Tag: wrongful arrest

Tennessee to Pay $125,000 to Settle Lawsuit by Man Arrested for Posting Meme Mocking Dead Cop

The state of Tennessee will pay $125,000 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed by a man who was arrested and jailed for nearly two weeks for posting a meme mocking a dead police officer.

Joshua Garton, 29, was arrested in January of 2021 and charged with harassment following a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) probe into a pseudonymous Facebook post that appeared to show two men urinating on the tombstone of an officer who was shot and killed in 2018. A judge dismissed the charges a month later, and Garton filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution, false arrest, and First Amendment retaliation.

In a settlement agreement filed earlier this month, two TBI agents and 23rd District Attorney General Ray Crouch did not admit any guilt, but they agreed to pay Garton to avoid further litigation costs.

“First Amendment retaliation is illegal, and law enforcement officials who arrest people for offending them will pay heavy consequences,” Daniel Horwitz, Garton’s lead attorney, said in a press release issued Monday. “Misbehaving government officials apologize with money, and Mr. Garton considers more than $10,000 per day that he was illegally incarcerated to be an acceptable apology.”

The TBI, Tennessee’s lead investigative law enforcement agency, launched an investigation into the offending Facebook post at the request of 23rd District Attorney Ray Crouch. Agents visited the officer’s gravesite and quickly surmised that the picture Garton posted was fake. It was in fact a doctored photo of the cover of “Pissing on Your Grave,” a single by The Rites, which originally depicted two men urinating on the tombstone of punk legend GG Allin.

Despite knowing that no one had physically desecrated the grave, the TBI continued its investigation, soliciting tips on Twitter about Garton’s identity. When it finally nabbed Garton, TBI put out a press release, complete with mugshot, announcing his arrest for “manufacturing and disseminating a harassing photograph on social media.”

As Reason wrote when Garton was first arrested, it was unclear how a dead person could be criminally harassed under Tennessee law, which requires that the subject be “frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.”

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‘Outrageous and flatly unconstitutional’: Lawyer decries arrest of Alabama journalists

Police arrested a southwestern Alabama newspaper publisher and a reporter for publishing an article that prosecutors say was based on confidential grand jury evidence.

Don Fletcher reported for the Atmore News on an investigation into the local school board’s payments to seven former school employees that Escambia County district attorney says broke the law against revealing grand jury proceedings, and both the reporter and publisher Sherry Digmon were arrested and charged with a felony, reported the Washington Post.

“While it’s illegal for a grand juror, witness or court officer to disclose grand-jury proceedings, it’s not a crime for a media outlet to publish such leaked material, provided the material was obtained by legal means,” legal experts told the Post.

Theodore J. Boutrous, an attorney who has represented media organizations, said the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the First Amendment protects journalists who publish information of public importance, even if that information came from a source who broke the law.

“That applies to grand jury information, Boutrous said, calling the Alabama case “extraordinary, outrageous and flatly unconstitutional.”

The newspaper’s publisher and co-owner is a member of the county school board, and she voted recently against renewing the contract of the superintendent – who has been publicly supported by district attorney Stephen Billy.

“I wish I could [comment],” said Digmon, the publisher. “I would rather not answer. I can only refer you to my attorney.”

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Alabama Cops Who Arrested Mechanic for Not Giving Them His ID Denied Qualified Immunity

A federal court has sided with Roland Edger, an Alabama man who says he was wrongfully arrested after he declined to give police officers his driver’s license in 2019. While a lower court had granted qualified immunity to the officers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned that decision, ruling that the officers clearly violated Edger’s Fourth Amendment rights and that Edger’s suit against them may go forward.

In June 2019, Edger, a mechanic in Huntsville, Alabama, received a call from a customer, who told him that his wife’s car had broken down and asked him to come out to repair it. The car was in the parking lot of a local church, where the customer’s wife worked. The customer told Edger he could pick up her keys at the church’s front desk.

When he arrived at the church on June 10, a few days after the customer had called, Edger retrieved the keys from the church and began inspecting the car. According to the ruling, Edger says he believed something was wrong with the car’s steering or tires and that he’d need to return with the necessary tools to fix the vehicle.

