The Mississippi Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a chancellor’s decisions not to sanction Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams for including the City Council’s five Democratic members in a lawsuit against a former city attorney.
The councilmen had sought for McAdams to pay the city’s legal costs to punish her for including them in a 2009 lawsuit over the firing of James Littleton as city attorney.
The vote was 7-1 with Judge Tyree Irving of Greenwood writing a dissenting opinion.
McAdams referred comment this morning to her attorneys, Bo Rideout and Lee Abraham. Rideout said the decision speaks for itself.
The councilmen’s attorney, Willie Perkins, could not be reached for comment this morning.
The councilmen could still appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The tangled dispute dates back to the day McAdams took office in July 2009. The independent had just defeated Sheriel Perkins, Willie Perkins’ wife.
McAdams sent Littleton a termination letter and then nominated the Abraham and Rideout firm for the position.
The City Council voted 5-2 against hiring Abraham and Rideout, and Littleton said he would continue to serve as a holdover appointment until the council approved a replacement.
Later that month, McAdams sued Littleton and the five members who voted against Abraham and Rideout — David Jordan, Tennill Cannon, Ronnie Stevenson, Charles McCoy and Carl Palmer. They are all black Democrats. The council’s two white Republicans, Johnny Jennings and Lisa Cookston, weren’t included.
McAdams tried to dismiss the councilmen from the lawsuit twice — once before oral arguments began and once during them — but Perkins would not agree to them being dismissed, according to court records.
Chancellor Joe Webster ruled in August 2009 that Littleton couldn’t serve as a holdover, a decision the state Supreme Court upheld last year.
At the same time, Webster dismissed the five councilmen as defendants and took under advisement whether to order McAdams to pay their legal costs, which were picked up by the city.
Eventually the mayor and council agreed on Don Brock as city attorney.
In July 2010, Webster dismissed the councilmen’s motion to have the mayor pay their legal costs. He said McAdams’ choice to include the councilmen “may have been ill advised” but wasn’t frivolous or intended for harassment.
The councilmen appealed and voted to hire Perkins to represent them. McAdams vetoed the vote, but the council overrode it by a 5-2 vote.
That led to the case before the state Court of Appeals.
Writing for the majority, Judge Eugene Fair said the lawsuit wasn’t frivolous because there was a genuine dispute between the mayor and councilmen about Littleton’s right to hold over.
Fair also said the fact that the five councilmen involved are African-Americans is not proof by itself that McAdams was racially motivated in her decision.
Irving, in his dissenting opinion, said the suit was frivolous because McAdams sued the councilmen in their individual capacities and not their official ones.
“Mayor McAdams’s motivation for bringing the lawsuit against the councilmen was to harass them, force them to yield, and give her the attorney of her choice,” Irving wrote. “Again, I reiterate that Littleton could have been enjoined from acting as city attorney without making the councilmen defendants in the action.”
• Contact Charlie Smith at 581-7235 or csmith@gwcommonwealth.com.
This is the written opinion of the Mississippi Court of Appeals on Tuesday, April 10, 2012, as it upheld a chancellor’s decisions not to sanction Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams for including the City Council’s five Democratic members in a lawsuit against Former City Attorney James Littleton.
