexual harassment, and the use of tasers on officers. Officers need unions to prevent abuse and exploitation and to ensure that they have protection from retaliation when they report on their fellow officers. Even abusers are sometimes abused. If we want good, honest people to work in police departments, we need to create work environments where they can and will want to. We can chase out those who aren't fit for the job as we go while still leaving good officers protected where they should be.

respectfully, i disagree. if they want labor representation they should not operate in service of the capital class.

> If I go further down my rabbit hole of systemic issues, I think citizens should be more involved in community policing in large populations.

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.

This seems to imply that voters elected someone because they campaigned on violating civil rights or breaking the law. That's rarely the case (Joe Arpaio is one exception). If an elected official breaks the law and/or violates the constitution they are still the one responsible for their actions, not the voters. If voters continue to elect someone with a record of breaking the law and ignoring people's rights that's a problem too, but not one that higher taxes due to fines and settlements is going to fix.

I fully agree, but you will never hear a candidate for sheriff call out an incumbent for being a shitty person. They're cops first, and public officials second, so both candidates will say they'll bring down crime more, but they will never betray the tribe by suggesting that law enforcment institutions can harbor criminal behavior.

It would be nice if someone ran against Sheriff Nick Weems using this case in their ads and speeches as an example of why Weems is unfit for the job and a liability for tax payers, but if someone did they'd have to be prepared to move away if they lost the election because otherwise they risk being retaliated against by someone who has already proven that they don't care about people's rights.

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

> but if someone did they'd have to be prepared to move away if they lost the election because otherwise they risk being retaliated against by someone who has already proven that they don't care about people's rights.

This is the big problem. A cop friend once told me that even he will not report abuse because he, and his family will be targeted by his fellow officers. They will do everything to make your life hell if you mess with them. One example is your license plate ends up in a database that gets you pulled over frequently and other forms of passive harassment.

The cops are just another gang, one that we call "the good guys." But honestly, not that many are good at all. Most are just ass holes looking for a power trip and carrying a gun is boner material for these cretins. The few decent or good people either leave or keep their head down and tow the line.

> One example is your license plate ends up in a database that gets you pulled over frequently and other forms of passive harassment.

And then, if institutions are functioning as they should, you sue them in a higher court above their jurisdiction to make them stop.

You make it sound easy but the fact is you have to be repeatedly harassed first before making any claims. Then you have to document that. So you have to eat, or at least take a few good bites from that shit sandwich before you can get the ball rolling.

I'm not at all suggesting it is easy. I'm advocating that such abuse should be heavily and punitively punished.

The real red pill is to accept that everything you just said also applies to teachers.

> I’ll cut against the grain here and say it’s ABSOLUTELY appropriate for taxpayers to pay the bill here.

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.

What would be the best mechanism?

Police aren't elected. Nor are judges in most cases.

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.

Sheriffs are elected officials, at least in most states.

Whatever political capital is gained fighting police unions will swiftly be lost when they run ads and start committing or letting crime get through.

The very first step that needs to be taken is cities decoupling citations/fines from their operating budget, either by putting them towards victim compensation funds or some other non-discretionary fund.

Part of the problem is the decisions of the US Supreme Court have codified a lot of unwritten rules to favor law enforcement/status quo - we would need a radical change in our form of government to undo this (the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court justices is one obstacle, along with the political nature of the job, the difficulty in removing a justice, that all bring to mind some sclerotic bureaucratic mess from a dystopia.) This overrides the influence any voter can have with local issues - their local and state governments cannot override these rulings with impunity.

> retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest.

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.

Even being a retired FBI director doesn't save you from this kind of stupid sh*t.

At the end taxpayer lost money and nothing happened to sheriff......

Most people would spend 40 days in jail for $800k. Why wouldn't police collude together to arrest one another? This feels like a free money glitch. I agree without accountability this provides a huge incentive to enrich your friends quite easily off the taxpayer.

This is an extremely paranoid take. Sure, $800k for 40 days is good money, but it also makes the department look terrible, and sets a precident that they have violated rights in the past. It isn't exactly a "free money glitch", since this wasn't just some automatic "$20k/day" judgment, this was damages for violating his freedom of speech.

Isn’t Jan 6 a better example? The next Jan 6 will be full of those seeking eligibility into a potential slush fund

You're making a big mistake by completely failing to account for the inherent (not to mention quite large) uncertainties in this kind of situation.

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".

Not to mention, the side effects extend beyond jail time. For example, your name gets plastered everywhere too.

That still makes these kinds of settlements feel more like a lottery than fair compensation.

I agree, and that's part of the point. "Free money glitch" does not sound like a valid description of any lottery I've ever heard of.

There's a reason (several, probably) why you don't actually see cases of police arresting each other and then suing to enrich themselves.

That’s a calculus for the destitute and mentally ill seeing in a moment someone driving distracted and jumping in front of their car in hopes of getting an insurance payout. Never mind the real possibility of death or significant loss of quality of life.

Only when you have nothing left to lose. And by that time you may be known in your society as mentally ill, and lose in the court because your actions are transparent.

The sheriff that arrested him should face criminal charges for misuse of authority. That he doesn't reflects a structural weakness in US law. In most European legal systems a law enforcement officer overstepping his legal authority would face criminal charges for it.

It's not a structural weakness, it's an intentional feature. Our legislature specifically and intentionally made it impossible for citizens (or anyone) to hold police responsible for anything.

It is a weakness, but yes, an intentional one. Why a weakness? It leads to structural instability.

This is a misunderstanding. In most cases you cannot sue the federal and state governments, with very important exceptions, but you can definitely sue the police. Government officials, such as the police, usually only have _qualified_ immunity rather than absolute or sovereign immunity, and even then only when they were acting in good faith and are not being accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights.

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.

Which has led to police officers using "the punishment I received is far in excess of the last time an officer of this department was punished for habitually arresting and raping minors!" as a defense, and it works.

Not the legislature: the Supreme Court. Qualified Immunity was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court back in the 1960's when a police officer arrested- and then a judge convicted- a group of black and white Episcopal priests for "making a disturbance of the peace"- that is, having black and white people out in public together as equals. This was Pierson v. Ray, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967.

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.

What's your source for:

> 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.

California SB 2, signed by Gavin Newsome in 2021, removed Qualified Immunity as a defense for all lawsuits brought under the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act.

I'm not a lawyer, and I have never lived in California so I don't know how much that covers. The QI removal I knew best was Colorado (CO's law also made individual LEO's have to pay with their own money, up to certain limits), and was doing some googling which listed California and New Mexico.

Isn't it way more narrow than what you're saying? For New Mexico's cases it only applies to civil rights violations. If the police officer just for example kills someone in the line of duty, he still has qualified immunity

Civil Rights law is how these sorts of things are enforced by individuals who were harmed, in your example a Law Enforcement Officer violated someone's civil rights by killing them in the line of duty and their family can sue for violation of the deceased's civil right to life. Qualified Immunity short-circuits that entire process for the individual LEO's (it does not protect the organization, just individual officers).

If the prosecutor thinks they can get a criminal conviction for murder (or whatever) that is a totally separate process that is between the People (whom the prosecutor represents) and the defendant (in this case, the LEO who killed the guy in the line of duty). Qualified Immunity never applied to criminal cases(1). But criminal cases will not provide any money or anything like that to the victim (or their family)- that comes from civil suits alleging that the LEO violated someone's civil rights. And that is what removing Qualified Immunity encourages, individuals who were harmed can sue individual officers and receive payments from those individual officers (Colorado's police reform bill holds individual officers responsible with their own money up to certain limits where the organization becomes responsible; I don't know about other states).

1: Which are rare against LEO's because prosecutor's don't want to anger the LEO's that they work with regularly. This is why civil suits are generally the main avenue for people to get justice from over-zealous LEO's.

How can I have a civil right to life? I'm aware I have a civil right to things like voting, a jury trial (for certain charges), legal representation. Those are all things the civic institutions provide to me. Civic institutions don't provide me life.

The US Constitution is an amazing document, I suggest you read it if you are an American. It's pretty short and has a lot of stuff that is useful to know, even if you aren't a lawyer (I am not). Because I am not a lawyer, I didn't word it exactly correctly.

The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution says, in its entirety:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The key in this context is "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." If a government agent takes that from you without due process that is a civil right of yours being abridged, at least in the US. I can't speak for other countries.

Those are constitutional rights, by definition.

You meant what? The civil rights you identified were constitutional rights.

From my perspective civil rights are the constitutional rights that the government can uniquely deprive you of. For example, a jury trial. No one else can try you, so only the government can deprive you of that right. It's fairly limited in practice anyways, but it is true.

