The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language tells us that to “hug” is to “squeeze or hold tightly in one’s arms.” Earlier this month, however, a court of law in Berkeley County, West Virginia, charged a mother – Adrienne Lusanne Byrd – with criminal contempt of court for engaging in just such action when she embraced her daughter during a high school graduation ceremony for her son and then posted about it on Facebook.
On May 14, 2026, Berkeley County, West Virginia, charged Adrienne Lusanne Byrd for the offense of (among other things) accepting a hug from her own daughter at her son’s high school graduation and posting on Facebook about her own court case. Those who believe the prosecutorial overreach we now expect at the federal level has no equivalent in our state and local justice systems would do well to read the Information filed in Berkeley County Circuit Court Case No. CC-02-2026-M-1. It is, in its way, every bit as alarming as anything emerging from Washington — and it ought to alarm Americans of every political persuasion who still believe in the First Amendment and in the basic principle that the courts of the United States are not properly used as instruments of personal retaliation.
Begin with the hug. On May 22, 2025, Ms. Byrd attended her son’s high school graduation. She did so with the express on-the-record permission of Berkeley County Circuit Judge Debra McLaughlin, granted at a hearing earlier that spring. While Ms. Byrd was watching one of her children walk across the stage, another — her daughter — saw her from across a field, ran to her, and hugged her. The video, which Ms. Byrd herself posted, is publicly available. The Berkeley County prosecutor has now made that hug Count One of a criminal case. Not the act of attendance — for which the bench plainly authorized her — but the act of being embraced by her own child while she was lawfully there.
Counts Four and Six of the Information are different in kind, and, if anything, more troubling. They allege that Ms. Byrd “did knowingly, intentionally, and willfully post on Facebook information regarding” her own court case. That is the entire offense. She wrote — publicly — about what the State of West Virginia was doing to her, and the State now seeks to put her in front of a court that can fine and jail her for the writing. There is no contact alleged. There is no harassment. There is, in plain English, only speech.
The pattern is by now familiar to anyone who has watched American government over the last several decades. A confidentiality statute, lawfully enacted for one purpose — here, the protection of child-welfare records under Chapter 49 of the West Virginia Code — is bent to a second purpose, for which no legislature ever intended it: silencing a parent the State has crossed. The result is what the Supreme Court of the United States has long called a “prior restraint” — and prior restraints, this Court has reminded us across decades from Near v. Minnesota to New York Times Co. v. United States, come to the bar of judgment bearing “a heavy presumption against [their] constitutional validity.” Punishing protected speech after it is uttered, by means of criminal contempt, raises the same constitutional problem from the other direction. And as the Supreme Court held more than 80 years ago in Bridges v. California, the contempt power cannot be used to punish out-of-court speech absent a “clear and present danger” to the administration of justice. There is no such danger here. There is only a mother who would not be silent.
Nor is the procedural posture of this prosecution any more reassuring than its substance. Indirect criminal contempt in West Virginia must be tried “on notice” under Rule 42(b), and the cumulative penalty exposure of an eight-count stack plainly exceeds the threshold for non-jury proceedings set by W. Va. Code § 61-5-26. The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia made the matter unmistakable in 2024 in State ex rel. Dilly v. Hall, when it issued a writ of prohibition against a circuit court that had imposed indirect-criminal-contempt sanctions without proper notice and without a jury. The Berkeley County Information cites Dilly for its notice posture; it makes no apparent attempt to comply with Dilly’s jury-trial command. That alone should give a reviewing court pause.
But the most damning fact about this case is not in the Information itself. It is in what came six weeks before. On April 1, 2026, every lawyer opposing Ms. Byrd in her separate child-welfare appeal — the West Virginia Department of Human Services, the children’s father’s counsel, and the children’s own guardian ad litem — stood before the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and conceded, on the record, that the order against her contained findings unsupported by the evidence. The guardian ad litem went further: she told the Justices that Ms. Byrd’s own children “did not want their mother’s rights to be completely severed,” and hoped “that at some point they would have a relationship with her, and it would be a meaningful relationship.” That appeal is now sub judice; a decision could issue at any time. The very orders Ms. Byrd is charged with violating are the orders that case will address. To press a criminal contempt prosecution in the meantime — over a hug, a doorbell, and two Facebook posts — is at best wasteful. At worst, it is something a great deal worse.
And the contrast in Berkeley County cuts further still. While the county’s prosecutors moved with dispatch to charge a mother for accepting her daughter’s embrace, a separate sworn citizen application is now pending in the same courthouse — Case No. CC-02-2026-P-214 — asking a grand jury to consider 37 counts of criminal misconduct against eight courthouse insiders: two sitting circuit judges, a magistrate, a magistrate clerk, a child-protective-services worker, a former forensic interviewer, and two attorneys who regularly practice in the county’s courts. As to those, the ordinary prosecutorial machinery has produced nothing. A private citizen, the editor of a national news organization, had to invoke a 19th-century West Virginia common-law right to take the matter directly to the grand jury because, in the words of the controlling case law, the prosecuting authority “will not act.” Quick to charge a mother. Slow to charge its own. That is the picture.
The Constitution does not protect Ms. Byrd because her case is popular. It protects her because it protects all of us — and it makes no exception for the parent the State has decided it does not like. If a county prosecutor’s office can criminalize a hug initiated by a daughter while the mother stood exactly where a judge had told her on the record she could stand, and can criminalize a parent’s speech about her own court case while the underlying order is being challenged at the State’s highest court, then the First Amendment, the right to petition, and the basic dignity of due process exist only at the sufferance of whoever happens to be holding the prosecutor’s pen that morning. Sadly, in too many places in this country, that appears now to be the working assumption. It should not be — and it is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, and of every citizen who still believes in ordered liberty under law, to insist that it is not.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served previously as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as head of Liberty Guard, and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.
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