We need to tame the impulse to throw people in jail for doing things we dislike, not just point it at different targets.
I see several comments saying that criminal charges should be brought over this. That is not the way.
Some who are in jail should not be. Some who aren't in jail should be. If I locked you up for a month over a meme, I'd go to jail for years.
Turning it into an escalating back and forth of each side trying to imprison the other, is not conducive to the kind of change we need. To take a recent example, while I don't particularly like James Comey or Letitia James, I don't think they should have been targeted. That kind of stuff is what happens when it escalates to each side calling for the other side to be locked up.
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.
Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.
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.
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.
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.
I also think every party involved in that failure should be fired and rendered unemployable in the field.
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.
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.
Personal civil liability and firing can also help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
no. one side will say it, and think it. the other side will say it, but know they're lying.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
How about kidnapping and false imprisonment, as in this case?
When there's a warrant, even if wrongly granted, the arrest and imprisonment is considered lawful.
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
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 appreciate the massive harms done by incarceration, which I why I support vastly reducing it.
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.
What kind of mindset do you need to have where you think the only way to prevent someone from doing something is via the threat of imprisonment after the fact? The vast majority of people don't do this, and that's because they don't have the power to do it, not because they don't want to.
Makes sense.
They falsely claimed he'd made an actionable threat. We can't remove their power to request warrants and arrest people for legitimately threatening others, right?
They misused power.
I think there are ways to have a system where judges do that, without having to criminally prosecute either cops or judges.
But they lied to obtain the warrant.
Would welcome reform that makes it harder to lie on warrant affidavits, although again, that should be civil in nature.
Yes, we call that lying by omission.
They knew that information would result in the warrant not being granted, so they left it out.
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...
Nobody should have this power, and then abuse of power wouldn't be an issue.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Terms like "willful" and "intent" are all over our laws and would work just fine here. Assessing that is why we have juries.
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__
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
And in comments I expanded on this and gave several specific reforms.
Not sure what your understanding was.