The right to life, etc. anyone can deprive you of.

No. The US Civil Rights Act covered discrimination from business owners for example. And anyone could prevent you to vote or attempt coercion.

Elections are not private. I don't see how someone could stop me from voting. If they do that is just kidnapping, threats of violence, etc.

> Elections are not private.

Who said they were?

> I don't see how someone could stop me from voting. If they do that is just kidnapping, threats of violence, etc.

Section 131(b) of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 states that “[n]o person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose” for any candidate for federal office.[1]

[1] https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/what-is-voter-intimida...

right, and that shouldn't be prosecuted under it's own statue. Threats of violence should always be illegal

In the US we grant immunity to the law in proportion to power. Rather seems it should be the opposite if you ask me.

"In return, Bushart will drop the federal civil rights lawsuit he filed against Sheriff Nick Weems, investigator Jason Morrow and the county for violating his constitutional rights."

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...

Under today’s administration and courts a federal lawsuit like that was going nowhere anyway, except maybe an executive order praising the Sheriff.

"Thrown out due to Qualified [read: absolute] Immunity"

Absolute immunity is much broader than qualified immunity; the former generally applies to government officials (judges, prosecutors, legislators, etc.), and the latter applies to law enforcement officers (e.g. police).

Maybe he should try to get compensation through the new Anti-Weaponization Fund.

> “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-...

What that actually is, is a reward pool for Jan 6 participants and other people who have done illegal things to support Trump.

The vast majority of the money from that pool will certainly go to Trump himself (and his family when he dies) in the long run.

He'll dole out small amounts of it to J6ers and other supporters in a public display of rewarding loyalty, but enriching himself is always the prime directive over every other concern and who (in his mind) has been the biggest target of "DOJ/govt weaponization?"... himself, of course.

He will take almost all of it to go along with the various other billions of dollars he has scammed away from the American people as president.

I think there's something in place where he's not directly eligible, but I doubt that applies to his family.

I was just thinking that James Comey would also have a valid claim

I hope he applies (he's thought about it) just to further point out what a joke the whole thing is. Zero chance they treat his case fairly.

Potentially winning a drawn-out lawsuit against that sheriff, investigator, and county would have been a big improvement for the rights of his neighbors and friends, but I'd wager that with even half of those settlement winnings that he could do a lot more good than one lawsuit.

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.

His choice makes sense when you consider that the Supreme Court under Trump has essentially gutted Bivens. Our legal system is currently very broken sadly requiring strategic choices versus just (as in justice) choices. It's not clear the Supremes wouldn't contort to just gut 1983 as well (especially with their judicially created qualified immunity nonsense).

https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/supreme-court-ice-r...

While we'd all like to see justice, I can understand taking this offer. SPY has averaged 15% APY over the past decade, which means if you dropped the full $835k into SPY you'd have passive income of $125k per year without touching the principal. That's a never-work-again, very comfortable life in large parts of the country. He's in Lexington Tennessee where the median income is less than half of that, and those people actually have to work for their money. I'm sure some of that money is going to pay the lawyers but I'm also assuming he's not starting at $0 savings either so he really should never have to work again, especially considering at his age he'll be raking in that sweet social security and medicare.

> In most European legal systems a law enforcement officer overstepping his legal authority would face criminal charges for it.

I wouldn't say in most. In many they wouldn't

At the very least, taxpayers should be looking to make him personally responsible for the $835,000.

In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behavior. The long-running US trend of the inverse (additional legal protections for positions of authority) is incredibly destructive. This is a moral and values judgment, yes, but it's not just that -- it communicates to the population at large that they should find their own solutions rather than using the established system.

More succinctly, down this path lie guillotines.

The death penalty should be reserved for people who violate a position of public trust and authority.

Hot take, but I feel like no humans should be killed as a punishment... But I'm also probably too European to understand the true value of death penalty.

I'm only against the death penalty for the simple fact that courts have convicted innocent people. Sometimes, that conviction happens when the court actively blocks exonerating evidence.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/

Anybody who is wrongfully executed was basically guaranteed to spend their entire life in prison. Death row inmates get dramatically more access to legal aid than anybody else rotting in a cell, so if they couldn't win their appeal, the guy doing life isn't, either.

Generally, I'm against incarceration for that reason. I think the relatively muted violence of it is too easy to stomach for the public, which leads to people letting the system get sloppy. For public and infamous crimes, however, where the question is not "what act took place", but rather "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"-type cases, I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment being on the table. We trust public officials with significant authority, and abuse of that authority is utterly irredeemable. Frankly, for elected officials I'd support a "two-thirds vote and you hang" policy. If you want power, and seek out power, you have an immense responsibility to live up to your constituent's expectations.

> "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"

I guess that last part is the perspective I'd change, for a more compassionate world. I'd much rather ask "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what made the person commit that crime, and how can we help them not do that in the future again?".

For the kinds of "public and infamous" crimes I'm talking about, the answer is almost always greed, either for fortune, power, or fame. There's no need to ask "Why did Nestle decide to kill a bunch of African children by giving away just enough formula stop mothers from being able to breastfeed?" or "Why did tobacco companies stand in front of congress and lie through their teeth about how non-addictive nicotine is?" or "Why did Nixon decide to pursue the war on drugs in order to disproportionately target his political opponents and minorities?". The answer is that in order to end up in the C-suite or board of directors of a megacorp, or the White House, you have to be one of the most madly greedy, power-lusting parasites in the world.

My compassion for my fellow man is why I suggest we wait for them to commit a crime before punishing such behavior.

> you have to be one of the most madly greedy, power-lusting parasites in the world.

Yes, which is why we need to help these people. They clearly lost all their humanity and compassion, at one point we should care about the betterment of humanity as a whole, and put a limit to how these sort of people can act and do, the current situation is not tenable, and they should be classified as the sick people they are, rather than idolized.

That isn’t true. There have been death row inmates exonerated, both before and after their execution.

The ones that were executed would have been alive for the exoneration if we they had been given life in prison instead.

So why aren't you against imprisonment for the simple fact that courts have imprisoned innocent people? We have to accept a certain amount of false positives in all things.

The death penalty can't be undone, a prisoner can always be released. Sure, they'll never get that time back, but at least they can live.

It's a uniquely-American perspective: "Our government can't do anything right. But hey, I still trust it to kill the right people."

so true, citizens of the dozens of other countries with the death penalty believe their governments to be infallible

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country

Vast majority of death penalties happen in countries where citizens don't have much of a say what their government does...

If someone kills a family member and the court gives them 6 years and a parole officer, the remaining family will and has taken justice into their own hands and that has a much higher blast radius and margin of error than executing a guy convicted of the murder in a court of law and sat on death row making appeals for 10-15 years.

If dylan roof was allowed to live his full natural life in jail, there would be race riots in the US by the end of the press conference.

Cool, maybe rather than aiming to punish people, aim to rehabilitate them, and they don't need to spend their full natural life in jail. And if they're "unsalvageable" like many would claim, we (maybe not you, in the US, I dunno) have hospitals for those that are ill.

We also have state operated forensic psychiatric facilities for criminals deemed "unsalvageable." Many are not the same facilities that civilians seeking mental health would attend. Though, some facilities house both on separate units.

While prisons in the USA are often more punitive and dangerous than a forensic psychiatric facility, that does mean forensic psychiatric facilities are not their own form of Hell rife with their own problems. Essentially, autonomy, dignity, and human rights are stripped from individuals in both facilities -- you do not want to go to either.

Cool, but I'm not sure the victims and the public are always thrilled when they see murderers get off by reason of insanity, despite it being a life sentence and essentially a medically induced solitary mental confinement. People were furious about Yates and Bobbitt despite not even living within a 1000 mile radius because they felt it was a miscarriage of justice and are aware that rehabilitating people who drowned their own children is naive at best or yet another grift to siphon public money into their own pet projects and feign moral superiority.

Are they thrilled when innocent people are executed? Because you can't have death penalty without that part.

> If someone kills a family member and the court gives them 6 years and a parole officer, the remaining family will and has taken justice into their own hands and that has a much higher blast radius and margin of error than executing a guy convicted of the murder in a court of law and sat on death row making appeals for 10-15 years.

There's a huge gap between "6 years and a parole officer" and the death penalty.

> If dylan roof was allowed to live his full natural life in jail, there would be race riots in the US by the end of the press conference.

This is both offensive and untrue. Black Americans oppose the death penalty at much higher rates than white Americans and in fact, several survivors and victims' family members have come out against his execution.

