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Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit
(fire.org)
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by ceejayoz
by ceejayoz
Every settlement against the police should be taken from their pension fund. This is something I've been advocating for decades now, because it creates an incentive not to do things like this. Right now, good cops don't patrol bad cops because it won't affect them. By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly.
So I would place a good amount of blame at the feet of the judge, who should be more knowledgeable about legal questions. I think cops should have a general understanding of the law but I doubt the legality of online memes comes up much.
So I don’t think it is catastrophic that the police came to the judge with this issue. The problem is the judge rubber stamping something that should’ve been rejected.
Second problem I see is that this took 37 days to resolve, which is also incredibly slow. So it really magnified the earlier mistakes.
That said, I’m not against liability for cops in general. I just think in this particular case I blame the judge more.
"Justice delayed is justice denied " is an important principle that appears to have been forgotten in the west
I think there’s an amendment about that or something but I’m not a lawyer.
Best solution would be to simply require licensing and conduct standards to be a police professional similar to that required for Registered Nurses.
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.
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.
- 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.
While that would be nice, it seems like extremely wishful thinking.
Maybe ask a wrongful termination lawyer how things would actually play out?
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Oh boo hoo. The official in question here isn't some rank and file rando, it's the sheriff who the taxpayers in question duly elected.
I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
in some sense you might be right because instead of this 91$ being taken per resident directly from their wallets, what would happen is the de-gradation of the services because of lack of funds, so your roads,clean drinking water and everything needed for a govt would have 91$ less per resident.
and then when those same quality of roads decline and other negative things happen, the same community might find scapegoats of its the problem of X,Y or Z and the sheriff is their vocal voices against the X,Y or Z.
So you might be right, also y'know what's the worst part is? It's the assymetry, these sheriffs might continue to get re-elected because of the above reasons I gave and they would continue doing un-just things.
And then it is upon the onus of the person (in this case the tennessee man) who was jailed unjustfully and who would have to file a lawsuit and win. Things perhaps could've turned out differently or taken more longer and imagine the man who might've been jailed for more time.
Either way, I think because of all of these reasons, its a systemetic problem but the result of it is that the society has become too polarized and so weirdly incentivized that you can get thrown into jail for memes. I imagine these things might continue to happen but atleast a legal precedent might've been set now (not sure about how American law works).
So... collective punishment?
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
> civilians who find themselves in the midst of an international armed conflict or military occupation and are in the hands of a foreign power
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 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.
Police don't face criminal charges for this.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
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!
Digging further[0]: "Morrow and Weems have been sued in their personal capacities and could “be on the hook for monetary damages,” a press release from Bushart’s legal team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said. Perry County, Tennessee, is also a defendant since it’s liable for unconstitutional acts of its sheriffs."
So, it sounds like most of the burden is placed directly on the shoulders of the guilty "officers of the law".
0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/man-sues-cops-wh...
But it should not get paid from taxpayer money, instea the offending officer ahould pay it
Thus, the appropriate remedy should put pressure on the conduct of the whole local government, whose use of tax-payer funds is accountable to the electorate. Punishing just the one officer by depleting his private resources won't move toward systemic reform.
And finally, on the principle of the matter, the officer can't and doesn't jail people on his own power and private authority as a citizen. He does so on the power and authority of the government that grants him his office. His actions as a private citizen did not harm the man. His public actions as an agent of the government harmed the man. In other words, the government did wrong, through the officer.
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.
They do not mention what their cut of that will be, but since they also do not specifically state they were working pro bono, I'd imagine it'll be around 40-50%.
But elsewhere on their website, on the Submit a Case FAQ, they do say very clearly: "Will this cost me anything? No. FIRE is a charitable, non-profit organization and does not charge for any of its services."
I think it's a shame this doesn't come with criminal charges, though. False imprisonment? Kidnapping?
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The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy by Jessica Pishko
> Weems admitted in a later interview that he knew at the time of the arrest that Larry’s Facebook post was a pre-existing meme that referred to an actual shooting that took place in a different state, over 500 miles away. But Weems and Morrow left out that extremely important context from their warrant application.
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But this is a civil case.
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1. Make Trump meme 2. Go to jail for N days 3. Profit ($22k per day)
Nice ;-)
Edit: also not a lawyer
Her story does not jibe with any of my experiences, direct or indirect, with law enforcement in Japan.
It's also "the punishment is the process". It's often a feature, not a bug.
Surprisingly, this isn't unusual. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/02/784225337/south-carolina-magi...
