On June 3 of last year, I posted the video showing 22 year old Paul Wert sitting on a bench outside the CVS store where he worked. He had just gotten off work. The store had closed about 7 minutes earlier. Then, here comes Edgewater police officer Daniel Rippeon. Officer Rippeon observed Paul and concluded that he looked suspicious. No crime had been committed. No crime had been alleged by anyone to have been committed. Yet Paul was almost immediately seized and threatened with being tased and bitten by a police K9. In the end, he was taken to jail, despite the fact that Officer Rippeon was fully aware that Paul was a store employee waiting for a Lyft driver. It’s now been 9 months and I have all the updates for you, straight from Paul’s lawyer.
In America, we don’t jail people for political speech. Yet Larry Bushart spent 37 days behind bars simply for posting a meme in a Facebook group. Perry County, Tennessee Sheriff Nick Weems sent cops to Larry’s home to intimidate him over a Facebook meme he posted. But he wasn’t intimidated. He knew his rights and didn’t back down. So then the sheriff obtained an arrest warrant that he knew was false and had Larry arrested and then put in jail for over a month. Only after national public outrage did county officials drop the charges and set Larry free. But now Larry’s out for justice and he’s being helped by FIRE, a national nonprofit First Amendment advocacy organization, who has now filed a civil rights lawsuit on his behalf. I got a chance to talk with Larry’s lawyer about the case – what actually happened, why it was so egregious, and how you can help.
In a Walmart in Danville, Kentucky, 66 year old John Hardwick (who had been diagnosed with dementia) was mistreated by Walmart employees while on a grocery shopping trip with his wife. They callously mistook John’s confusion (due to his dementia) for attempted shoplifting, and then called the police. But the police were worse. Officer TJ Godbey punched this vulnerable man 6 times, which was caught on video. And then he, along with Danville Police Officer Ben Ray, arrested John. A lawsuit was filed, which I covered about a year ago. That case has now been settled, with the government claiming the high road. But there’s something they’re not telling you, and they can’t be allowed to cover it up, and escape accountability.
On March 10, 2022, Lexington KY police officers responded to a report of a “disorder” at St. Joseph Hospital. The call was dispatched to LPD officer Myles Foster and officer Daniel Helo. The caller was a hospital employee reporting that a 61 year old female was being “disorderly” and was refusing to leave Emergency Room #3. The 61 year old female was later determined to be Linda Trapp, a homeless woman. Rather than help her, within 21 seconds of meeting her, Officer Myles Foster threatened physical force. He would make good on that threat shortly afterwards, violently breaking her left leg. Then the nurses and emergency room physician would do nothing to help Linda Trapp, leaving her in agony for another 18 hours.
Police Practices expert witness Ryan Wilfong’s report on the incident:
Imagine you go into a business and their AI surveillance camera thinks it recognizes you as a trespasser. So that business handcuffs you and calls the cops. The cops arrive. You show them your Real ID. But they don’t believe it. Instead, they believe the AI. Crazy, right? This happened. On September 17, 2023, the Peppermill Casino in Reno telephoned the Reno Police Department to report that a man we’ll refer to by his initials – M.E., a trespasser, had unlawfully returned to the casino. The casino reported that their A.I. facial recognition software positively identified the man as M.E., a man they had barred from the casino months earlier for sleeping on the premises. But the Peppermill’s AI software was wrong. They had the wrong guy.
A sober man, who was actually a retired deputy suffering a diabetic crisis, was arrested for DUI by the Tennessee Highway Patrol. The worst part about it is, this wasn’t just a mistake where a cop mistook a diabetic crisis for a driver being drunk. Brand new bodycam footage, given to me by the man’s lawyer, shows that this innocent man, Elmer Binkley, was arrested only after this 25 year old trooper (Ryan Nichols) learned that the man was suffering a diabetic crisis. He discovered the man was sober, and yet he arrested him anyway.
This man goes into a Walmart to buy his elderly mother some over-the-counter arthritis medication. Meanwhile, this woman is riding around on a mobility scooter, even though she’s not disabled. Her kids are literally hanging off it as she puts around the store. The man can’t find what he’s looking for, so when he sees this woman, he asks her if she knows where he can find it. Then, all hell breaks loose. The man, “Mick” Patel, ends up spending 47 days in jail over what were obviously-false accusations (and as it turns out, this may not have been her first time). A lawsuit was just filed. I got the chance to speak to his civil rights attorneys.
This guy got arrested at a Christmas parade in Florida for wearing a body armor vest concealedd under his shirt. The problem is, that wasn’t illegal. I saw this in the news, with cops taking a victory lap and Karens rejoicing about it, so I put in a request for the footage, and just got it. And it’s worse than I even thought it would be. Lawful conduct does not become illegal just because police officers – or Karens – are afraid of something. My rights don’t end where your fear of some perfectly legal object begins.
Cops respond to a silent alarm coming from within their own county courthouse, where they find intruders locked inside the dark, closed building. After taking them into custody, the ‘burglars’ tell the cops they are actually professional hackers, hired by the State Judicial Branch to test the courthouse’s security measures.
Then the local sheriff arrives, apparently embarrassed by the fact that the hired hackers were able to just walk right in an unlocked door in the middle of the night, and angry that he wasn’t informed of the security testing ordered by the state. So instead of releasing them, he orders handcuffs put on them and has them taken to the county jail and charged with burglary.
Then it gets even worse. The bureaucrats at the state judicial branch then get worried about their own jobs, and they attempt to throw the hackers they hired under the bus, initially claiming they did not authorize the “burglary,” even though they did. Eventually the State Supreme Court admits they hired the hackers and apologized for the confusion.
But the county still wanted to prosecute the two innocent hackers, who were caught in the middle of this government power struggle. Even up through the day before trial, the county prosecutor was refusing to drop the charges. He finally had to though, because they were innocent. So then the two hackers filed a civil lawsuit, which took years to litigate. Now, that just settled, with the two hackers receiving $600,000 from the county for their false arrest and malicious prosecution.
This is an absolutely insane story out of Iowa.
The official statement of facts from Justin and Gary’s lawsuit that was presented to the Court, much of which is quoted in the video:
This is Part 2 of the update on the viral video arrest of Demetrius Kern from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which I originally covered in July of 2023, along with Mr. Kern’s attorney, Chris Wiest. Mr. Kern had been falsely arrested and charged after he was almost hit by a police cruiser driven by Officer Carly Lewis, whose video deposition was featured in Part 1 of this update. That arrest was primarily at the direction of Officer Lewis’ supervisor, Sgt. Naftali Wolf, whose video deposition is detailed in this video.
Here is the main brief by Mr. Kern’s attorneys that I walked you through in the video, using the video deposition excerpts they actually cited in the brief:
If you want to go further into the weeds, here is the motion for summary judgment filed by Defendant Wolf’s lawyers (to which the above brief is responding in opposition):
As I mentioned in the video, as of this date, the Court has not yet ruled on the pending motions. Which means that the case is just hanging in limbo with nothing happening, until such time as there is a ruling. The ruling will decide whether or not the lawsuit gets dismissed, or whether it proceeds to a jury trial. This is fairly unusual for a delay of this length to occur in federal court – though sometimes does happen).