You want to give the government the legal ability to threaten the life of the entire civil service, judiciary, and all elected representatives.

I’m sure that would never be abused.

The government already has that, since currently anyone (except the King) can get the death penalty.

I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, for a variety of reasons.

However, currently the court has to at least find that a murder has occurred or in some cases child rape (sometimes with conditions like a second offense). These are categorically different offenses that are unlikely to occur during the normal course of a public servants job, except perhaps if police kill someone there may be a question whether it was murder.

If “violation of trust” is given the death penalty than any normal act in the course of a public servant’s service history could potentially be used to hang him by questioning the legitimacy of the act.

For the record, I am also against the death penalty. I just thought it would be a funny Venn diagram to keep it for the existing crimes, but only if the perpetrator is also a public servant. But better abolish it completely.

Yeah that would never be weaponized with trumped-up charges against political opponents.

But the same thing could happen right now with the existing death penalty -- has that been a trend in American politics?

There are some troubling signs that things are headed in that direction (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/20/sediti...)

The greater problem is that many innocent people have already been and certainly will be murdered because of the death penalty. That should be totally unacceptable.

POTUS has been throwing around the "treason" label a lot this term, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he started pushing for executions of his political opponents or reporters he doesn't like.

Because it is irreversible, the death penalty should be reserved for cases in which there is no possibility of mistake. Which, given the fallibility of humans, is never.

I think when you admit on public television and public comms that you will commit war crimes and then you do commit war crimes we should have a notable exception - there's no possibility Pete Hegeseth didn't know exactly what, how, and when his war crimes were going to be perpetuated.

I don’t see how the death penalty adds anything here. There are already significant consequences. People who commit such crimes either do not expect to face the consequences or don’t consider the consequences at all.

Sure, and that might as well be said for any punishment at all for them. When you take mass human life you should not expect to stick around for your cronies to bust you out of jail in 10 years when the political winds have shifted for the worse again.

The death penalty was supposed to be for exceptional circumstances now, and look where we are. This country has put innocent people to death.

If you make exceptions, you will make more exceptions, and you are eventually guaranteed to put an innocent person to death due to the law of large numbers. A justice system must have a way to reverse mistakes to deliver justice properly, period.

Bad people doing bad things doesn't invalidate good people doing the right thing. If we kill innocent people that is bad, and we should require an incredibly high bar for this type of thing.

It becomes a slipper slope argument - well if we allow people to be jailed then inncocent people will be jailed and that's due to the law of large numbers, and there's no way to reverse our incredibly horrible prison system as it stands.

So now its my job to build our restorative justice system or... take out a few more nazis.

Theres's no slippery slope. You can reverse sending the wrong person to jail. You release them.

> If we kill innocent people that is bad, and we should require an incredibly high bar for this type of thing.

Yeah, the bar should be "only when humans reach infallibility" and then we won't kill any innocent people.

Why would you want a justice system that kills innocent people (and spends more money in the process) when it is entirely avoidable?

The death penalty should just be abolished. Where it exists there will always be innocent people who are murdered by the state.

One of the worst examples in the US is the consequence asymmetry for speech. Law enforcement and federal agents can lie as much as they like with impunity when dealing with citizens, but (a) it's a federal crime to lie to a federal officer (18 US Code § 1001, up to 8 years imprisonment), and (b) truly, anything you say to law enforcement when under any suspicion can and will be used against you in a court of law, even the act of pleading the 5th, regardless of (or perhaps especially because of) your innocence. "I want a lawyer", repeated ad-nauseam, is always the least harmful response, regardless of context[0].

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.

This distinction doesn't make sense. A police officer's job is to lie to you. Are we expecting jailtime for doing their job?

Then it shouldn't be a crime to lie to the officer.

I genuinely don't think certain charges relating to preserving one's freedom should even be a crime in of it self.

Unless you endanger others in an extreme manner, things like "resisting arrest", running from police, or attempting to escape prison shouldn't be charges within themselves.

People love the phrase "you can beat the rap, not the ride", but that essentially gives broad power to harass and damage one's life without recourse sans extremely expensive legal routes. In this example, a man lost his freedom for 37 days over a bogus charge and was paid by the taxpayers to essentially shut up.

It's not. You might be thinking of perjury, which is lying under oath.

I believe in certain Scandinavian or northern European countries, there is no crime or additional punishmented meted out for attempting to or escaping from prison, as "the desire to be free is inherently human". You will be looked for, and retrieved and returned, to be sure, but you won't then be charged with escaping from custody.

I learned about that years ago and really internalized it.

> A police officer's job is to lie to you

Federal statute should categorize that as a fireable offense and an intentional tort incurring punitive damages at minimum, and any subsequent proceedings (after the lie) as inadmissible evidence.

If that makes investigation more difficult, then so be it. For too long, law enforcement and federal investigators have relied on inappropriate and immoral techniques to obtain conviction. Mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, manipulating suspects -- what happened to old-school investigation that was after truth via smart observation and deduction? There's a reason people love watching Poirot: it's a (admittedly stylized) snapshot of real justice in progress.

Their expected standard of behavior should be higher than that of citizens.

How is it their job to lie to me?

When trying to obtain evidence, investigators or regular officers will make frequent recourse to lies and intimidation to get you to admit to things that you may or may not have done. For example, "If you don't tell us where you were that day, CPS will take your kids away" or "Look, if you just admit what you did, we can let you go" or "We've already detained your wife/brother/mother/father and they've fessed up; just yadayada."

I'm well aware of when they will lie, but it's a choice, not an inherent part of the job.

There is no law prohibiting a police department from requiring their officers to lie to you. It absolutely can be part of the job.

The claim was not that it can be part of the job. The claim was “A police officer's job is to lie to you.”

Police are trained to lie to you in the course of investigation so “they could choose not to do their job (by conducting an investigation)” doesn’t refute the notion that it’s their job to lie to you, it affirms it. It’s like saying “it’s not cops’ job to lie to you, some of them are dogs whose entire job is sniffing out cocaine with their extraordinary sense of smell”

It's like saying it's a pilot's job to wear a uniform. The uniform may be required by their employer, but it's not the job. A law banning pilots from wearing uniforms would not result in jail time for doing their job.

A job is a thing an employer trains you and requires you to do hth

So if I proposed a law banning pilot uniforms, you’d say a reasonable response would be “Are we expecting jailtime for doing their job?”

What are you talking about? You asked “how is it the police’s job to lie to me?” and got an answer (it is). It’s not a hypothetical that relies on a thought experiment, it’s just a true statement. You can’t imagine your way into a world where it’s not the police’s job to lie to you.

Lying is not an inherent part of the job nor is it required by all employers. It is not, in fact, the police's job to lie to me, any more than it's a pilot's job to wear a uniform.

Making it illegal for police to lie on the job would have the effect of many police no longer lying on the job, rather than putting all police in jail.

> nor is it required by all employers

Obviously lying isn’t required by all employers. Most employers aren’t the police (eg it is not the grocery clerk’s job to lie to you.) We are just talking about police, where lying to you is their job.

> Making it illegal for police to lie on the job would have the effect of many police no longer lying on the job, rather than putting all police in jail.

I still have no idea what you are talking about here. If you made something that the police do every day illegal then they wouldn’t arrest each other for doing it? That is obviously true but unrelated to the fact that it’s the police’s job to lie to you. Or it almost seems like you’re trying to say “if cops couldn’t lie to you then their job description would be different than it is now”, but that would just be another way of you saying that it is their job to lie to you?

I’m not sure what this fixation on hypothetical police that don’t lie to you is about, but again, saying “I am picturing imaginary police in my head where it’s not their job to lie to you” does not refute the fact that it’s the police’s job to lie to you, it affirms that it’s their job to lie to you. “All of my contrary evidence exists as stuff I made up in my head” is generally a supportive statement to any notion!

> A police officer's job is to lie to you.

No it isn't. Their job is to enforce the law. The only time it's reasonable for an officer to lie is when they're engaged in authorized undercover operations.

> legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want.

As the famous Russian saying goes, "Был бы человек, а статья найдется" (Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.)

The alternative extreme is likewise unworkable.

"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.

A reasonable exception can be made for undercover work without permitting most of the instances where police lie to people.

Absurdities in US case law:

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."

> In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behavior.

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.

> 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

Honest question, is this currently true?

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)

I agree with most of that, but are cops around you paid low enough to get anything in exchange for giving higher wages? Ive lived in many poor places across the US and the cops are often among the highest paid workers in the area already despite currently needing a jokes worth of training and knowledge. The wages ive seen cops around me getting seemed to already be in the top 50% of skilled proffessionals with college degrees.