Even if the man did make the meme I'd say it should qualify as free speech
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.
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.
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.
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.
Existing police officers do not want this.
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.
Just fire them after the first fuckup. It does not need to be this complicated.
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.
The pension payments will be increased. There isn’t a good solution for this other than individual liability.
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There's indie journalists on Youtube and X exposing fraud and corruption. Follow them there.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Adding a line item to their property tax bill showing how much is paid into settling lawsuits will not make people think that they should demand more accountability. They will think that it should be harder to take legal action against the police.
I think part of the problem here is that this is usually hidden from visibility (intentionally) by officials because it reflects negatively on them.
It may make the news for a day or two, never get seen by the majority of voters, and get swept away later under the deluge of distraction most "infotainment pretending to be news" provides.
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Go further and just list all government settlements/court judgements underneath the elected official in charge of the branch responsible.
Still, this idea bears merit for other reasons. Americans routinely underestimate how much money is spent on Social Security, healthcare, and debt payments, and overestimate how much money is spent on education and infrastructure. More clarity into that could help build real political momentum to actually balance the budget.
If citizens had granular voting power (i.e. liquid democracy), this would make more sense. As it stands you get to vote for team red or team blue once in a while and hope that their votes impact that line item you’re concerned about.
And quite frankly even if you're a hard-line rightwinger, the way this administration treats your money is so objectively bad, you have to be brainwashed to deny it.
There is literally no legal mechanism for anyone to hold a police officer responsible for anything. This is enshrined in the highest levels of the law and there is literally no way to undo it without a constitutional amendment or a supreme court decision. Citizens also have no influence over either of those mechanisms. Literally nobody has influence over the supreme court.
This isn't a matter of voting. The police are literally outside of the law and above consequence. This was set up by a panel of unelected judges without any possibility of influence by the people.
Do you seriously not undersrsnd how any of this works? This is not a problem that can be fixed with votes. This problem exists outside of the law and out of control of any and all elected officials. A constitutional amendment is the only conceivable way in which the people could overturn this decision.
It'd be better for law enforcement to be a licensed position and for civil rights violations like this to result in loss of their license which would strip them of their ability to work in the field anywhere in the US.
That'd solve the whole resign->move over one town/county->repeat cycle for officers too
* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.
For police in particular, the unions prevent a lot of police accountability, and because of the power that police wield over the population, I am comfortable saying I support unions EXCEPT police unions. At best they should be ballot initiatives.
If I go further down my rabbit hole of systemic issues, I think citizens should be more involved in community policing in large populations.
Police unions don't have the power to stop state prosecutors from filing charges on officers, or the power to stop a jury from finding an officer guilty, or the power to stop a judge from sending a cop to prison for their crimes. Those are the main problems standing in the way of police accountability.
Where police unions do end up giving too much protection for police it's in contracts that get approved by government officials when they shouldn't have been. Police unions can ask for unreasonable things, but when they do our governments should be telling them to fuck off instead of rubber stamping whatever they ask for.
Police, like almost all workers, still need unions though. Police can still be subjected to things like unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, insufficient training, low wages, and poor benefits. Police should be able to unionize to prevent being exploited. Local governments should refuse to cave to their unions unreasonable demands such as those that prohibit anonymous complaints, or purge disciplinary records to prevent identifying repeat offenders, or reject body cameras, or allow officers to use paid vacation time to cover unpaid suspensions.
Police unions get a lot of attention as being the main thing preventing police accountability but they really aren't. The problems are much deeper and eliminating the unions will not solve them.
the rub: police unions are highly political machines and heavily involved in electing rubber-stamp politicians. it's a quid-pro-quo relationship that we seem to have a very hard time breaking out of in the united states.
re: police requiring unions: i have to disagree with you. american policing originated from two antilabor arms: slavecatchers and union-busters. they wield power over non-police union labor and implement it on every level from the individual to the systemic. they are class traitors by choice and by definition and do not deserve protection, because they are the physical arm of the body we require protection from.
This is something I have thought of too. We are all interested in living in a safe society; However, there are many people who know damn well they can get away with all sorts of idiotic behavior because the cops aren't looking, but everyone else is. So give everyone else a method to discourage that behavior.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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The guy who posted the photo of brown skinned people with the "imagine the smell" comment was American and lost his job. The UK wasn't involved in any way. [0]
The comedian you might be thinking of is Graham Linehan - he was arrested for inciting violence against trans people and has a long string of twitter posts quoted as possible reasons. (and had a similar post with the comment of "a photo you can smell" but with a photo of a trans rights protest, so perhaps the origin of the confusion?).
