It forced the last-minute cancellation of a public meeting that about 100 people had gathered to attend, and it so worried Tempe councilmembers that they stopped doing in-person meetings temporarily, Chief Kenneth McCoy told The Arizona Republic.
For Tierney, the post she made on a councilmember’s Facebook page was pointed and “snarky” commentary pointing out how councilmembers’ own actions created a mess.
The post showed a GIF from the TV series “Game of Thrones.” A woman’s silhouetted figure overlooks a Valley engulfed by a green smoke explosion. Tierney captioned it, “Konner Culver watching tonight’s City Council meeting.” Kulver was a pseudonym for an anonymous social media account that had criticized the city for months.
Police conducted a sweep of the council chambers after the post but found no safety threat. The next day and week, they executed search warrants on Tierney and Culver’s Facebook and email accounts. The searches pulled up public comments harshly criticizing city leadership, according to police reports, but no evidence of a plan to harm or cause fear.
Still, a month later on Sept. 24, Tempe police officers and U.S. Marshals swarmed Tierney at her Tucson apartment.
They shackled her wrists, waist and ankles and took her to Tempe police headquarters for questioning. They executed additional search warrants on her home, car and digital devices. They confiscated her phone and laptop for weeks.
Officers arrested her on suspicion of computer tampering, a felony crime that carries potential jail time for using a computer to engage in a scheme that “seriously alarms, torments, threatens or terrorizes the person.” They also cited disorderly conduct and threatening or intimidation, misdemeanor charges.
That same day, Tempe police released Tierney from jail, one-tenth of a mile from the council chambers they accused her of threatening.
The city issued a news release. Local news broadcast Tierney’s mugshot and retold the story. Days later, she was terminated from what she called her “dream job” at Cox Communications.
Tierney waited three months for Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell to consider whether to prosecute the recommended charges.
Mitchell announced in early December she would not.
“No reasonable likelihood of conviction,” a spokesperson said.
Tempe’s case against Tierney spotlights a long-running tension between law enforcement’s duty to protect public safety and constitutional law that provides expansive free speech protection from political retaliation. It also reflects heightened responses to perceptions of political violence threats. In Tennessee, a 61-year-old man was jailed for 37 days after posting a political meme after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The U.S. Supreme Court has clarified the First Amendment does not protect “true threats.” But such threats cannot be quips or hyperbole; they must “convey a real possibility that violence will follow.”
That “exception is a narrow one with a high bar,” said Stephanie Jablonsky, senior program counsel for public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It “is commonly misunderstood or misused by government officials to justify blatantly unconstitutional actions.”
“To be clear, the Supreme Court has protected far more direct hyperbolic political speech like, ‘If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ,’” Jablonsky said.
Franklin Rosenblatt, associate professor of Mississippi College School of Law, and Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the extensive search warrants police executed also were troubling.
Tierney, who agreed to speak with The Arizona Republic in her first public interview since the arrest, said she hopes her story serves as a “cautionary tale.”
Tempe officials, meanwhile, have doubled down. They said they disagreed with the county attorney’s decision not to prosecute the case.
Why post on Tempe councilmember’s Facebook page caused panic
Tempe councilmembers, during the meeting Aug. 28, were slated to vote on placing a citizen’s petition on the ballot. The petition asked city voters to repeal an ordinance the councilmembers had passed just a month earlier.
The ordinance made it illegal to gather in a Tempe park with more than 30 people without a permit. It was enacted after individuals hosting free picnics to feed homeless people prompted complaints from nearby neighborhoods.
Tierney, a former political consultant who specialized in ballot measures, watched the controversial ordinance pass and believed it lacked adequate citizen input. The fact residents gathered enough signatures to refer the new rule to an election, thereby forcing the council to heed public input, was poetic justice, she recalled thinking.
“It seemed to me like had (the council) just gotten the community input from the beginning, they wouldn’t have had to endure this incredibly uncomfortable meeting (where) they were going to have to rescind this,” Tierney told The Republic.
So, she posted the GIF to Councilman Randy Keating’s Facebook page. She remembered from a conversation they’d had once at a fundraiser that he loved “Game of Thrones” and named his dog Cersei, after the character who was silhouetted in the image. Her profile account was named “Kadi Marie,” the name she said she more commonly goes by.
Fifteen minutes after she made the post, she saw news reports that the meeting was being shut down due to a threat.
“In a million years, I did not think that I was the reason for the meeting being shut down,” Tierney said. But the cancellation did make her think about her post. She recalled thinking it was “too snarky” and that she wanted to be more “civil.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, that was probably a bad joke. That was probably kind of badly, poorly timed,” Tierney said.
She called her long-time friend Andrew Ching, Tempe’s former city manager, to chat about the meeting cancellation. In her telling, they chatted about Tempe news regularly. She asked him if he thought she should remove the post, and she said he agreed. So, she did.
She didn’t think anything more of it until the next month.
U.S. Marshals swarm woman, shackle her wrists, waist and ankles
The morning of Sept. 24, Tierney was packing a vehicle with supplies for one of her biggest work events of the year when she looked up and saw officers in tactical gear surrounding her, she said.
“I didn’t know what was going on. My mind is racing and I thought, ‘Did I have like a huge traffic violation?’” Tierney said.
She was taken to a Tucson police station, handcuffed to the table and questioned by Tempe police officers who had traveled down for her arrest.
“All of the questions were about Konner Culver. Do I know him? Have I ever met him in person? If they scan my devices, are they going to find a lot of DMs between me and Konner Culver?” Tierney told The Republic.
