Plain Old Justice

Cops Who Retaliated Against

Facebook Poster Sued

by K. W. Locke

In 2009, The Rites released an album, “Pissing On Your Grave.”  The cover showed two men, with backs to the camera, urinating on a tombstone.

Joshua Garton, of Lyle, Tennessee (shown in the banner above) superimposed on the tombstone a picture of a Dickson, Tennessee police officer who had been killed on duty.  He posted the doctored photo on Facebook.

The local district attorney took offense and asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to get involved.  Agents arrested Garton and the DA charged him with harassment.  Garton spent about two weeks in jail before a judge dismissed the charge.

Recently, Garton’s lawyer filed a lawsuit against District Attorney General Ray Crouch, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch, a number of law enforcement officers, and the city of Dickson, Tennessee.  The lawsuit alleges that the defendants conspired to retaliate against Garton for exercising his clearly established First Amendment rights and that they did retaliate.  It seeks at least $1,000,000 in damages.

Now here’s the scary thing: These defendants weren’t ignorant yokels.  The DA, of course, had studied law.  TBI Director Rausch has a master’s degree in criminal justice.  You will find his very impressive pedigree on the TBI website.  It concludes by describing his desire to be a person who “has a keen foresight as a systems thinker who leads with moral authority.”

Moral authority?  What kind of morality endorses petty retaliation which puts someone in jail for no reason other than a rude facebook post?

But, for now, let's leave aside morality.  We'll come back to it later.

Whatever its morality, arresting someone for a Facebook post which, although distasteful, threatened no harm, clearly violates the Constitution.  How can either a lawyer or someone with a master’s degree in criminal justice not know that?

It seems more plausible that they did know, but didn’t care.  But that makes it even worse.  It means that officers sworn to uphold the law deliberately disobeyed the nation’s highest law, the Constitution.

As I mentioned, Rausch's page on the TBI website says he wants to be a person who  “has a keen foresight as a systems thinker who leads with moral authority.”   Keen foresight?  Rausch should have known, even before he sent his agents out to investigate, that Garton had a First Amendment right to make the Facebook post and that it would be unlawful to arrest him for it.

Foresight would have told Rausch he was wasting taxpayer dollars having government agents investigate lawful conduct.  Foresight would have told Rausch that he and his agents could wind up as defendants in a federal lawsuit.  

Now, about Rausch's other personal goal, leading with “moral authority.”   Does a moral person hurt other people needlessly?

Certainly, a moral person might well take offense at Garton’s post and sympathize with the deceased officer's family.   But would that family even have known about Garton’s post, and therefore been hurt by it, if the TBI had not arrested Garton and issued a press release?

By the way, when Rausch said he wanted to lead with "moral authority," what moral standard did he have in mind?  As a moral standard, “turn the other cheek” would set a very high bar.

Instead, let's apply here the older standard which "turn the other cheek" replaced.  This standard, lex talionis, specifies “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

In other words, the punishment must be in proportion to the offense.  So ask: If a person hurts someone else’s feelings, is it moral to throw him in jail and attempt to brand him with a criminal record?  The question answers itself.

The problem with law enforcement today is not that we have too few people trying to "lead with moral authority."  It's that we have too many self-righteous bullies.