[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/indians-dogpile...
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I don't know why HN has become full of authoritarian anti-free-speech apologists. The current political divisions are turning people insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
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> [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.
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Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages
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
Even at his age of 60 (I'm getting up there), I wouldn't have made that deal.
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates...
> “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
For example, there are surely dozens of others who are taking plea deals because they can't afford a lawyer to bring such a lawsuit, a few hundred thousand could multiply the impact tenfold.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/supreme-court-ice-r...
More succinctly, down this path lie guillotines.
Also, the body of federal law and regulations is so vast that smart people estimate the average person unknowingly breaks roughly 3 federal criminal laws per day[1], giving the federal government the legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want.
[0] James Duane, You have the right to remain innocent, 2016
[1] Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, 2011.
As the famous Russian saying goes, "Был бы человек, а статья найдется" (Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.)
1. You do not assert the right to remain silent - you must state verbally that you are doing so. Otherwise the prosecution can describe your communication as "refused to cooperate with or answer questions from law enforcement" which is a "negative" finding, whereas the right to remain silent is at least meant to be interpreted neutrally.
2. Beware anything beyond the simplest statement: "Yo, I want a lawyer dawg" can be successfully argued in the (state) Supreme Court as "Defendant asked for a canine attorney. Law enforcement were unable to find one, but had fulfilled their obligation to attempt to provide counsel for the defendant. Therefore, any statements he made after his were done knowing he had no counsel and were as a result admissible."
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.
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I wouldn't say in most. In many they wouldn't
The current implementation of it- where you need to have "clearly establish" a Constitutional right with a prior case in this region- is based on Pearson v. Callahan from 2009, and it takes a terrible Supreme Court precedent and makes it even worse. This has created the patchwork "no case in the circuit has clearly established that a police officer must not make a warrantless search on a Tuesday in May" sort of quibbling.
The work of legislatures has been to roll back qualified immunity. Colorado, New Mexico, and California have removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. LEO's can still claim qualified immunity for suits under federal law, but they cannot for some suits brought under state law or the state constitution in those states.
The Supreme Court has also, at the same time they've made it harder to hold police to account, made it harder to hold politicians to account, gutting bribery laws and expanding "free speech" to include paying politicians. And the recent idea that a President can't be prosecuted for any "official acts" is also nonsense created by the Supreme Court. This isn't Congress fault, there were laws that prevented it. The Supreme Court just decided that they didn't want to enforce those laws.
The Supreme Court at the root of a lot of the dysfunction in American politics, and somehow still has more respect than they deserve.
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.
The real problem right now is how the courts determine if an official was acting in good faith. Right now they are assumed to have acted in good faith unless it has already been “clearly established” that what they did was illegal. This means that the official can argue that they didn’t know that their actions were illegal because no prior case ever dealt with that exact fact pattern. This works far too often and has let a lot of very guilty police get away with their crimes. Still, some police officers _are_ held to account, so it is not actually impossible.
It'd be an interesting thing to see garnishing of wages, deductions from pension funds, or loss of some kind of bonus system to help balance the scales.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ultimately the US lacks some sort of Federal "inspectorate of police" that would be able to ban people from being law enforcement officers or at least require e.g. retraining or restriction of duties, without leaving it up to frankly corrupt local authorities.
Double-edged sword though when the Feds get captured by the Party, though.
I don't think this is true, or at least it's not entirely true.
Various states and law enforcement agencies have an office of the inspector general which at least should provide some oversight. We also have the courts and individual officers and agencies can be sued in the court of law which also provides a means of oversight. You seem to be suggesting that everything is corrupt, corrupt local authorities, corrupt feds captured by the party. I think that level of perceived corruption is not reflected in operational reality.
Some states or local police organizations do in fact look at past police records for applicants. There's a bit of variation here, but it's probably a bit better organized than, say the EU where outside of other bureaucratic hurdles I don't believe there is any real way to stop some German citizen who should be banned from being a police officer from moving to Estonia and being a police officer. Though perhaps I'm wrong and there is an EU-wide database that all countries and their police forces use?
I know the UK isn't in the EU, but I just bring that up as I think it may be a bit closer of an example.
So, not very much, and I suppose you can argue about whether it's meaningful, but it is a consequence.
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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?
What level of taxpayer due dilligence are you envisioning here?
No, he did not literally campaign on those specific words.