Eh, in the UK this is only true for the most absolutely serious cases where someone has been killed or seriously injured. Wrongful arrest doesn't. It may face career risks.

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.

> US lacks some sort of Federal "inspectorate of police"

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.

Piscis primum a capite foetet

Catchy, I suppose, but ultimately without much meaning.

Huh? It's a widely recognised proverb, you might as well say that "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" is without much meaning. You could insist it's wrong if you like, or that it somehow doesn't apply but meaning is its whole thing.

I would say that goose phrase is also without much meaning. It's just a phrase. Like ok, you said a phrase? So what?

Let's bring up the Iran war - you could say a few things about how it's wrong or something and I can just reply de oppresso liber.

Ok? That's not a discussion, it's a drive-by, feel good zinger.

You claim that "de oppresso liber" doesn't mean anything? Seems to me that it's meaning was pretty clear. Actually in this context I'd say there are two distinct meanings, both the "Regime change" bullshit from the start of this war and boots on the ground for a US combat unit. Seems like a poor comeback to any "War is bad" rhetoric because in my experience all such rhetoric sort of builds in a just cause assumption and that's really all you'd be going for with this phrase.

But then you say it's not a discussion, nobody said anything about it being a discussion.

That’s how the cookie crumbles

Yeah. Did any meaningful consequences befall anyone for the Horizon IT scandal?

On 23 February 2024, King Charles III revoked Vennells' CBE

So, not very much, and I suppose you can argue about whether it's meaningful, but it is a consequence.

In the UK 30 people are arrested a day for social media posts online. Only about 10 percent resulting in convictions.

Police don't face criminal charges for this.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

The UK has different speech laws than the United States. Presumably, the actions of the police making those arrests are within the scope of UK law. Even if 90% don't result in a conviction, the police may still be operating within the scope of their authority in those arrests.

That’s not Europe. They had a whole vote about it and everything!

Telegram creator arrested for the crimes of his users on his platform. He did not commit any of these crimes, he's being held as complicit, when every other social media giant is not being held to this standard, and its ridiculous to hold most platforms like this liable, unless it's the only thing they host.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

> when every other social media giant is not being held to this standard, and its ridiculous to hold most platforms like this liable, unless it's the only thing they host.

My guess is there's a little bit of confusion on why this happened on your part. If the government wanted to, they can and will go after the other platforms. But you see the other platforms aren't end to end encrypted and gladly give up the data to law enforcement. If they keep giving over the data, there is no risk of prosecution.

> the other platforms aren't end to end encrypted

This is false. Discord (Voice & Video), Facebook Messenger, iMessage (to the point law enforcement has to rely on "leaked" message contents from the phones notifications), WhatsApp, Signal, Viber, and plenty others. They all have end to end encryption in some way, shape or form. There's also Twitter / X that has this as well.

Europe is a continent which the UK is a part of.

this is false

It was a joke about Brexit. A joke about a joke, if you will.

The UK doesn’t have free speech

Those 30 aren’t arrested for just for writing “social media posts” but for possibly “harmful communication including incitement to terrorism and violence, online threats and abuse, and unwanted communication via email and other means”

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

The vast majority of those arrested are just for mild insults, which are illegal under the censorious UK regime; not incitement to terrorism or threats.

I'm pretty sure it's threat of violence. Sure, in some of the cases, the threats are mild ('i will fuck you up'), but they are often repeated, which, to be clear, should be considered harassment in any case (and the fact that it still isn't in other countries is wild. Someone keeps sending me insults, I should be able to legally retaliate to make him stop, no?)

Do you live in the UK? This isn't true.

Here in the UK it is illegal to be grossly offensive online. Racism for example will have you charged under the Communications Act 2003.

Have the racists tried not being racists?

Not UK but in Germany you can face criminal prosecution for insulting the chancellor,

https://x.com/Pirat_Nation/status/2056692341399081235

While here in the UK you can be arrested and charged for saying mean things about the royal family on private whatsapp groups,

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-09-07/five-former-met-p...

The second one was for specifically racist messages - i.e. breaching hate speech laws - not just being mean.

I am opposed to criminalising hate speech, BUT I think its important to be clear its not just "saying mean things".

> The second one was for specifically racist messages - i.e. breaching hate speech laws - not just being mean.

Can you provide a definition of "hate speech" which doesn't also apply to "mean words"?

Are you suggesting racist words are a special category of mean words or something? If so why?

Hate speech is a subcategory of mean words that needs to be legally prevented for a just society where people are equal. Racist words are only hate speech if they are uttered and used in a discriminatory manner. Since whatever group is targeted by hate speech is the only group that can be harmed by the hate speech, they should be handled differently in the eyes of the law to ensure no one group is excessively discriminated against

Do you feel the same about homophobia, height discrimination, fat discrimination and other discriminatory behaviours? Or do you feel these are different enough that they should be treated differently?

I think I disagree with you on this, but I think what you've said is a perfectly valid opinion and appreciate your response. I'm sorry that it appears someone has downvoted you for disagreeing. This seems to be a new trend on HN and I wish people would stop doing it.

> Do you feel the same about homophobia, height discrimination, fat discrimination and other discriminatory behaviours?

The first is covered by current UK law, the other are not.

> I think I disagree with you on this, but I think what you've said is a perfectly valid opinion and appreciate your response. I'm sorry that it appears someone has downvoted you for disagreeing. This seems to be a new trend on HN and I wish people would stop doing it

Agreed. I upvote a lot of things I disagree with to counter unfair downvotes (including GP).

homophobia, of course, considering I myself am bisexual and have had relations with other women.

Height and weight discrimination depends on what is considered height and weight discrimination. Saying you need to be x height or y weight to do something? That's safety. People saying they'd only date someone above x height or below y weight? I bit shallow but that's personal preference. Saying everyone above 200 pounds is lazy and deserves to die of a heart attack? Maybe then it crosses the line into actual discrimination

> People saying they'd only date someone above x height or below y weight?

What about height and weight affecting career prospects?

Depends. Is there a reason to limit them (safety, they need to be big/small enough to do something, etc.)? if not, then it seems a bit discriminatory

The law does provide a definition of hate speech that does not apply to mean words in general.

You assume we both know what is meant by "racist words" which implies it is a category that can be defined. Hate speech laws apply to more categories than race too. The wikipedia article has excerpts of and links to the relevant legislation and important cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...

And harmful communication can be "Fuck Hamas" which may be hateful, but not harmful.

I mean, this is exactly what the Tennessee sheriff accused this guy of doing. The Sheriff said that a meme referencing Trump saying that people 'needed to get over' a school shooting was actually a threat against the school.

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?

> While it is good that the UK version doesn't send you to pretrial jail, you still have to fight the charge

The UK has much stronger protections at the start of this process though. Pre-charge detention is capped at 96 hours, charging decisions are by a professional, non-political, and non-elected governmental department who have accountability, political cases require sign-off right up the ladder, and bail is presumed in favour of release. You might get a police visit, worst case scenario an arrest and your devices seized, but it's also a case that will go nowhere because the CPS won't charge it. And you don't really get this whole "rogue sheriff" issue in the first-place, because we're not insane enough to politicize local law-enforcement.

>Of the 90% many will accept their fault and receive a caution or warning

Why do you need to arrest someone just to warn them?

In the UK the police can detain you for up to 24hrs without a judge and extend it to 36hrs in some cases.

One case I read of a guy who got in trouble for a social media post, he was called into the station and they basically forced him to sign a paper otherwise he couldn't leave as they'd just keep interrogating him, where I'd imagine they threatened to get the courts involved unless he admitted he was wrong for doing it. Which is why most of them don't end up as convictions.

It's basically a very aggressive warning.

Example: https://www.aol.com/police-apologise-arresting-former-specia...

> Mr Foulkes was detained in a police cell for eight hours and questioned in relation to a potential charge of malicious communications. He said he ended up accepting an unconditional caution because he feared the investigation could affect his visits to his daughter in Australia.

Another https://www.foxnews.com/world/blogger-arrested-sharing-anti-...

> After being questioned for several hours, North was released without charge.

>In the UK the police can detain you for up to 24hrs without a judge and extend it to 36hrs in some cases.

So pretty much half the time than in the US. (County of Riverside v. McLaughlin)

-In the United States, police generally cannot hold you for more than 48 hours without formal charges or a probable cause hearing before a judge.

Yep pretty similar, technically in the UK they can go up to 96hrs if the police just ask a judge for an extension, even without formal charges. So about twice as long as the US's theoretical upper limit.

