Attorneys for 61-year-old Larry Bushart say a Tennessee sheriff violated the First Amendment: “In America, we do not jail people for political speech.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/17/bushart-lawsuit-speech
A retired Tennessee policeman who spent more than a month in jail over an anti-Trump Facebook post is suing the authorities responsible for his arrest.
Attorneys for Larry Bushart, 61, filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday against a sheriff, an investigator and Perry County, which lies about halfway between Nashville and Memphis. The suit alleges that they violated Bushart’s First and Fourth Amendment rights when they ordered his arrest in September and held him for five weeks on charges of threatening mass violence — all in response to what Bushart contends was a harmless social media meme.
“In America, we do not jail people for political speech,” the lawsuit states. “Yet Larry Bushart spent 37 days behind bars simply for speaking his mind. It took a national uproar about his detention for Perry County officials to drop the charge against Mr. Bushart — a charge officials knew from the outset was unfounded.”
The lawsuit is Bushart’s bid to turn the tables on local authorities in a deep-red corner of rural Tennessee, where his prolific anti-Trump Facebook posting had annoyed some neighbors and amused others — until the day officers showed up at his house. He joins a growing number of liberal activists around the country who are pushing back on what they view as an overzealous crackdown on speech in the wake of the September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk......
Bushart appears to have a particularly strong case as someone who was arrested and jailed over a Facebook post, Cavedon said, adding that doesn’t necessarily mean he will win it.
“Hopefully everyone agrees that someone like Larry should get relief for sitting wrongly in jail for months,” Cavedon said. “Unfortunately, courts have created a lot of doctrines that make it really hard for people to get access to relief even when their rights have been violated” by the government. “Things like qualified immunity, prosecutorial immunity and judicial immunity mean that people have to jump over a lot of hurdles.”
This lawsuit makes me smile
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