Did he align himself with people who have and continue to violate the First Amendment (among many others)?
Yes.
> What level of taxpayer due dilligence are you envisioning here?
About 5 minutes.
Basic responsibility sits with those who commit the act.
If you elect someone who crashes your economy, who suffers those consequences? Maybe this isn't so much of a "who should suffer the consequences" but maybe more of a "who does (logically) suffer the consequences".
Poe’s law and all.
“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.
I know it gets more complicated, especially with larger cities--and doubly so where states have control over police departments or similar. But in general, in a great number of cities and localities, this judgment alone would have a big impact on oversight and governance of the department, probably even if the governing body also disliked the plaintiff's political views. $835k is almost 3 mills of property tax revenue in my city. So, that's my $0.02.
My doctor is required to carry malpractice insurance. Those who commit repeated egregious mistakes become uninsurable.
Make cops do the same.
Try electing more sensible politicians and put more checks and balances into work to stop this from happening again if you don't want your tax money wasted on this.
Yes, but it should never have even gotten to evaluating whether the speech was 1A protected. Even if it wasn't, it wasn't remotely illegal, threatening or anything. The content never needed a 1A exemption. The arrest was illegal for selective prosecution before we even get to 1A.
> the offending officer ahould pay it
There should definitely be consequences for such gross misconduct under color of authority but it's not just the arresting officer. The victim was in jail for over a month. That means, at minimum, in the first couple days a local prosecutor decided to charge this case AND a local judge didn't toss it out. One cop can be negligent, stupid or evil but those other people are also officers of the law with more training and higher pay. They are there to stop individual stupidity before it turns into systemic calamity - and they abjectly failed in their duty.
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And to say the least, I doubt the officer has $800K.
Turning it into an escalating back and forth of each side trying to imprison the other, is not conducive to the kind of change we need. To take a recent example, while I don't particularly like James Comey or Letitia James, I don't think they should have been targeted. That kind of stuff is what happens when it escalates to each side calling for the other side to be locked up.
you're implying that the two sides are morally and legally equivalent, and both are just engaging in retaliatory squabbling. that is a ridiculous implication
one "side" routinely flaunts the law, steals from the public, abuses and ignores the courts, and has a complete disregard for civil rights, legal procedure, and credibility. it uses the DoJ as a personal henchman, stringing up frivolous charges targeted at political enemies.
the other "side" is trying to enforce the law.
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.
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.
You are demonstrating what I think will be one of the most pernicious outcomes of the Trump administration's transformation of the Justice Department: the blurring of lines between law enforcement, criminality, and corruption as the institution is debased and public trust is lost.
What kind of mindset do you need to have where you think the only way to prevent someone from doing something is via the threat of imprisonment after the fact? The vast majority of people don't do this, and that's because they don't have the power to do it, not because they don't want to.
Makes sense.
They falsely claimed he'd made an actionable threat. We can't remove their power to request warrants and arrest people for legitimately threatening others, right?
They misused power.
I think there are ways to have a system where judges do that, without having to criminally prosecute either cops or judges.
Nobody should have this power, and then abuse of power wouldn't be an issue.
Much of our legal system is based on the incarceration or individuals who are deeply compromised and have zero choice in their actions, pardons need to become more commonplace until a more mature approach is taken here.
It's nearly impossible to get paid for malicious prosecution by the federal government. Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Amendment_(1997)
>A 2010 investigation by USA Today "found the law has left innocent people... coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases."[5] The investigation "documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Still, USA Today found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded."[5]
The case in OP would never have settled if it was against the federal government rather than a state. Also, the feds cap the amount paid for wrongful imprisonment at $50k/year, by statute.
We need a way to make the federal government pay out for malicious prosecution cases, just as OP got paid.
See e.g. Douglass Mackey. He posted some misleading memes on Twitter about the election, falsely claiming that people could vote by text, and got arrested and found guilty at trial until eventually the 2nd circuit said that what he did wasn't a crime. Should he be compensated? Should the prosecutor and judge in his case face their own criminal prosecutions?
You'd have to change the law to allow for prosecutions in cases like this, and that change would likely be weaponized in other cases.
"Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC"
Settlement reports are top line in my experience. Not bottom line.
(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.)
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.
You can almost never hold anyone in government accountable. You are forced to sue your own community to get some shred of justice while the actual people who violated your rights face zero accountability.
Tell lawmakers who want your vote this November that you want an end to qualified immunity. Agents of the state should not be less accountable to the laws of the land than regular individuals.