Police reports show she “apologized throughout the interview, stating she never intended to cause harm to anyone.”
Tierney said an officer told her he believed her and didn’t want to ruin her life, or for anything to get out to the public. But they needed to take her to Tempe for fingerprints and photos, then would let her go, she said.
“When they took out the leg chains, I looked at the two Tempe police officers, and I was just terrified,” she said. “I had done nothing wrong, you know, and I still at that point didn’t understand what law I had broken.”
U.S. Marshals took her to Tempe, where she said she was patted down and questioned again. Then, they walked her to the door and released her.
“I had no idea where I was. I looked over and Tempe City Hall was like yards away,” Tierney said. “It was surreal to me, and it felt like there was more at play than what was going on. Because if I am a felony-level threatmaker, why are you setting me free in front of the building that you said I threatened?”
No job, no income and applying for food benefits: ‘I lost everything’
Tierney didn’t have her phone, her car or her laptop. Ching picked her up and took her home.
She said he warned her not to be “freaked out,” but that reporters may be at her apartment. The city had published a news release naming her as the threatmaker.
McCoy, the police chief, said the arrest demonstrated the city’s “unwavering commitment to protecting the safety of our community members and elected leaders.”
He said threats like Tierney’s “not only endanger lives, they disrupt civic engagement and silence the voices of the people we serve. We will not allow intimidation to interfere with democracy in our city.”
Tierney said she thought it was ironic for McCoy to accuse her of trying to silence anyone when she was facing criminal charges for a social media post. Also, she said, the meeting was about undoing the council’s ordinance, which she supported. She wouldn’t have wanted it canceled.
Her boss contacted her through her emergency contact, her sister, a few days later to tell her of her termination.
Tierney spent much of the next few weeks lying face-down on the floor of her apartment to avoid hyperventilating, she said.
Friends and family stuck by her, reassuring her the city’s case was weak. She didn’t need to worry about the charges or jail, they said. But for Tierney, nothing about her circumstance was normal.
She had run campaigns for multiple politicians and fundraised for various ballot propositions to help fund schools and parks. Tierney was proud of her reputation.
“I lost everything, you know? I went from a six-figure job to I just recently applied for SNAP (food benefits) because I have no money coming in. I’m un-hireable at this point,” Tierney said.
She said she’s relieved that Mitchell has declined to prosecute the case, but that it only marks the end of her criminal justice story.
When asked if she would sue the city, Tierney said she was keeping her options open.
Her attorney, Booker T. Evans, said he believes the city arrested first, investigated second. For now, though, he’s focused on helping his client restore her reputation.
Tempe investigation of Facebook post finds no smoking gun
A 43-page police report shows an extensive investigation by Tempe officers, but offers no smoking gun evidence that Tierney’s threat was real or that she recklessly disregarded a “substantial risk” that people would be alarmed by it — the legal qualification for speech to lose First Amendment protections.
Officers’ multiple search warrants against Tierney and the Culver social media accounts revealed only harsh criticism against city leaders and the identity of who they believe is behind the Culver account. The officers confirmed in the report that person was not a suspect.
Tierney’s phone showed 130 calls with Ching, the former Tempe city manager, but he gave police the same explanation she had: they were long-time friends who spoke about Tempe politics. He told police he hoped Tierney’s “good name and reputation can be restored because social media can be interpreted in different ways and what happened to her could happen to anyone if something is interpreted a certain way.”
Keating told police he didn’t think much of the post but sent it to Deputy City Manager Greg Ruiz because he didn’t want to potentially underreact. The context of the scene, he explained, was the character Cersei killing her political enemies.
He told police he didn’t feel like a victim and that he thought it was probably a bad joke.
Ruiz said he went into “first-responder brain” and immediately contacted the assistant police chief, James Sweig. He said councilmembers were “rattled” and that city officials felt like they needed to take it seriously regardless of whether it was a real threat.
McCoy, in an interview with The Republic, focused on the havoc that ensued after Tierney’s post, and the fact she didn’t turn herself in after the meeting was canceled.
The police chief said “accountability” was needed, and suggested law enforcement may not have recommended charges had Tierney turned herself in prior to the arrest — a timeframe when Tierney says she was unaware her post had led to the fallout.
McCoy said it was suspicious that Tierney deleted her account the day after the meeting cancellation. Such action, he said, could suggest she knew she was the cause.
Tierney dismissed that, saying she’s just “not a Facebook person,” and said she has deleted and created new accounts multiple times over the years.
Free speech and constitutional law experts criticize Tempe response
Free speech experts and advocates decried Tempe’s arrest of Tierney as government overreach that appears potentially retaliatory.
James Weinstein, an attorney at Arizona State University’s First Amendment clinic, said Tierney appeared guilty only of “negligence” — not enough to warrant prosecution.
Rosenblatt said police “never should have” executed search warrants, let alone recommend charges, because no crime happened the night of the meeting, so there was no probable cause.
Probable cause is what officers have to show for a judge to approve a search warrant. Law enforcement outlines their rationale in an affidavit, and then whatever comes back from the search is outlined in a “warrant return.”
In Tierney and Culver’s cases, none of the documents were available for The Republic to review because Tempe police asked the judge to seal the case. Rosenblatt said the inability to access such information presents another First Amendment problem.
McCoy told The Republic the department would ask the judge to unseal the records but did not clarify when.
Rosenblatt said Tierney’s story could chill political engagement.
“If nobody knows exactly what speech they’re coming after, then people are going to stay quiet,” Rosenblatt said.