A West Virginia librarian accused of soliciting the assassination of President Donald Trump on social media walked free Thursday after prosecutors dismissed the terroristic threat charge against her, not because the evidence fell apart, but because arresting officers failed to read her Miranda rights.
Morgan L. Morrow of Ripley, West Virginia, had been charged in January with one count of making a terroristic threat. Jackson County prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the case without prejudice on April 16, Fox News reported, citing the Miranda violation as the procedural basis for dropping the case.
The dismissal came less than a week after a would-be assassin targeted Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and in the same week that Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, appeared in court Monday to face charges of attempting to assassinate the president and using a firearm while committing a violent crime.
The case against Morrow began on the evening of January 25, when the account Libs of TikTok flagged a series of her social media posts on X. One video Morrow posted featured a caption that read, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reported:
"Surely a sniper with a terminal illness cannot be a big ask out of 343 million."
The Libs of TikTok post identified Morrow as a librarian at the Jackson County Public Library and noted that other commenters on the same thread had called for violence against Stephen Miller, Larry Ellison, and Peter Thiel. The post added: "Our tax dollars pay her salary."
Officers from the Jackson County Sheriff's Department arrested Morrow that same night at 9:31 p.m. EDT. The sheriff's department posted about the charge on its Facebook page.
But the arrest unraveled on a technicality. Court documents cited by Clarksburg-area TV station WDTV stated that the arresting officers never advised Morrow of her Miranda rights during interrogation. That procedural lapse gave prosecutors no choice but to move for dismissal.
Morrow's attorney, Mark Atkinson, went further than simply accepting the dismissal. He told Fox News that the prosecution should never have happened at all.
"This case has been dismissed. We feel it never should have been brought in the first place."
The "without prejudice" designation means prosecutors could, in theory, refile the charge. But the Miranda violation taints the core evidence, and no indication has emerged that the state intends to pursue the matter again.
Neither the White House nor the Secret Service immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation's requests for comment.
The Morrow dismissal lands in a period when threats against the president have repeatedly crossed from online rhetoric into real-world violence. Two people targeted Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign alone.
In July 2024, Thomas Crooks fired multiple shots at Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, striking the president in the right ear. That attack, which drew intense media scrutiny over coverage of the assailant's manifesto, remains one of the most alarming security failures in modern presidential history.
Months later, in September 2024, a Secret Service agent thwarted Ryan Wesley Routh, who was lurking near the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Florida, armed with a rifle. Routh was convicted of attempting to assassinate Trump and sentenced to life in prison.
The contrast is hard to miss. Routh received life behind bars. A Pennsylvania man who threatened to assassinate Trump and ICE agents pleaded guilty after the FBI traced his YouTube account. But Morrow, whose post openly mused about recruiting a sniper from among 343 million Americans, walks free because the officers who arrested her skipped a basic procedural step drilled into every rookie at the academy.
Miranda warnings are not optional. They are a bedrock constitutional protection, and law enforcement officers are trained to deliver them before custodial interrogation. When officers skip or bungle the warning, prosecutors lose the ability to use statements obtained during questioning, and sometimes lose the case entirely.
That is precisely what happened here. The Jackson County Sheriff's Department arrested Morrow swiftly, within hours of the Libs of TikTok post going viral. Speed is understandable when the subject matter is a public call for a sniper to target the sitting president. But speed without procedure produces exactly this result: a suspect who goes free, a case that collapses, and a public left wondering whether anyone in the system takes these threats seriously enough to handle them competently.
The episode also arrived during a week of heightened security concerns. Just days earlier, Secret Service agents fired five shots at an alleged assassin who targeted Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Cole Allen, the California teacher accused in that incident, appeared in court Monday on federal charges.
Allen faces the full weight of the justice system. Morrow does not.
The open questions here are uncomfortable. Which prosecuting office handled the dismissal? The available reporting identifies Jackson County prosecutors but does not name an individual. What was the full text of the court filing beyond the Miranda finding? Did anyone in the sheriff's department face internal consequences for the procedural failure that torpedoed the case?
None of those answers have surfaced. What has surfaced is a clean outcome for a woman who posted a message that, on its face, solicited the assassination of a sitting president, a president who has survived multiple real attempts on his life.
The security landscape around Trump has grown steadily more dangerous. The Butler rally shooting. The golf course ambush. The Correspondents' Dinner attempt. And alongside those real-world attacks, a current of online incitement that has coincided with armed breaches and violent incidents at Trump properties.
In that context, a case built on a public call for a sniper deserved more than a botched arrest and a quiet dismissal. It deserved officers who followed the rules, prosecutors who could take the evidence to trial, and a system that demonstrated, clearly and publicly, that soliciting the murder of a president carries real consequences.
Instead, the system demonstrated something else: that a procedural failure by the very officers sworn to enforce the law can hand a free pass to someone accused of encouraging the worst kind of political violence.
When the people charged with protecting the president can't even Mirandize a suspect, the threat doesn't come only from the person posting online. It comes from the incompetence of the institutions that were supposed to hold her accountable.