My main concern is the fact they are raiding peoples houses, taking electronics, and aggressively interrogating people for hours over a tweet, then pushing them to sign a document admitting they did something wrong without charging them. While everyone pretends they just got a 'warning' and it's not a big deal that this happens to thousands of people a year.

> possibly “harmful communication including incitement to terrorism and violence, online threats and abuse, and unwanted communication via email and other means”

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.

Great summary here of the kind of things people are arrested for and a bit more about the laws this refers to https://open.substack.com/pub/monkdebunks/p/are-30-people-a-...

Sorry, that is far from a great summary. It quite obviously sets out to prove that there is nothing wrong. Evidence for this includes arrests have increased from 5k 12k a year but the number of convictions has gone down. That is far from reassuring. It seems to be claiming that all arrests fall into "bad" categories and have nothing to do with political thought. That is misrepresentation. Also narrowing of the argument in a attempt to refute the whole problem.

Here's one horrible example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j718we6njo

As an aside the police body cam footage one of the officers searching his house says "lots of Brexity books'

There are countless awful examples of arrests for online comments. Here's another:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

She posted the lyrics of her dead friends favourite rap song, and was convicted. How this even resulted in an arrest never mind court and conviction is beyond me.

Given the met police chief thinks they shouldn't be doing this, I doubt that there isn't problem with the level of police involvement:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/03/met-police-c...

I'm pretty sure most people will "accept their fault" for whatever claims you make if you hold a gun against their head.

Note that the quoted laws also cover things that would be restraining or harassment orders in the USA.

It is similar in Germany, where you can be arrested for simply posting an insult (non-violent) to a politician. No police will face charges if you aren't convicted. And you will NEVER get a settlement.

I don't know why HN has become full of authoritarian anti-free-speech apologists. The current political divisions are turning people insane.

Excuse the whataboutism, but how many Americans are arrested for “disorderly conduct” each day? (Which from my YouTube police footage watching appears to be “being an annoying arsehole in public” [1] ie a broadly similar moral misbehaviour)

> [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.

Similar in the UK, and there has been along history of the police misusing things such as "causing an obstruction" here

I find it ironic; George Orwell was English!

What are these messages? Threatening your ex-wife? Plotting to commit arson? Or saying you don't like immigrants? They all fall under this umbrella, yet the vast majority of people would agree the first two are criminal in nature.

My understanding is that saying anything "grossly offensive" is illegal there, so it's not clear those police were blatantly overstepping their authority like in the case from the OP.

I don't think GP is advocating that the US become more like europe by increasing the authority of police officers.

I see a huge problem in increasing the authority of US police officers. They need to be held to much higher standards than they are now.

you pitch this and next election cycle you will out as soft on crime which is why this can only ever go (significantly) into the opposite direction unfortunately

We need a better system than this one.

Right, nor was that the suggestion of my comment. I just wasn't sure they were comparing how abuse of power is handled in different legal systems so much as how freedom of speech laws are handled.

UK police aren't breaking laws by arresting people for those social media posts. They don't have free speech to begin with.

The Sheriff absolutely should face some consequences, at least to his career. The money paid to Bushart ultimately is no skin off the government's back. It's taxpayer money, they will just underfund a good thing, raise taxes, or print debt to pay it if there's a shortfall.

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.

> The money paid to Bushart ultimately is no skin off the government's back.

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.

*County taxpayers. The people who actually work for the country won't face any consequences.

Their insurance rates will go up. Its not like they are cutting a check from their county budget...

I highly doubt Tennessee is going to start printing USD.

States and municipalities can issue bonds, which is what I presume they meant given a charitable interpretation.

Seems to me that law enforcement officers should be required to carry liability insurance that they personally pay for. Have a lot of settlements / claims? Your insurance rate goes up. That happens enough and now it's not economically feasible to hold the job

Not just law enforcement, all civil servants should.

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.

It is better than nothing but it is also adding another middleman between civilians and justice with its primary motivation as personal profit above anything else.

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.

Merely facing some consequences to his career would be far too weak. This dude knowingly imprisoned somebody for over a month. The minimum consequence should be, say, two days in jail for every day this guy spent locked up. Better would be whatever punishment we'd levy against any common criminal who kidnapped someone for 37 days. Ideally we'd be even harsher than that, due to the abuse of authority involved.

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.

> sheriff that arrested him should face criminal charges for misuse of 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?

In the US, we just pay out a lot of taxpayer money to the victim, and the authority abuser gets some time off with pay.

i don't know if you've seen how american law is faring; the supreme court recently legalized racism as long as it's partisan.

>In most European legal systems a law enforcement officer overstepping his legal authority would face criminal charges for it.

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.

The same Europe where people who criticize the rapist of their child does more time for causing offense than the rapist did for the actual rape? THAT Europe?

Well, its not like thats going to happen when people settle out of court. Not sure if his first amendment rights have been vindicated really...

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.

Giving some of the taxpayers' money back as a fine is no victory.

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!

Just a note to the many commentors hear gnashing their teeth that "the sheriff should have to pay, not the taxpayers!"... The article makes it pretty clear that the settlement was against the sheriff and others involved.

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...

The sheriff isn't paying the settlement, the local government is (just about always does). The settlement comes with the agreement to drop the lawsuit.

Cite?

The settlement agreement was linked from the original post from FIRE: https://www.fire.org/research-learn/settlement-agreement-and...

I have tremendous respect for FIRE's commitment to defending free speech equally whether attacked from the left or the right.

This was the meme he posted that got him jailed: https://www.fire.org/sites/default/files/styles/417xy/public...

so the "meme" was a photo and a quote

Yes. (And an accurate quote, too.)

Are there any memes that are not described thusly?

A very bad taste quote in context. Not that it shouldn't be free speech but let's not pretend this guy did nothing wrong.

Trump did something very wrong. Bushart is sarcastically "quoting" him to point that out - or do I have it the wrong way around?

Like when Trump posts racist posts and then deletes it afterwards?

A judgement isn't enough. Those behind the warrant should be in prison, and fined personally. The tax payers of Tennessee shouldn't have to foot the bill for their malfeasance.

Imagine if he said "we need a patriot to bail out the guy who killed charlie kirk" like Charlie kirk said about the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi and was at Nancy Pelosi's house to torture her.

Sometimes I feel like I live in an alternative reality because I very clearly remember thousands of people saying shit like that.

Are you sure they weren’t ironically referencing the Pelosi case to make a point about the double standard?

They very well could be. If so, great.

Poe’s law and all.

Imagine you added this context to that statement which was a broader statement about bail and not about how he supported the attacker? I don't agree with Kirk, but your "quote" of him is purposefully misleading.

“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.

https://x.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1587127536122732544

Thanks for pointing out how he equated random street violence to premeditated attempted murder and torture.

I'm really not sure how you got that from what was said? Murder is worse, in fact, than attempted murder, regardless of if it was "random street violence" or not.

So the taxpayers should not face accountability for who they elect?

Did this guy campaign on "I'll violate the First Amendment" or something?

What level of taxpayer due dilligence are you envisioning here?

> Did this guy campaign on "I'll violate the First Amendment" or something?

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.

What a ridiculous argument.

Basic responsibility sits with those who commit the act.

Voters are well aware that elections have consequences that have real impacts on their lives.

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".

Thank god 1st amendment works.

But it should not get paid from taxpayer money, instea the offending officer ahould pay it

Cops generally don't care because it's not coming out of their pocket. And around where I live for a multitude of reasons, cops don't generally work in their hometown but the next one over. So it's not even their tax dollars paying for their fuckups (directly or indirectly through insurance and premiums).

Eh, I’d prefer they get punished. Imagine if you misconfigured a service and then had to pay out the fee for breaking your company’s reliability contract…

And to say the least, I doubt the officer has $800K.

This was not an accident.

I at least partly disagree, speaking from my perspective as a small-time city council member. I agree that ideally taxpayers shouldn't pay money for this kind of misconduct. But in practice, misconduct must face consequences, those affected must be made whole, the offending employee likely can't pay the judgment in full, and most importantly, the monetary judgment is the most effective way to motivate city governments and their constituents to effect change to prevent further misconduct.

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.

> the offending employee likely can't pay the judgment in full

My doctor is required to carry malpractice insurance. Those who commit repeated egregious mistakes become uninsurable.

Make cops do the same.

Many (most? idk) governments that employ the cops (city, county, whatever) do have insurance for this, and grant police qualified immunity. There are some attempts to hold cops liable as well - https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb20-217. The City Council in my town immediately restored qualified immunity for their police. Don't underestimate the level of absolute blind support for cops that exists among the US population.