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Houston Police Arrested an Animal Rights Protester and Detained Him for 16 Hours, Lawsuit Says

Animal rights activists Daraius Dubash and Faraz Harsini were peacefully demonstrating in a Houston, Texas, public park when park employees demanded they leave. When Dubash insisted that the pair had a First Amendment right to protest, officials called the police, who arrested Dubash and charged him with criminal trespass. 

While Dubash’s charge was eventually dismissed, the pair have now filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city, arguing that city police clearly violated their Constitutional rights.

“No one should be handcuffed and detained for exercising his First Amendment rights,” said JT Morris, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit group. “We’re suing because public parks belong to all Americans and their expressive rights, not the personal views of a few.” 

From April to July 2022, Dubash and Harsini demonstrated several times in Discovery Green, a Houston public park. According to their lawsuit, the pair—keeping in practice with Anonymous for the Voiceless, the animal-rights activist group the two pertained to—wore Guy Fawkes masks while playing clips from Dominion, a documentary showing the gruesome mistreatment of animals in factory farms. 

On three separate occasions, park employees asked the pair to leave the park, claiming that the park was private property. (Discovery Green is public property, though it is managed by a private company.) According to the complaint, the pair complied, fearing retaliation.

On July 23, 2022, Dubash and Harsini were approached again. This time, they refused to leave, and Dubash calmly told park employees that he had a right to demonstrate peacefully. However, a park security guard told Dubash that protests were allowed on a “case by case” basis, adding that his “manager is going to come and come look at it.”

According to the lawsuit, when the manager, Floyd Willis, arrived, Dubash informed him that, while the park was managed by a private conservancy, the park was still public property, meaning that the First Amendment applied.

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A Cop Jailed Her for 2 Years on Fake Charges. Will She Ever Get Justice?

A Minnesota woman has resuscitated her effort to sue a police officer who jailed her as a teenager for two years on false charges associated with a sham sex trafficking investigation that the FBI once billed as its largest human trafficking crackdown. The case is another example of the legal labyrinth victims are required to navigate when attempting to get recourse after the government infringes on their rights and once again raises the question: How inoculated should those government officials be from civil suits for violating the Constitution?

Hamdi Mohamud’s odyssey began over a decade ago when St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker had her arrested on witness tampering charges concerning a woman named Muna Abdulkadir, who allegedly attacked Mohamud and her friends at knifepoint. Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s sex-trafficking case, which, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conceded, was “plagued with problems from the start.” Some of those problems included Weyker lying under oath, coercing witnesses, editing police reports, and making up evidence.

The groundless charges against Mohamud were ultimately dropped, but not until she spent about two years in federal prison, where those accused of federal crimes are typically held pretrial.

When Mohamud sued, Weyker was denied qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue state and local government actors unless their alleged misconduct was “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. Yet the 8th Circuit in 2020 overturned that decision, citing Weyker’s position on a federal task force. Government employees at the federal level receive an even more muscular immunity.

“Qualified immunity makes it very, very difficult to sue government officials,” Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), told me in 2021. “This makes it impossible.” The U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened that protection in June 2022.

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Police Let Their K-9 Maul on the Wrong Guy. They Arrested Him Anyway.

Last year, a police officer sicced his K-9 on Sean Davis as he slept in a wooded area in Covington, Kentucky, mauling his arm and causing severe injuries. Officers had mistaken Davis for a different individual who had allegedly violated a protection order and detained him even after he provided police with his ID. Last month, Davis filed a lawsuit against the officer responsible for Davis’ mauling, claiming that he was subject to unreasonable force, negligence, and battery.

According to the Covington police incident report, on June 8, 2022, police received a call from a woman who said she believed that her violent ex-boyfriend, whom she had a protection order against, was sleeping in a wooded area near a campsite at which she was staying. When police arrived, they found Sean Davis—not the woman’s ex-boyfriend—sleeping in a hammock in the woods. Without warning, a police officer released a K-9 on Davis, which bit his arm and brought him to the ground. While the dog continued to maul Davis’ arm, police got on top of Davis.

