A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer who spent more than five weeks behind bars for sharing memes on Facebook about Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk will receive $835,000 from Perry County and its sheriff’s office, a price tag that lands squarely on local taxpayers for what amounted to a jailing over online speech.
Larry Bushart, a former police officer, filed a federal lawsuit late last year after authorities arrested him, set a $2 million bond, and held him for 37 days over posts that his attorneys argued were plainly protected by the First Amendment. The felony charge was eventually dropped. Now the county is writing the check.
The settlement, first detailed by Breitbart News, resolves a civil rights lawsuit Bushart brought against Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, an investigator who obtained the arrest warrant, and the local government. The case drew national attention as a stark example of what happens when law enforcement treats a social media post as a criminal act.
The chain of events began in September, after Kirk was fatally shot while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. A community Facebook group in Perry County began sharing posts about a prayer vigil to honor Kirk.
Bushart posted a series of memes, created by others, on that same group. The memes accused Turning Point USA of having perpetrated “hate.” One meme showed President Donald Trump saying, “We have to get over this,” a quote tied to a separate shooting at Perry High School in Iowa. The original poster of that meme had added the words “this seems relevant today.”
Sheriff Weems claimed people felt Bushart had been “threatening the local high school.” That interpretation set the machinery of arrest in motion.
The Perry County Sheriff’s Department asked the police department in Bushart’s hometown to dispatch an officer to visit him. When the officer arrived, Bushart said he would not remove his post. He was arrested later that night.
Bushart sat in jail for 37 days. His bond was set at $2 million, a figure more commonly associated with violent felony defendants, not retirees who shared memes. The Washington Examiner reported that prosecutors ultimately dropped the felony charge in October after the district attorney declined to prosecute the case.
By that point, the damage was done. Bushart told reporters he lost his postretirement job during his weeks behind bars. He missed his wedding anniversary. He missed the birth of his granddaughter.
Those are not abstractions. Those are the real consequences a man and his family absorbed because a county sheriff decided a Facebook meme constituted a criminal threat.
The broader pattern of officials wielding legal authority in ways that invite serious accountability questions is not unique to Tennessee. But the facts here are unusually clean: a man shared other people’s memes, refused to delete them when asked, and went to jail.
Bushart’s federal lawsuit, filed at the end of last year, named Perry County, its sheriff, and the investigator who obtained the arrest warrant. The Associated Press confirmed the suit alleged violations of both the First and Fourth Amendments, including wrongful arrest and prosecution.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, represented Bushart. The settlement, $835,000 paid to Bushart and his wife, resolves the case. Newsmax reported that the county did not admit wrongdoing as part of the agreement.
That last detail is worth pausing on. Perry County writes an $835,000 check drawn on taxpayer money, but officially maintains it did nothing wrong. The residents who fund that county government may see the matter differently.
FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh framed the outcome in direct terms. No one, he said, should be jailed “over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message.”
Cary Davis, another FIRE attorney, went further. As the Washington Times reported, Davis said the settlement should serve as a warning:
“Our hope is that Larry’s settlement sends a message to law enforcement across the country: Respect the First Amendment today, or be prepared to pay the price tomorrow.”
Bushart himself kept his public comments measured. In a statement released through his legal team, he said he was pleased his First Amendment rights had been vindicated.
“The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy.”
He added: “I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”
Those are not the words of a man who posed a danger to a high school. They are the words of a man who lost five weeks of his life, lost his job, and missed irreplaceable family moments, all because a county sheriff interpreted memes as threats and a system let that interpretation stand long enough to do serious harm.
Cases like this raise the same fundamental question that surfaces whenever government power is turned against speech: who decides what counts as a threat, and what accountability exists when they get it wrong? The Supreme Court’s recent willingness to check government overreach against expressive rights suggests the judiciary still takes these boundaries seriously, even when local officials do not.
Perry County’s taxpayers are now on the hook for $835,000. The sheriff’s department still operates. The investigator who obtained the warrant is not reported to have faced discipline. The district attorney who eventually declined to prosecute the case did so only after Bushart had already spent 37 days locked up on a bond designed to keep him there.
Every link in that chain failed. And the only person who paid a personal price, until the settlement, was the man who shared the memes.
Breitbart News noted that in the aftermath of Kirk’s fatal shooting, several people publicly mocked and celebrated his death. That context matters. The online environment around Kirk’s killing was heated, ugly, and in many cases far worse than anything Bushart posted. Yet Bushart was the one who went to jail.
The question of whether officials face real accountability when taxpayer money covers their mistakes is one that repeats across every level of government. Settlements resolve lawsuits. They do not fix the systems that produced them.
Free speech cases rarely arrive in neat packages. The speech at issue is often provocative, tasteless, or poorly timed. That is precisely the point. The First Amendment does not protect only speech that local officials find pleasant. It protects the memes, the sharp comments, and the posts that make people uncomfortable, especially when the government’s response to discomfort is a pair of handcuffs and a $2 million bond.
Public figures who face online criticism after tragedies deserve sympathy. But sympathy is not a statute, and hurt feelings are not probable cause. When elected officials and public servants face backlash for their own online conduct, the system does not jail their critics. The same standard should apply in Perry County.
An $835,000 settlement is a lot of money. It is also the minimum price a community pays when its officials forget that the Constitution applies even to speech they do not like.
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