A West Virginia woman arrested in January for allegedly recruiting people on TikTok to assassinate President Donald Trump will not face trial, after the local prosecutor moved to dismiss the case, citing a failure to properly read the suspect her Miranda rights during interrogation.
Morgan Morrow, 39, of Ripley, West Virginia, had been charged with one count of terroristic threats following what the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department called “a detailed evening investigation.” Now, according to Fox News Digital, the prosecuting attorney in Jackson County lodged a motion to dismiss without prejudice on April 16, and the case is over, at least for now.
Her attorney says the charge should never have been filed. The sheriff’s department described the original conduct as a “social media recruitment of individuals to pursue and assassinate President Trump.” The gap between those two positions tells you everything about how the case unraveled.
In January, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department announced on Facebook that Morrow had been “detained, arrested, and transported to SCRJ following a social media recruitment of individuals to pursue and assassinate President Trump.” The post identified her by full name, age, and hometown.
WOWK reported that a criminal complaint described a TikTok post featuring the sentence: “Surely a sn!per [sniper] with a terminal illness can’t be a big ask out of 343 million.” The word “sniper” was partially obscured with a character substitution, a common tactic on social media platforms to evade automated content filters. The Libs of TikTok account shared the video on X in January, showing the sentence overlaid on the clip.
The complaint also stated that Morrow allegedly indicated she had written and posted the statement on TikTok and claimed it was meant as a threat toward the president. That admission, made during questioning, would become the prosecution’s central problem.
The Jackson County Bureau of Investigations assisted deputies in the probe, and the sheriff’s department publicly charged Morrow with one count of terroristic threats.
On April 16, the prosecuting attorney in Jackson County filed a motion to dismiss without prejudice. The filing reportedly indicated that Morrow had not been appropriately Mirandized during her interrogation, meaning investigators may have questioned her without properly advising her of her constitutional right to remain silent and to have an attorney present.
That procedural failure can be fatal to a prosecution. Statements obtained in violation of Miranda protections are generally inadmissible. If the suspect’s own words were the strongest link between the TikTok post and the charged conduct, losing those statements could leave prosecutors with little to take to trial.
The dismissal was filed “without prejudice,” which means the state technically retains the option to refile charges in the future. But a Miranda defect this early in the case, one serious enough to prompt the prosecutor’s own motion, suggests the evidentiary foundation was compromised from the start.
In a legal system that has seen other high-profile criminal cases hinge on forensic and evidentiary details, the Miranda failure here is a reminder that the rules of evidence protect everyone, including people accused of threatening the president.
Morrow’s attorney, Mark Atkinson, told Fox News Digital plainly what he thought of the prosecution:
“This case has been dismissed. We feel it never should have been brought in the first place.”
Atkinson did not elaborate further in the published remarks. But the implication is clear: the defense believes the charge was built on a flawed investigation, and the Miranda violation confirmed it.
Whether or not the original TikTok post constituted a genuine threat, or fell into the murky territory of political hyperbole that courts have long struggled to define, is now a question that may never be answered in a courtroom.
Even with the criminal case dismissed, Morrow has not walked away unscathed. Jackson County Public Library Director Carla Long confirmed to Fox News Digital that Morrow is no longer employed at the library. The circumstances of her departure, whether she resigned, was terminated, or left by mutual agreement, were not specified.
Morrow’s name was broadcast nationally after the arrest. The sheriff’s department posted her full name and the nature of the allegation on its public Facebook page. Libs of TikTok amplified the video to a large audience on X. For a 39-year-old library worker in a small West Virginia community, those consequences do not disappear with a court filing.
The case fits a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar: individuals posting inflammatory political content on TikTok and facing swift professional and legal fallout, regardless of how the legal process ultimately resolves.
Threats against the president, real or rhetorical, are taken seriously for obvious reasons. The Secret Service and federal law enforcement investigate thousands of such cases every year. After multiple real-world attacks and attempts on political figures in recent years, the stakes are not abstract.
The targeting of Trump officials by individuals motivated by political hostility has been documented in cases far more serious than a TikTok video. Law enforcement agencies are right to take social media threats seriously and investigate them aggressively.
But “aggressively” is not the same as “competently.” If deputies in Jackson County failed to Mirandize Morrow before questioning her, a requirement drilled into every first-year criminal justice student, they handed the defense the easiest possible path to dismissal. The suspect’s own alleged admission that the post was “meant as a threat toward the president” may now be legally useless.
That is not a victory for anyone who wants threats against public officials taken seriously. It is a procedural failure that let a charged suspect walk free.
The political environment around criminal prosecutions with political dimensions is already charged enough. Cases like this one, where a serious allegation collapses because investigators skipped a basic constitutional step, erode public confidence in the system’s ability to hold anyone accountable.
Several questions remain open. The exact text of the motion to dismiss has not been published in full. It is unclear which court received the filing. The criminal complaint’s complete contents have not been made public beyond the excerpts WOWK reported in January.
Whether the Jackson County prosecutor’s office will attempt to refile, perhaps building a case without the tainted interrogation statements, is unknown. The “without prejudice” designation keeps that door open, but the practical likelihood seems low given the evidentiary gap.
And the question of whether Morrow’s TikTok post crossed the legal line from protected speech into a true threat, a distinction the Supreme Court has addressed but never fully resolved, remains untested. Courts have long held that political rhetoric, even ugly and alarming rhetoric, often falls short of the legal standard for a criminal threat. Whether this post met that standard is now a matter of opinion, not law.
The Supreme Court’s recent attention to cases at the intersection of free expression and government power makes these questions more relevant, not less.
Conservatives who rightly demand that threats against the president be prosecuted should be the first to insist that those prosecutions be done correctly. A Miranda violation is not a technicality. It is a constitutional safeguard, one that, when ignored, lets the accused walk and leaves the public less safe.
If you want the law to mean something, you have to follow it, even when the suspect is someone you find reprehensible. Especially then.
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