Man arrested over meme of Dickson police officer's grave settles lawsuit with DA, TBI
District Attorney W. Ray Crouch and two TBI agents have paid $125,000 to Rutherford County resident Joshua Garton to settle a First Amendment case after Garton' was arrested back in 2021's arrest over a photoshopped meme.
The settlement of claims for malicious prosecution, false arrest, and violations of his First Amendment rights came after almost three years after Garton was charged with harassment and held in jail for 12 days.
The charge was later dismissed for lack of probable cause.
“First Amendment retaliation is illegal, and law enforcement officials who arrest people for offending them will pay heavy consequences,” said attorney Daniel Horwitz, Garton’s co-lead lawyer. “Misbehaving government officials apologize with money, and Mr. Garton considers more than $10,000.00 per day that he was illegally incarcerated to be an acceptable apology.”
More: Man arrested over faked photo of Dickson police officer's grave sues TBI, DA, city for $1M
In January 2021, Garton posted an edited photo of The Rite’s 2009 album cover “Pissing On Your Grave,” showing two men urinating on a headstone, with a “crudely integrated” headshot of former Dickson Police Sgt. Daniel Baker superimposed on the headstone.
Baker was fatally shot in 2018 while investigating a suspicious vehicle.
Text messages included in the court filings reveal that defendants in the case — including Crouch, Director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation David Rausch and a number of TBI employees as well as the Dickson Police Department — knew Garton had not committed a crime, with some even directly stating that the public would be mad at them because “We violated (Garton’s) First Amendment rights.”
“He has a right to post,” one unnamed defendant said in the text messages. “That doesn’t mean there are no consequences.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed in cases such as Texas. v. Johnson (1989) that the “bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” and that “giving offense is a viewpoint,” according to Matal v. Tam (2017).
“The right to criticize our government is not merely fundamental, it is essential to democracy,” said Brice Timmons, Mr. Garton’s co-lead counsel. “We are proud to have protected that right for Tennesseans here.”
The USA Today Network - Tennessee's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners.
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Man arrested over meme of Dickson police officer's grave settles suit with DA, TBI, city
