A West Virginia librarian who allegedly posted a social media video calling for a sniper to assassinate President Donald Trump walked free Thursday after prosecutors dismissed the terroristic threat charge against her, citing a Miranda rights failure by the arresting officers.
Morgan L. Morrow of Ripley, West Virginia, had been charged in January with one count of making a terroristic threat. Now the case is gone, dropped without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could theoretically refile but chose to let the charge collapse over what they described as a procedural error by the Jackson County Sheriff's Department.
The dismissal lands in a moment when threats against the president are not abstract. Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, where a gunman struck him in the right ear. A second attempt followed in September 2024, when Ryan Wesley Routh was caught lurking near the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Florida, with a rifle. Routh was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. And less than a week before Morrow's charges were dropped, a would-be assassin targeted Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The case began in January when the social media account Libs of TikTok flagged a video attributed to Morrow. The post featured a caption that read: "Surely a sniper with a terminal illness cannot be a big ask out of 343 million." Libs of TikTok identified Morrow as a librarian at the Jackson County Public Library and noted that other commenters on the post had called for violence against Stephen Miller, Larry Ellison, and Peter Thiel.
The Jackson County Sheriff's Department arrested Morrow at 9:31 p.m. EDT on January 25 and announced the charge on its Facebook page. She faced a single count of making a terroristic threat, a serious charge that, in any functioning system, should have been handled with basic competence from the first minute of the encounter.
It wasn't.
Prosecutors stated in court documents that officers from the Jackson County Sheriff's Department failed to advise Morrow of her Miranda rights. That procedural lapse, the Daily Caller reported, was the stated reason for the dismissal. WDTV, the Clarksburg-area television station, first reported Thursday that prosecutors had elected to drop the case without prejudice.
Jackson County prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss on April 16, Fox News reported. Morrow's attorney, Mark Atkinson, did not mince words about his view of the prosecution.
"This case has been dismissed. We feel it never should have been brought in the first place."
Atkinson's position is that the charge itself was unwarranted. Prosecutors, by contrast, did not say the charge lacked merit, they said their own officers botched the arrest. Those are two very different claims, and the distinction matters.
A dismissal "without prejudice" preserves the legal option to refile. Whether prosecutors in Jackson County have the appetite or the evidence to do so remains an open question. The court documents cited in reporting do not indicate whether any statements Morrow made during the un-Mirandized encounter were central to the case, or whether the social media posts alone could have sustained the charge.
What is not in dispute is the pattern. Three confirmed assassination attempts against Trump in under two years, plus a social media culture in which calls for political violence circulate with startling casualness.
Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, appeared in court Monday to face charges of attempting to assassinate Trump and using a firearm while committing a violent crime. Allen's alleged attempt occurred the previous Saturday, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where Vice President JD Vance later described the chaotic evacuation that followed.
Thomas Crooks opened fire at Trump's Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in July 2024. Trump was struck in the right ear. Routh stalked Trump at his Florida golf course two months later and now sits in federal prison for life.
Against that backdrop, a librarian's social media post soliciting "a sniper with a terminal illness" to target the president was not a joke that misfired. It was, at minimum, a data point in a rising tide of normalized threats. Whether it met the legal standard for a terroristic threat charge is a fair question. Whether it deserved to be investigated seriously is not.
The security environment around the president and his family has grown more dangerous, not less. Every failed prosecution of a credible threat sends a signal, intentional or not, about what the system will tolerate.
The Daily Caller News Foundation sought comment from both the White House and the Secret Service. Neither responded before publication.
The silence is notable but not surprising. The real accountability gap sits with the Jackson County Sheriff's Department. Miranda warnings are not an obscure legal technicality. They are among the most basic procedural requirements in American law enforcement, drilled into every recruit, featured in every police procedural on television, and understood by most citizens who have watched a single episode of a crime drama.
Officers who arrest someone on a charge as serious as making a terroristic threat against the sitting president and then fail to read that person her rights have handed the defense a gift. The prosecutor's office, faced with tainted evidence, had little choice but to move for dismissal.
That is not a vindication of Morrow. It is an indictment of the officers who handled the arrest. The system did not weigh the merits of the threat and find it harmless. The system never got the chance to weigh the merits at all, because the front door was left unlocked.
Morrow's attorney may believe the case "never should have been brought." But the reason it fell apart had nothing to do with whether the social media posts were threatening. It fell apart because the people responsible for building the case failed at step one.
The chaotic scenes from the recent Correspondents' Dinner attack are still fresh. Allen is in federal custody. Routh is serving life. And Morrow is free, not because a court found her innocent, but because the officers who arrested her couldn't manage to follow a procedure taught in the first week of the academy.
Several facts remain unclear. The specific prosecutor and court that handled the dismissal are not identified in available reporting. The full content of the video and related Instagram posts has not been published in detail beyond the quoted caption. And it is unknown whether prosecutors intend to refile after addressing the Miranda deficiency, or whether they consider the matter closed.
The "without prejudice" designation keeps the legal door ajar. But in practice, refiling a case after a public dismissal requires political will, fresh evidence handling, and an appetite for a second round of scrutiny. None of those are guaranteed in a rural West Virginia county.
What is guaranteed is that the next person who posts a social media solicitation for someone to assassinate the president will look at this case and draw a conclusion. The conclusion may not be the one prosecutors intended, but it is the one their officers made inevitable.
When the people charged with enforcing the law can't follow their own procedures, the people who break the law are the ones who benefit. That's not justice. It's negligence with consequences.