They did not say governments should have legal insurance. They said cops should have malpractice insurance. Insurers calculate individual rates and want profit.

Your town's council overrode a state law?

The govt/state granted that sheriff the power to do that action. The govt/state therefore have a responsiblity for his actions. Otherwise companies/govt could never be held accountable (because an organisation can never take action only humans can)

In a democracy the populace should in fact bear the consequence of their own government's actions.

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.

No, I think the government paying is right. It wasn't just the offending officer acting alone that led to the gross mistreatment of this man. The officer was working within the context of a system of local government that ought to have righted the wrong on its own. But the man had to appeal to the federal government to get it righted. The fact that the system lacked enough accountability to avoid or fix this wrong shows that more than just the one officer is the problem.

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.

It's not the government paying, its you.

When a cop does millions of dollars of damage they only choice is for tax payers to pay, or for the victims to get nothing. Definitely the cops should also face consequences though.

> Thank god 1st amendment works.

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.

The path to solving a culture that overincarcerates is not by incarcerating those involved in perpetuating that culture.

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.

that is literally the way. these maga law breakers need accountability. They got off scott free for j6. we're still fighting the civil war and white fragility because they suffered no consequences the last time.

Not just scott free, but they might be getting a million dollars each from tax payers due to that asinine "settlement" from Trump suing the government.

This is another example of the kind of partisan thinking I'm criticizing.

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?

> It's nearly impossible to get paid for malicious prosecution by the federal government.

We'll see. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

> 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?

"falsely claiming" is a pretty big distinction between these cases, yes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey says he got off, in part, because no one provably fell for his trick, not that the behavior was legal.

I've read the second circuit opinion and saying that it was legal is a fair takeaway. They didn't reach the 1st amendment grounds though because they didn't need to once determining that he didn't conspire as required (technically, they didn't prove he conspired.)

Of course any two cases are going to be different, and the guy posting memes on your side is going to be more sympathetic to you than the guy posting memes that you don't like.

That's part of my point. If you create a criminal statute that applies to OP, someone is going to try applying it in a case like Mackey's. If you don't think it should be applied in Mackey's case, how would you word it to cover just the cases you like and not those you don't?

That doesn't seem so hard. Per this article:

> That meme — which Larry didn’t create or alter...

> 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…

He didn't create it, the meme was accurate, and the cops knew that. Every bit of the conduct they attempted to punish was clearly legal, and they knew it.

The opinion you reference is at https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/23-7577_opn.pdf.

"cannot alone establish Mackey’s knowing agreement" clearly indicates that things would have been different if they could have established that conduct.

When an appeals court rules on one issue that's enough to decide the case, they often don't rule on the remaining issues.

Anyway I don't see how you'd word a law that only applies to the cases you like and not the ones you don't.

Also, other people will like different cases than you, including the judge and jury in whatever case gets brought based on the statute you're proposing.

> Anyway I don't see how you'd word a law that only applies to the cases you like and not the ones you don't.

Terms like "willful" and "intent" are all over our laws and would work just fine here. Assessing that is why we have juries.

I'm sure that the DOJ, headed by Trump's personal attorney, will get right on the Trump administration to prevent them from violating the Hyde amendment.

This comment has too much snark, but anybody who says the Trump administration won't do something because it's illegal/against norms __hasn't been paying attention__

That's not at all what I said.

I'm saying that for decades, people who were maliciously prosecuted by the federal government had effectively no recourse.

It's good to change that, and I'm hopeful that the new fund does some of that. I would prefer to change the system to vastly reduce the threshold for finding the federal government liable in such cases.

Are you asserting that the folks who participated in a literal coup attempt were maliciously prosecuted by the federal government? Because that sounds like the position you're arguing from.

If you include the guy who was arrested for posting memes as participating in a coup, sure. "But the memes were misleading" (as someone else in this thread was arguing) I don't care.

Was there an actual judge in this case? If so, that judge should never have approved this settlement. Of all the horrifying things this administration has done, this one is near the top of the list.

The judge in the case in fact put out a statement that there WAS no settlement.

> Kathleen Williams, the judge handling the lawsuit, dismissed the case on Monday and, in her filing, admonished the government agencies, notably the Justice Department, for failing to be transparent about the settlement.

> She said no agency "submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed."

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/g-s1-122938/irs-trump-settlem...

The people involved in January 6th were manipulated by external intelligence influences, and really had no choice in committing their crimes.

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.

We have overincarceration and underincarceration simultaneously.

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.

The system needs to change so pursuing frivolous or weak charges doesn't work. We also need to reform bail, which has gone way outside of historical/constitutional norms.

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.

> The system needs to change so pursuing frivolous or weak charges doesn't work.

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.

How is that an example? Whatever you do now doesn't work retroactively.

Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.

> Whatever you do now doesn't work retroactively.

The point of such a thing is to deter similar conduct in the future.

The fact that this isn't a crime, and that qualified immunity typically means they can't even be held responsible civily, is part of what encourages police to commit misconduct like this.

The only folks punished here were the local taxpayers footing the bill.

If you're going to change the system, which you need to do to make it possible to bring charges in a case like this, the other changes I suggested would be more effective and harder to weaponize.

The core problem here is that the system allowed an innocent person to stay in jail. That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.

> The core problem here is that the system allowed an innocent person to stay in jail.

No; the system got the innocent person out of jail and a hefty settlement for their trouble. The system is now, unfortunately, allowing the guilty parties to stay employed as cops after performing a kidnapping.

> That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.

An accidental positive on a drug test is a bad outcome.

Locking someone up for more than a month because they posted a photo of the President and a quote he actually said is a crime.

See I don't view the guy getting out after 37 days as a success. It's a failure but it could have been worse.

I also think every party involved in that failure should be fired and rendered unemployable in the field.

You may want to explain a bit better, as stated it sounds like you’d prefer he’d still be in jail: “ See I don't view the guy getting out after 37 days as a success”

The case shouldn't have been brought, but even if brought he should have had a prompt bond hearing and been let out within 24 hours.

I do agree

What could a systemic solution to this possibly look like? He didn't stay in jail for 37 days because the system left no room for any other possible outcome. There were a number of points at which he could have been released had the system worked correctly. But Sheriff Nick Weems, an official in a key position of authority administrating the local justice system, decided that he'd like to subvert the system and steal this man's freedom. So he used his authority and expertise to ensure the system did not work correctly.

The magistrate judge should not have approved the warrant. They should have had a bail hearing within 24 hours, at which it would have been clear that they posed no threat.

Instead somehow bail was set at $2 million and the hearing to reduce bail was delayed.

Those are flaws in the system that should be fixed, and will continue harming people even without bad faith from sheriffs.

> Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.

At a certain point, punishing abuse of power after the fact is the only way to discourage the potential abuse of power. Like there is nothing that actually stops you or me from going and kidnapping someone. And that same dynamic applies to someone who happens to also be a sheriff who controls a jail due to his employment. There is no magic wand for the system to wave that makes it so that the individuals employed by that system can't simply break the law.

The warrant here was approved by a magistrate judge, and I would suggest making the process for approval more robust to reduce this kind of abuse.

Personal civil liability and firing can also help.

I don't think magistrates rule on questions of law (maybe you were implying this, but maybe not). But in general the whole legal/justice system is basically blind to the harm it itself causes, so I don't think an actual judge looking at the merits of a warrant would be terribly adversarial to a sheriff either - they work together all the time, and most of the warrants presented by the sheriff are legitimate.

I do agree with you in general that we should aim to split system functions between multiple people. But this merely raises the bar, it doesn't make corrupt actions impossible. Which means we should be focusing on both avenues of reform, rather than emphasizing one to downplay another. Especially as when you do this, the entrenched system seems to takes advantage of the downplaying while resisting the solution being emphasized.

Magistrates are supposed to verify that the warrant contains probable cause and reject ones that don't.

You could make the system more adversarial at that point, although I think enforcing bail hearings where a public defender can argue would help in this and many other cases.

Shooting from the hip, I'd think a properly adversarial/just process would be something like a public defender (or other attorney of the person's choosing) who is paid out of government funds. Then there should probably be different classes of warrants, with the lowest class being something like the person is notified and able to choose their representation to challenge the warrant before it's even issued (presumably non-violent, no flight risk, etc), with escalating classes based on those factors.

But even then, abuse of that classification is something that could routinely happen and would need to be punished post-facto. Imagine the same sheriff looking to perform the same retaliation, so he checks all the boxes for a no-notice no-knock warrant that still results in an arrest with a weekend in jail. Which is why my main point is that we shouldn't argue against one avenue of reform with the goal of emphasizing a different one.

