Brace yourself. This fact pattern is stupid.
In Tennessee, a former sheriff recently earned an $800k+ settlement after his free speech rights were infringed. Police arrested him at his home and jailed him for over a month because he posted a Charlie Kirk meme. It was a cut-and-dried case from the start, but seeing it play out this way should have served as a reminder to police departments nationwide that you can’t just arrest people because they say things you don’t like.
If only the police in Texas bothered to read.
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A woman in Texas was recently arrested for warning the locals that the water coming from their faucets was contaminated. And this wasn’t one of those conspiratorial 5G has contaminated our reservoirs either — the water looked like this:
Fox has coverage:
Police in the City of Trinidad, located in Henderson County around an hour south-east of Dallas, arrested Jennifer Combs on May 8 and charged her with felony false alarm or report.
Her arrest stems from a Facebook post she made on her ‘Southern Belle Watch’ account, where she claimed that the city’s water issues had led to hospitalizations due to bacteria.
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The rationale for the charge was that her posts involved false information that could create fear, panic, or unnecessary emergency response in the community. Nice to know they have laws like that on the books — why aren’t they brought up when people were denying vaccine efficacy so hard that children had to die from measles before they listened to science again? Even if she were factually wrong about the cause, there’s no way her posting caused more fear and panic than people turning on their sinks and seeing what they saw.
She’s since filed a lawsuit for being arrested. It isn’t likely that she will get six figures from the suit — she only spent a day in jail compared to the former sheriff’s 37, but she should be compensated for her time and the violation of her rights either way.
Woman Files Lawsuit After Arrest For Facebook Post Concerning Trinidad Water Supply Issues [Fox]
Earlier: Man Arrested For Charlie Kirk Post Wins 6 Figure Settlement
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.