EVANSVILLE — Dredon Nunn on Friday was released from jail following his detention in a 2024 misdemeanor case after his arrest following a social media post he penned mourning his father Everett Nunn’s killing by an Evansville police officer last year that mentioned “bloodshed” and what prosecutors allege were unlawful threats.
The arrest in the misdemeanor case came just days after he posted bond in the speech-centered case in which he was arrested on a felony intimidation charge following a Facebook Story he posted addressing his father’s killing by an Evansville police officer in November.
Court records show the state filed the bond revocation petition in the 2024 misdemeanor case alleging counts of marijuana possession and resisting law enforcement on June 22 — the same day Nunn posted bond in the intimidation case. The misdemeanor charges predate his father’s death by more than a year.
After a hearing Friday morning, court records now show Nunn, represented in the case by prominent Evansville defense attorney Scott Danks, accepted a deal in which he pleaded guilty to resisting law enforcement, and in turn prosecutors dismissed the marijuana charge.
He was sentenced to 22 days in jail, with 11 days credit for time served, according to court records.
Danks, also representing Nunn in the speech-focused intimidation case, previously told the Courier & Press he’s confident he can win a satisfactory outcome for his client.
“I don’t know that it won’t survive a motion to dismiss,” Danks said of the intimidation charge. “Anyway, we’ll try to come to a resolution to it, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll file a motion to dismiss and if that doesn’t work we’ll try the case. But I suspect we’ll be able to come to a resolution.”
A leading First Amendment scholar who reviewed Nunn’s Facebook post and the charging documents at the request of the Courier & Press deemed it a “close call.”
“Context is key in any true threat analysis,” Clay Calvert, a First Amendment scholar and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “There are certainly viable arguments that it is not a true threat.”
The post in question featured text atop a photograph of Nunn clad in his Bosse High School Bulldogs basketball uniform standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his father: “I love you forever dad,” the post read, in part. “Come see your baby boy it’s been forever.”
But Evansville police zeroed in on two other lines in the post, which detectives allege crossed the line from legal speech to unlawful intimidation against the officer who shot and killed Everett Nunn.
According to a probable cause affidavit, Nunn wrote that his father would “get justice systematically or through bloodshed,” and that seeing “that coward die in front of me will probably be the last and only thing I need in this life.”
The post does not name the officer who shot his father nor any other member of the Evansville Police Department.
“It was not a threat toward anybody specifically, and the reference to ‘bloodshed’ is so vague,” Danks told the Courier & Press in an interview Thursday. “It’d be different if he said, ‘I’m going to go out and shoot John Doe today,’ but that isn’t the case.”
Nunn’s next court appearance is scheduled for July 17.
In a post after his June release following the intimidation charge, Nunn cast his arrest as retaliation for his activism, writing that while city officials “publicly claim to stand for the people,” it was “difficult to understand how these actions align with those promises.”
“I will continue to speak out, pursue justice and stand on my constitutional rights,” he wrote.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Dredon Nunn out of jail after rearrest in 2024 misdemeanor case
Reporting by Sarah Loesch and Houston Harwood, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Sarah Loesch and Houston Harwood, Evansville Courier & Press | USA TODAY Network
