James Littleton, who is trying to unseat Leflore County Court Judge Kevin Adams, says he decided to sue the incumbent after Adams refused to stop circulating a campaign flyer that Littleton claims is defamatory.
The lawsuit in Leflore County Circuit Court was filed on Sept. 14, one week after Littleton sent and delivered to Adams a cease-and-desist letter. The letter demanded that Adams and his campaign stop distributing the flyer and issue within 48 hours a retraction of part of its content.
Adams, in response, has said the flyer is not defamatory and, thus, there was no justification to halt its dissemination.
The flyer includes headlines and lead sentences from articles taken from the Commonwealth’s website on various controversies involving Littleton between 2005 and 2014.
The article that was most prominently featured on the flyer and with which Littleton said he took most issue was written in 2014 regarding a lawsuit filed against him by his mother, Bonnie Littleton, and sister, Melaney Littleton, in Bolivar County. The 2013 suit alleged that James Littleton had forged the pair’s signatures on land documents related to his late father’s estate.
The lawsuit was later dismissed, with the court finding that the plaintiffs had failed to prove their claim.
James Littleton said that after seeing Adams continue to distribute the flyers while the two were campaigning Sept. 20 in the M.A. Snowden-Jones Apartments, he decided to sue.
Adams acknowledged Wednesday that he continued to distribute the flyers after he had received the cease-and-desist letter.
He said he weighed the validity of the allegations Littleton was making, including that Adams, before distributing the flyers, “had a duty to determine the outcome of that litigation so that you could report the truth if you decided that you wanted to embark upon this subject.”
Adams said he concluded that the challenger had no case for his claims.
“I believe that his allegations were entirely unsupported by the law and thus the cease-and-desist letter was meaningless because it did not point out anything that either violated the law or created a cause of action in tort,” Adams said.
Littleton also alleged in his lawsuit that the Commonwealth produced the flyers, a claim that both Adams and the newspaper have denied.
Littleton said he came to that conclusion because of wording on the bottom of the flyer that included Adams’ endorsement and credited the material as being copyrighted by Emmerich Newspapers, the Commonwealth’s parent company.
“I have no beef with the Commonwealth,” Littleton said. “My beef is with (Adams) for distributing something that he knew was a lie after Sept. 7. That’s why the lawsuit was filed on the 14th.”
Adams said he has since modified the flyers to include information that they were personally prepared by him and that the news items chosen were taken from the Commonwealth’s website.
Littleton said he was not aware until reading Wednesday the Commonwealth’s story on his lawsuit against Adams that Littleton’s mother and sister had filed a new lawsuit in August over a dispute about another tract of family land in Bolivar County. The lawsuit claims the land was fraudulently transferred from them to James Littleton in 2010.
“That lawsuit’s been on file for almost two months now. I haven’t even been served. I had no knowledge of it,” Littleton said.
Littleton filed a complaint in Bolivar County earlier this year against his mother.
Also named as defendants were Virgil Jones, who, according to Littleton, is his mother’s husband, and Louis Spearman, who Littleton alleged planted a crop without his consent on a 35-acre tract owned by the attorney.
The complaint accused the trio of various infractions, including of Bonnie Littleton brandishing and firing a gun into the air while preventing one of James Littleton’s tenants from going onto the property.
A court order, issued in August, prohibits Bonnie Littleton, Jones and Spearman from coming onto the property and from harvesting the crop that the judge agreed had been illegally planted.
Adams and James Littleton will face off in the Nov. 8 general election.
- Contact Kevin Edwards at 662-581-7233 or kedwards@gwcommonwealth.com.
