Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Tennessee Man Over Facebook Meme

Last month, Tennessee authorities arrested a man for posting a Facebook meme, a clear violation of his First Amendment rights, and held him on a $2 million bond. This week, prosecutors dropped the case, but that doesn’t negate the weeks he spent in jail on a bogus charge.

As Reason previously reported, police arrested 61-year-old Larry Bushart for posting a meme on Facebook. In a thread about the murder of Charlie Kirk, Bushart posted a meme with a picture of President Donald Trump and the quote “We have to get over it,” which Trump said after a January 2024 shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa.

Sheriff Nick Weems of nearby Perry County said Bushart intentionally posted the meme to make people think he was referring to Perry County High School. “Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems told The Tennesseean.

On September 21, deputies arrested Bushart at his house and booked him on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities, a felony that carries at least a year in prison. In body camera footage posted online by Liliana Segura of The Intercept, Bushart is incredulous when presented with the charge. “I don’t think I committed a crime,” he tells the officer, jokingly admitting that “I may have been an asshole.”

“That’s not illegal,” the officer replies as he leads Bushart into a cell.

Unfortunately, it was no laughing matter: A judge imposed a $2 million bond. Getting out on bail would require Bushart to come up with at least $210,000. According to the Perry County Circuit Court website, Bushart had a hearing scheduled for October 9, where he could file a motion for a reduced bond, but a court clerk told Reason that the hearing was “reset” for December 4. As a result, Bushart sat in jail for weeks.

Right away, it should have been clear how flimsy the case was. But the sheriff doubled down.

As Segura reported at The Intercept, Weems personally responded to people on Facebook suggesting Bushart was arrested because authorities misread a picture that briefly referenced a prior news event on the other side of the country. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” Weems wrote. But it “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers…that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”

“Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria,” Segura notes. “Nor was there much evidence of an investigation—or any efforts to warn county schools.”

In a local news interview, Weems affirmed that while investigators knew the meme was not referencing the local school, “The public did not know.”

“This has everything to do with a guy coming onto a Perry County page posting this picture leading people in our community to believe that there was a hypothetical Perry County High School shooting that caused fear in our community,” Weems told Phil Williams of WTVF’s NewsChannel 5 Investigates, “and we done something about it.”

But on October 29, just a day after the interview aired, prosecutors dropped the case. Bushart’s attorney confirmed to Reason via email, “the State has elected to nolle prosequi the case and Mr. Bushart has been released.” (Nolle prosequi—”not wish to prosecute,” in Latin—is a legal filing which says a prosecutor is choosing to dismiss a case.)

WTVF also published body camera footage of local police coming to Bushart’s house before his arrest, at the request of a Perry County investigator. “I have really no idea what they are talking about,” the officer tells Bushart. “He had just called me and said there was some concerning posts that were made….They said that something was insinuating violence.”

Bushart disputed that characterization, and added, “I’m not going to take it down,” to which the officer replied, “I don’t care. This ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

“He admitted to making the post and advised that he was not taking it down,” Weems said in the interview with Williams. “I mean, what kind of person does that? What kind of person just says he don’t care?”

But it’s clear from the original body camera footage that the officer didn’t even know the details of the post in question and never mentioned a school.

It’s good news that Bushart is released, but that doesn’t negate the time he spent in jail on a spurious charge—37 days, in total. According to WTVF, “Bushart had lost his job doing medical transport” as a result.

“We are relieved that Larry Bushart has been freed after nearly 40 days in jail, and subject to a $2 million bond, over a Facebook post clearly protected by the First Amendment,” Adam Steinbaugh, attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. “A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts.”

“Thanks to…any supporters out there, and I’m very happy to be going home,” Bushart told local radio station WOPC upon his release, adding with a laugh, “I didn’t seek to be a media sensation, but here we are.”