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.
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 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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
"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%.
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?
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.
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] threadWe 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.
But it should not get paid from taxpayer money, instea the offending officer ahould pay it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Political opinion is always protected.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Every settlement against the police should be taken from their pension fund. This is something I've been advocating for decades now, because it creates an incentive not to do things like this. Right now, good cops don't patrol bad cops because it won't affect them. By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly.
So... collective punishment?
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
While that would be nice, it seems like extremely wishful thinking.
Maybe ask a wrongful termination lawyer how things would actually play out?
Oh boo hoo. The official in question here isn't some rank and file rando, it's the sheriff who the taxpayers in question duly elected.
I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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.
- Individual Officer liability insurance.
You scrap Qualified Immunity; and instead claims could be made against the specific Officer's insurance. This would be a nationwide insurance system, and their premiums would follow them as an individual from job to job/location to location.
If departments want to compensate Officers for liability they CAN, but ultimately it would come out of that department's payroll/budget unlike now where lawsuit settlements don't even hit the police department's balance sheets at all.
The police are an organ of society (if you don't live in an authoritarian shithole), so the society that gives them the power of pit and gallows is ultimately accountable for their behaviour.
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.
Not system will ever work as intended if entire societies are either corrupt and/or stupid. Cops are no different.
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.
1. Make Trump meme 2. Go to jail for N days 3. Profit ($22k per day)
Nice ;-)
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...
They do not mention what their cut of that will be, but since they also do not specifically state they were working pro bono, I'd imagine it'll be around 40-50%.
But this is a civil case.