Joshua Andrew Garton (TBI)
Three members of law enforcement agencies in Tennessee have paid a combined $125,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who was arrested and incarcerated for nearly two weeks because he posted a meme to social media about a police officer who was killed in the line of duty.
District Attorney W. Ray Crouch, of Tennessee’s 23rd District, and two agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) paid the funds to Joshua A. Garton, who filed the suit based on claims that his January 2021 arrest constituted malicious prosecution, false arrest, and violations of his First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, his lawyer announced.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Garton was arrested after he posted a fake photograph depicting two men urinating on a gravestone which had been crudely photoshopped with a picture of a Dickson County police officer who was fatally shot while on the job in 2018. He captioned the post, “Just showing my respect to deputy Daniel Baker from the #dicksoncountypolicedepartment.”
DA Crouch subsequently called upon the TBI to investigate whether the officer’s grave had really been desecrated, but investigators quickly determined that the photograph was not authentic. In fact, the photo of the deceased officer was just placed on the cover art for a band’s 2009 single aptly titled, “Pissing on Your Grave.”
Garton was later arrested, charged with harassment, and held on $76,000 bond for 12 days before his case was dismissed.
“First Amendment retaliation is illegal, and law enforcement officials who arrest people for offending them will pay heavy consequences,” Daniel A. Horwitz, a First Amendment attorney and Mr. Garton’s lead counsel in the case, said in a statement following the settlement. “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.”
Horwitz also noted that if the case had gone to court, juries typically top out damages for wrongfully convicted criminal defendants at about $3,000 per day.
In a previous interview with Law&Crime, Horwitz referred to the authorities involved in Garton’s arrest as “constitutionally illiterate.”
“The only people who broke the law here were the police officers and TBI agents who participated in this flagrantly unconstitutional arrest,” Horwitz said. “He did a meme. They arrested him for posting an anti-police meme.”
Text messages included with the originally filed complaint appeared to show that law enforcement authorities were aware that they were violating Garton’s First Amendment rights when they placed him under arrest.
“[W]e violated his first amendment rights,” one of the defendants’ messages states. Another defendant responds, “He has a right to post. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences.”
Screenshots of defendants’ text messages after Garton’s arrest (court documents)
“The trolls will do what trolls do. It appears they and the lawyers forget that there are surviving family members who have rights as well,” TBI Director David Rausch said in a text conversation included in the complaint. “My assessment is these are the same folks who called the insurrection at the Capitol free speech.”
A text message from TBI Director David Rausch talking about the Garon case (court documents)
The TBI and Crouch’s office did not immediately respond to a message from Law&Crime.
“The right to criticize our government is not merely fundamental, it is essential to democracy[,]” attorney Brice Timmons, Mr. Garton’s co-lead counsel, said in a statement. “We are proud to have protected that right for Tennesseans here.”
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