When a Hug Becomes a Crime: A Warning From West Virginia |
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.........