My concern is that new crimes will be weaponized.

As opposed to the current status quo where would-be criminal actions of public officials against otherwise-uninvolved private citizens go unpunished? I don't find this argument compelling, as it would still at least limit the blast radius to people who get involved in public office.

And once again there isn't much that can be done about corrupt public officials unjustly prosecuting/persecuting former officials as it comes down to that same human problem rather than a system problem - regardless of whether there is or isn't criminal liability for actions adjacent to official acts, they are still subject to the rest of the law! For example James was persecuted under the guise of having defrauded an unrelated agency in a personal capacity, independent of her actions as an official being what drew the aggro. Those persecutions of Comey and James basically rely on a post-truth electorate that doesn't care, and who chose to reelect a destructive tyrant who repudiates our American values merely to stick a fork in the eye of "the elites".

And while we can also talk about ways of reforming the system to prevent that (eg Constitutional amendment that explicitly divides power amongst independent agencies), I don't think it has much bearing on how we should be drawing legal lines in the sand to constrain public officials.

> each side trying to imprison the other,

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.

The thing is, each side will think you're talking about the other side.

I view it differently. To me there's the pro incarceration side and the anti incarceration side. Both parties institutionally are pro prosecution and have failed to reign in abuses.

Both sides have abused the courts. Instead of arguing over which side has abused them worse (I may not even disagree with you on that!) I prefer to focus on reducing the potential for abuse.

> I prefer to focus on reducing the potential for abuse.

Sounds great in theory but at the end of the day the backstop to bad behavior is force, one avenue of which is incarceration.

This is just the paradox of tolerance.

> each side will think you're talking about the other side.

no. one side will say it, and think it. the other side will say it, but know they're lying.

I don't think both-sidesing this is particularly appropriate. Law enforcement officers who abuse their position to harm people under false pretenses should be prosecuted as criminals, because that's what they are. This is true in any political environment and entirely distinct from the Trump administration's malicious and baseless abuse of the legal system against Trump's perceived enemies.

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.

Public trust should be lost, because these institutions were never trustworthy.

I am not both sidesing. I'm saying that there are better reform options than adding additional criminal statutes that are likely to be abused.

Put simply, do you want the Trump administration to be able to bring criminal charges against any prosecutor or judge that they can argue brought a bad case?

You could make this argument about anything. We should have no laws, because they might be abused by a malicious prosecutor. Utter nonsense.

We should indeed get rid of many laws because the benefit is outweighed by the abuse.

America has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world (used to be #1) but suggest that maybe we're overcriminalized and you must be talking nonsense.

You are not suggesting that "maybe we're overcriminalized". You are suggesting that we should not hold law enforcement accountable for egregious abuses of power that do real harm to real people. You think it should not be considered criminal for a police officer to put somebody in prison (under threat of bodily harm or death, by default) just because they feel like it, or whatever. You think police officers should be able to rape innocent travelers on the side of the road and face no consequences for it. You think police officers should be able to scream conflicting orders at somebody and then shoot them in the head because "they were reaching for a weapon".

Or do you not? All these things happen in America, and the officers involved almost never face meaningful consequences. Where do you draw the line, if at all?

I haven't said those things.

Rape and murder are existing crimes, and they should be applied equally to police officers.

I think that the core problem with the system is not individual bad actors, but overcriminalization and the acceptance of that by judges and juries. To solve that you need actual reform, and adding a new crime that would inevitably be weaponized is not the way.

The whole concept of holding people "accountable" is the wrong frame. It's precisely that mindset that created this highly flawed system. I want to reduce bad things, not to feel good because people who did bad things are punished.

And when you think about how to prevent bad cases from being brought, you need to systematically reduce the power of those who can make such decisions.

Added: I do want strong civil liability for these cases, which we do have, which is why OP was able to get a good settlement. We should expand that to federal cases and lower the threshold.

> Rape and murder are existing crimes, and they should be applied equally to police officers.

How about kidnapping and false imprisonment, as in this case?

As I mentioned elsewhere, neither currently apply because due process of law was followed.

How can a deliberate blatant violation of the First Amendment be "due process of law"?

Look up the elements of false imprisonment.

When there's a warrant, even if wrongly granted, the arrest and imprisonment is considered lawful.

No, it isn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus

What does that have to do with the elements of false imprisonment?

"invoking the jurisdiction of a court to review the unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual" would seem to indicate that such a detention can be deemed unlawful, yes?

In short, unlawful means different things in different contexts.

In the context of false imprisonment, it generally means without legal process, and legal process later overturned does not count.

See eg. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/549/384.h...

>Reflective of the fact that false imprisonment consists of detention without legal process, a false imprisonment ends once the victim becomes held pursuant to such process--when, for example, he is bound over by a magistrate or arraigned on charges. Dobbs, supra, §39, at 74, n. 2; Keeton, supra, §119, at 888; H. Stephen, Actions for Malicious Prosecution 120-123 (1888). Thereafter, unlawful detention forms part of the damages for the "entirely distinct" tort of malicious prosecution, which remedies detention accompanied, not by absence of legal process, but by wrongful institution of legal process

> I haven't said those things.

No, but they clearly follow from what you have said.

> Rape and murder are existing crimes, and they should be applied equally to police officers.

Okay, but they aren't, because police enjoy broad immunity and benefit of the doubt from (and during) prosecution. How do you suggest we fix this?

Additionally, I am not sure you appreciate the magnitude of harm that can be caused by locking somebody up for months. They can lose their house, their job, their pets, their kids. They miss important life events. The payout in this case was fully justified, though, of course---since the officer himself was not held accountable---it is the taxpayer who will foot the bill.

> The whole concept of holding people "accountable" is the wrong frame. It's precisely that mindset that created this highly flawed system. I want to reduce bad things, not to feel good because people who did bad things are punished.

Holding people accountable is not the same as pursuing retributive justice for its own sake. I agree that the latter is bad and that it is pervasive in our justice system. But I don't agree that we shouldn't hold people responsible in any way for what they have done, especially if there are no mitigating factors.

I would get rid of all forms of immunity and mandate body cameras. Probably also raise requirements for police officers. And part of it is reducing the scope of what the cops are meant to enforce.

I appreciate the massive harms done by incarceration, which I why I support vastly reducing it.

> I would get rid of all forms of immunity

IIUC getting rid of "all forms of immunity" would essentially make it impossible for police officers to arrest anybody in good faith without exposing themselves to criminal prosecution (maybe that's what you want). But weakening or eliminating QI, which shields officers from civil liability, is sorely needed.

You didn't ask, but I'm not necessarily in favor of throwing cops in jail in many of these misconduct cases (for practical reasons at the very least). What should happen is that they be thrown off the force for good and prevented from working in law enforcement ever again. I don't believe you would need new criminal statutes to accomplish this, but what you would need (per jurisdiction) is political will to make it happen, perhaps starting with an independent review commission or similar, but making sure they can't just go one county or state over will be much more difficult.

> mandate body cameras

They just turn them off, or the footage gets "lost". This won't work without much broader reform (and, dare I say it, accountability).

> Probably also raise requirements for police officers

I agree.

Sure. Let’s start pushing back against over-incarceration by not punishing people that knowingly did something wrong and flies in the face of the country’s supposed values.

Makes sense.

We should start by removing the ability of prosecutors and police to bring such cases in the first place.

What does that look like here?

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.

The magistrate judge is supposed to be a check on that power. Unfortunately, they've become rubber stamps for the most part. In a functioning system, the judge would block the warrant and arrest.

I think there are ways to have a system where judges do that, without having to criminally prosecute either cops or judges.

> In a functioning system, the judge would block the warrant and arrest.

But they lied to obtain the warrant.

OP says that they left out information (which cops do all the time) but that the warrant shouldn't have been granted either way because of SCOTUS precedent.

Would welcome reform that makes it harder to lie on warrant affidavits, although again, that should be civil in nature.

> they left out information

Yes, we call that lying by omission.

They knew that information would result in the warrant not being granted, so they left it out.

I doubt that. The magistrate judge already granted an unconstitutional warrant, why assume the result would be different with more info?

As you are well aware, they kept important facts from the magistrate judge to obtain said warrant.

The affidavit did not support the post was a threat.[1] This was why FIRE said the information left out should not have mattered. Any reasonable competent person would have denied the warrant. But the information left out could have overcome incompetence possibly. This was why FIRE said it was important.

A reasonable system would have required the investigator attached an unedited full screen image which included the post. And the magistrate attempted to view the post if possible to counter deceit. And required the magistrate had legal education.