Political opinion is always protected.
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Spreading misinformation about elections is broadly legal.
"Are election-related false statements protected by the First Amendment?
Generally yes, but not if they seek to interfere with the process of voting."
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
To those of you downvoting, please articulate why you think something deserves a downvote. As it is, I can only assume rather hypocritical double standards. Someone saying something anti-Trump is ok, but someone saying something anti-Leftist (or Clinton) is not?
(For the record, I 100% am on the side of the guy who was jailed. Just as I am on for the guy who retweeted that meme in 2016. Abusing government power is unacceptable no matter who it benefits.)
In the other, it was false information, a grand jury indicted, and a jury convicted. The appeal rested on the government struggling to demonstrate a) anyone actively fell for the information and b) the conspiracy element. (https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/23-7577_opn.pdf)
Somehow, this distinction is... bias?
If you view one of those cases as a bad result, then chances are you are biased.
That said, if you downvote because you have looked into the cases enough to think that that similarity is not valid, and then you can articulate it (like the person I'm replying too did) then I'd consider that fine. (Assuming they downvoted, they may not have.) I may still think there's some bias there, but it's not uninformed bias.
If you can't articulate a reason you want to downvote, then it's bias and emotion fueling your downvote. Which, I don't consider to be a valid reason to downvote.
As a side note, I think we all need to be aware of how similar the things we hear about the "bad" side are. The comments I see about Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people is pretty much exactly what I saw said about Biden weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people during his administration. I also have seen MANY comments where if you replace "Biden" or "Trump" with the other name, you end up with a comment the other side would make. I think that should trigger some self-reflection. I know I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it.
There are no double standards. Take my downvote.
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.
Perry County is home to 9,126 people as of 2025. Which means this was $91 per resident.
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.
And then, if institutions are functioning as they should, you sue them in a higher court above their jurisdiction to make them stop.
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.
There's a reason (several, probably) why you don't actually see cases of police arresting each other and then suing to enrich themselves.
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.
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.
> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls
This seems like a straightforward call to violence to me. And he was released after police ascertained that he had no intent to act on these statements.
If someone made posts along the lines of "Christians are abusive, punch them" would it be surprising if CBP took them aside for further questioning?
But in general US law sets a high bar for claims of incitement. Your hypothetical statement would certainly be considered protected speech. That is, of course, not to say that you would not be a victim of vindictive prosecution ;)
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The UK, Switzerland, and most of the former Yugoslavian states are not in the EU. Same for Iceland.
"drew heavily" != "the same"
I went to law school and I assume you did too; I'm not sure why you would say this lol
Among other things, the fact that the US has The Bill of Rights is turning out to be important when it comes to privacy and free speech issues.
The UK has a problem with free speech at the moment. This is why the https://freespeechunion.org exists.
I'm not going to prove fire is hot when the OP is asserting the equivalent of 'actually fire isn't hot the burn is caused by socialists'.
Here in the UK it is illegal to be grossly offensive online. Racism for example will have you charged under the Communications Act 2003.
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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...
That's a lot of colorful language to say "words hurt".
I could point you to 30 BlueSky posts that would qualify.... posted in the last 5 minutes.
Why do you need to arrest someone just to warn them?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/03/met-police-c...
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.
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?
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.
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.
"OK, before we begin this meeting of the capas of our totally legitimate, not at all criminal business... Is anyone here an undercover officer of the law?"
"Shucks, you got me. I'm FBI."
However, your implied extreme isn't accurate. Lying to suspects can in some cases result in entrapment charges (although it is historically more likely for suspects with power and public office). Etc.
Yes, the current system is injust. No, it's not as bad as you claim.
I 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.
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.
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.
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Honest question, is this currently true?
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.
I’m sure that would never be abused.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
But then you say it's not a discussion, nobody said anything about it being a discussion.
Your town's council overrode a state law?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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...
And in comments I expanded on this and gave several specific reforms.
Not sure what your understanding was.
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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?
I am opposed to criminalising hate speech, BUT I think its important to be clear its not just "saying mean things".
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?
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...
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.
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> 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 ones that were executed would have been alive for the exoneration if we they had been given life in prison instead.
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?".
My compassion for my fellow man is why I suggest we wait for them to commit a crime before punishing such behavior.
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.
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.
Vast majority of death penalties happen in countries where citizens don't have much of a say what their government does...
The right to life, etc. anyone can deprive you of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
What about height and weight affecting career prospects?
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.
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 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.
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.
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!