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GREENVILLE, SC (FOX Carolina)
- Posted: Sep 22, 2015 10:12 PM EDT
- Updated: Sep 22, 2015 10:20 PM EDT
- By Andrew Reeser
- Original Post HERE
An Upstate man, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was arrested for a Facebook post he made while going through a messy divorce.
“I had made a post on Facebook due to some arguments that had been happening, and me actually being Facebook stalked,” he said. “I made the comment that if anybody needed or had a problem with me, they needed to contact me directly and face to face, man to man.”
That post, he said, was construed as a threat by his ex-wife, and he was arrested.
“What my thought was from the get-go was ‘this is ridiculous,'” said Greenville attorney Grant Varner, “It’s becoming entirely too common where someone just puts a generic statement on Facebook or Twitter or any of the social media applications and someone takes it in the wrong context and they seek law enforcement to step in.”
Varner said arrests for generic sayings on Facebook sets a “dangerous precedent.”
The judge dismissed the case.
The Supreme Court recently threw out a controversial case where a man was arrested and accused of directing a post with threatening rap lyrics at his estranged wife. The court deemed the man had not communicated a “true threat that a reasonable person would understand to convey an intention to inflict bodily injury … ”
Nevertheless, the arrest prompted the Upstate man we spoke with to deactivate his Facebook account.
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