[1] https://www.fire.org/research-learn/complaint-bushart-v-perr...

If you don't hold people accountable for removing the liberty of others without just cause, those who abuse their power will continue to run rampant.

Where does this idea come from that we somehow can't take power away from people without criminal punishment after the fact?

Nobody should have this power, and then abuse of power wouldn't be an issue.

If you want to reform the justice system, more power to you, but while it exists the last people who should be exempt from its reach are those who wield its power in criminal ways.

Indeed. Thankfully - as has been proven time and time again in America - if leniency is given to those who abuse their power, they will absolutely never ever decide to abuse their power again.

Nobody should have that power.

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.

This is a grossly disingenuous strawman. The top comment as of posting clearly states "The sheriff that arrested him should face criminal charges for misuse of authority." False imprisonment is against the law, this situation is far from merely doing something we dislike.

False imprisonment generally doesn't apply when due process is followed, like getting a warrant.

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.

Your comment spoke to the commenter's motivation, not about how likely any proposed charges were to stick from a technical standpoint in this particular jurisdiction. So, you have abandoned defending your original claim and moved the goalposts elsewhere.

What? My original comment says that we need to reform in a different way.

Your original comment is different from "we need to reform in a different way". If that's what you meant, that's not what you posted.

>We need to tame the impulse to throw people in jail for doing things we dislike

And in comments I expanded on this and gave several specific reforms.

Not sure what your understanding was.

If you refer to my earlier post, I show how it is disingenuous to claim that people are having this impulse. They are not. You are arguing against a strawman. Hope that clears this up, because I don't know how to state it clearer.

"Today, the parties announced in a joint statement that Larry will receive $835,000 in exchange for dismissing his complaint. "

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%.

"Larry will receive" answers your question.

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."

https://www.fire.org/research-learn/submit-case-faq

Okay, that's for FIRE's part, but they worked with another law firm:

"Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC"

> "Larry will receive" answers your question.

Settlement reports are top line in my experience. Not bottom line.

I’ll be honest this seems low for what he’s been through.

I would voluntarily go to jail for 37 days for that amount.

I think it's a shame this doesn't come with criminal charges, though. False imprisonment? Kidnapping?

Would you do that if you were an ex-law enforcement officer who's racial profile puts you under the protection of criminals on the yard that largely support the person you heckled while not knowing that it was only going to be 37 days?

I wouldn't, but that does really put some perspective on it.

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.

Would you live through the stress of a legal case with unknown legal costs and unknown incarceration time for that amount of money?

No. I'm just saying said amount seems fair from the monetary side of this case's specifics.

(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.)

The outcome wasn't guaranteed; that's the scary part. If Trump had decided to take a hand then it could have been drawn out for months at a minimum.

At some point, barring him getting beaten to death in jail, this was always going to get in front of a judge who'd go "uh what the fuck?!" It's about as slam-dunk of a situation as you could come up with.

I could say that about a litany of court cases in the previous decade, yet here we are, our president winning immunity for all tax evasion, in the past and future, for his whole family, and getting seditious white supremacists paid while doing it.

It is my fervent hope that said fund will, when it encounters a judge, collapse for similar reasons.

He wasn’t jailed for 37 days. He was jailed indefinitely. Every day he didn’t know if things would get worse. He didn’t know how long he was staying. He was already in the absurd scenario for being jailed for a meme so anything was possible at that point. He happened to get out after 37 days.

And in cases like this, the actual perpetrators typically don't pay a cent out of their own pockets. Instead, the city or county indemnifies the defendant, either directly or through insurance. Which means that taxpayers (possibly including the injured party) are the ones who pay.

Indeed. Qualified immunity is a stain on American jurisprudence.

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.

IMO this case is a good example of one that ought to void qualified immunity as it currently stands, though I know in practice it's more difficult. I think it's plain that a "clearly established" constitutional right was knowingly violated here.

It’s about what your average senior engineer makes here at hackernews per month

I would say it seems unbelievably high! I've known people t-boned by Semi Trucks that ran a red light and they couldn't get 1/10th of that because you can only prove so many actual damages. A single month in the slammer caused this guy $835k in proven damages? You'd probably lose your job, go into arrears on rent/car/mortgage, but it's hard to believe that every day in prison was costing this guy $22k

This was settled out of court. Nothing was proven. For the county to settle for this much, there must be some things going on behind closed doors that the people involved do not want to be made public.

Not an expert here, but after his lawyer's cut and taxes, my guess is he'll take home around $250K ???

I'm still not seeing how that "meme" could in any way be a threat. I've dissected it every possible way. It would never have occurred to me that the point that meme was trying to make was to threated violence. What am I missing?

There's more than one Perry High School, and the claim is that someone thought this was a reference to a future school shooting at their local school. The fact that the police knew that it wasn't, but arrested him anyway, and held him with a ridiculous bond, all weighed into the lawsuit.

Reminds me of Douglass Mackey, who was convicted for sharing deceptive memes before the 2016 election that falsely told Clinton supporters they could vote by text message. He was sentenced to 7 months in federal prison in 2023.

Why does it remind you of that case? The two seem quite different.

There’s a large difference between tampering with an election by spreading misinformation (illegal) and posting a picture that expresses an opinion (free speech)

Well, his conviction was eventually overturned on appeal.

> There’s a large difference between tampering with an election by spreading misinformation (illegal)

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...

No there isn't, according to the appeals court which overturned it.

I wondered if anyone else noticed that. I upvoted. Hopefully more people will as well to balance out the bias.

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 one case, the meme was accurate - the photo, the quote, and its attribution were all accurate, and the cops knew that. It never made it to trial, for obvious reasons.

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?

In both cases the reason someone was persecuted was they offended someone in power. And the system eventually ruled in their favor. That is the similarity.

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.

> In both cases the reason someone was persecuted was they offended someone in power.

Sure, if you ignore all the other elements of each case.

> If you view one of those cases as a bad result, then chances are you are biased.

I think it's worse to spread deliberately false information about an election than it is to accurately quote the President of the United States.

> 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.

Hitler said nasty things about Jews, and Jews say similarly nasty things about Hitler. Does this make them equal?

Name all the times Biden fired someone from his administration for failing to obtain a conviction of a political opponent, and I'll take this false equivalence seriously.

It proves nothing because Biden generally didn't fire anybody. Name all the times Biden fired ANYONE from his cabinet. Below the cabinet, compared to any other president, he just didn't fire people to any degree.

I voted for Trump. I fail to see how the meme here is a threat. And I also think that telling Democrats they can vote by text message is an attempt to undermine the election.

There are no double standards. Take my downvote.

Fraud and similar activities often do not qualify as protected speech under the first amendment.

Political opinion is always protected.

It doesn't remind me of this at all. That person may have been "joking" but it could reasonably be construed as an attempt to subert or manipulate an election.

On a related note, if you want to know more about the power of sheriffs in the US, I strongly recommend this book-

The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy by Jessica Pishko

Huh? It is the opposite. It is the local enforcement and consideration that keeps the reckless federal encroachment from happening more often.

If that’s what you believe, you must read this book to gain an alternative perspective

The elected office of sheriff, being a law enforcement office, can push back at the county level to overreaching state government, in a similar way to how state government through states' rights can push back against an encroaching federal government. It's a power of government that is closer to the people and more accountable to them, theoretically. Not to say it can't be abused but it can also serve a valuable role in checks and balances. Look up the principle of the Lesser Magistrate.

Sheriffs can push back but how often they do? Many sheriffs in the US are strongly aligned with Trump making it very difficult to see how they will push back against him. It’s more likely that they will push back against the state governors who are pushing back against the federal government

Why's everyone picking (rightfully) on the sheriff alone and ignoring that he got a legal warrant from a judge, and that the defendant was then later kept in prison by a judge?

That'll be because of this bit:

That’s relevant and should have been included in the warrant, but I still blame the Judge here.

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.

And don't forget the Sheriff's electoral mandate. The locals played a part in it too.

That's great compensation. I'm glad justice was served but couldn't have happened to a bigger piece of crap.

It’s horrifying that this went on for 37 days… complete madness.

I’d be happy if Trump was forced to pay it from his pocket. After all, inciting police officers (or anyone) to commit crimes is also a crime and he should be held accountable.

But this is a civil case.

Best country in the wooooorrldd

At least the US has working courts that gave the wrongly arrested man some redress. Almost $900,000 for 37 days in prison isn't bad at all.

what a pay out!

Victory news...

New business model apparently. USD$22,567.56 per day.

1. Make Trump meme 2. Go to jail for N days 3. Profit ($22k per day)

Nice ;-)

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