A retired police officer was handcuffed in the dead of night, jailed for 37 days, and held on a £1.59 million ($2 million) bond, all for sharing a Facebook meme he did not even create. What might once have sounded like a cautionary tale about life in an authoritarian state instead unfolded in a small American county, and ended with a six-figure payout to the man at the centre of it all.
Larry Bushart, 61, of Lexington, Tennessee, has won a £663,000 ($835,000) settlement from Perry County after a federal civil rights lawsuit argued that his arrest following the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a brazen violation of his First and Fourth Amendment rights. The settlement, announced on 20 May 2026, closes a case that drew national attention, exposed deep fault lines over political speech in America's polarised climate, and implicated a county sheriff who, by his own admission, knew from the outset that the meme posed no credible threat.
