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She was 12 and, her mother said, she was not fitting in with her father’s new family. She grabbed her camo-coloured iPhone 4s and shot a text to a friend — roughly: I don’t like his ratchet girlfriend or her kids.

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It was 2013. That word — “ratchet” — was running through rap songs and teens’ text messages, thought to mean a low-class and clueless diva. When Ronald Jackson saw it, he took away his daughter’s cellphone.

“I was being a parent,” Jackson recently told CBS-DFW. “A child does something wrong, you teach them what’s right.”

Jackson, a 36-year-old from Dallas, was ultimately arrested and charged with property theft, a Class B misdemeanor — because he had taken his daughter’s iPhone and refused to give it back.

Following a long legal battle, a Dallas County Criminal Court judge ruled last week that the state did not have enough evidence to continue the case and ordered a jury to find him not guilty.

Jackson spoke with The Washington Post at length following the verdict but then recanted, saying he had signed an exclusivity agreement with a TV program a day earlier. He said he could not speak further.