According to WCPO, a local news station, body camera footage of the incident shows that officers handcuffed Davis and demanded he identify himself. In the footage, Davis repeatedly gives officers his name, social security number, as well as his photo ID, proving that he was not the person in the protection order. Nonetheless, police kept Davis handcuffed for 37 minutes. 

“Try to scoot your butt straight over so you don’t get blood all over the car,” one officer told Davis as he directed him to get inside the police vehicle. “Try to keep that arm off the seat.”

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Ohio Cops Raided Afroman’s House Looking for a Dungeon Because of a Bizarre Confidential Informant Tip

When sheriff’s deputies in Adams County, Ohio, raided Afroman’s house last year, they were looking for more than just marijuana, which the rapper is famously fond of. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon.

The Adams County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house last August on suspicion of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. Afroman was not charged with a crime, and the kidnapping angle was never explained. But now, public records obtained by Arthur West, a public records advocate, and provided to Reason shed more light on the raid, which has since led to a bitter legal battle between Afroman and the ACSO deputies.

According to the search warrant affidavit, the Adams County Sheriff’s Office received a tip from a confidential informant that Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, was not only trafficking large amounts of marijuana, but he also “has a basement, referred to as ‘the dungeon’ in which he…keeps women locked in, forcing them to urinate and defecate in a bucket as punishment for upsetting or disobeying him.”

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Man Arrested for Citing Bible Verse While Protesting Pride Event — Charges Withdrawn After Video Evidence Emerges

A Christian preacher who was targeted by the law for reading from the Bible at an LGBT Pride event has been cleared of charges of disorderly conduct after a review of video evidence led prosecutors to conclude that said preacher had not behaved in violation of the law.

Evangelical preacher Damon Atkins was arrested on June 6th on allegations that he was “engaged in fighting” when he protested a pride event several days earlier in Reading, Pennysylvania.

“After a review of the incident which took place on June 3, 2023, in the 800 block of Washington Street in the City of Reading, the District Attorney’s Office has withdrawn the charges of disorderly conduct filed against Damon Atkins,” the DA’s Office said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“The charges were withdrawn after the District Attorney’s Office reviewed the videos of the incident along with applicable case law.”

Berks County Commissioner Christian Leinbach said in a statement to the Lancaster Patriot that Atkins’ arrest was unlawful and that further pursuing the case could expose the city of Reading and its law enforcement agencies to legal action.

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ATLANTA POLICE ARREST ORGANIZERS OF BAIL FUND FOR COP CITY PROTESTERS

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — dubbed Cop City — atop a forest in Atlanta.

In a joint operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Atlanta cops charged Marlon Scott Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson — all board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”

The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

“This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way,” Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. “And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.”

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Taxpayers Shell Out $400K After School Cops Beat the Hell Out of a Child Then Framed Him

Another chilling incident showcasing the deeply entrenched culture of abuse and deceit within the American law enforcement mixture with public education has come to light. Riverside County taxpayers were forced to make amends in the amount of $400,000 to Daniel Silvas, the father of a 13-year-old boy who was allegedly assaulted and falsely accused of resisting arrest by sheriff’s deputies in 2018.

The boy, a freshman at San Jacinto High School at the time of the incident, faced a harrowing ordeal on only his second day at school. It began when he was singled out by security officer Jesus Peraza under the pretense of a suspicion of impending trouble, a suspicion that attorney Jerry Steering, representing the boy, ties back to fights at the school the previous day.

The boy, aware of his innocence, chose to protest and walk away from the confrontation, a decision that triggered a chain of events culminating in an alleged assault and subsequent framing. The school’s resource deputy Derrick Bunn and the security officer followed him in what the lawsuit describes as an “intimidating” manner. The situation escalated when the boy asked the two to stop tailing him, leading to Deputy Bunn reportedly shoving the boy to the ground.

What followed was a spectacle of police brutality, with Bunn repeatedly screaming expletives at the minor while beating him. Not wanting to miss out on the sadistic beating of a child, Deputy Timothy Dunlap joined the fray. Despite video evidence that contradicted their claims, the deputies and Peraza maintained that the boy had taken a fighting stance and cursed at them.

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