A former director of the Greenwood-Leflore Emergency Management Agency says he is pleased with the terms of a settlement reached in his lawsuit against the Leflore County Board of Supervisors.
Troy Brown Sr. sued the board in 2014 following his termination as the director of the agency. The suit was settled Friday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, U.S. District Judge Debra Brown refused two motions brought by Brown’s attorneys to reschedule the case, which was scheduled to go to trial Monday morning in Greenville.
Brown declined to comment on the details of his settlement but said that “justice prevailed.”
“I trusted in God. I trusted in Jim Waide, my attorney, and his firm,” said Brown. “I had totally trust in the evidence that we had.”
The board terminated Brown in a 3-2 vote, shortly after the Commonwealth published a letter to the editor and guest column by Brown in which he made several allegations against then-Chancery Clerk and County Administrator Sam Abraham.
Brown claimed his firing violated his First Amendment rights. The board maintained that Brown was fired for insubordination and improper inventory management.
Brown’s attorneys filed a motion to reschedule the trial in late November, citing a scheduling conflict with a seven-year-old trial.
Counsel for the county filed a motion the next day also citing scheduling conflicts.
In an order handed down Thursday, Judge Brown stated that the scheduling conflict cited by Waide “does not rise to the level of good cause” justifying a delay of the trial.
The order goes on to argue that although the other trial is older than Brown’s suit against the county, its trial date was set several months later. Brown’s suit’s trial date was determined in December 2014.
The trial date of the other case was not set until the following March.
“Under these circumstances, the Jones date does not control and must yield to this Court’s trial setting,” stated the order.
In the original motion to reschedule, Waide argued that any requests to move the trial date of the Jones case were unlikely to be granted on grounds of the case’s age.
Brown’s attorney filed an unopposed motion on Friday to move the trial to Jan. 20 — a date agreed to by the county’s legal counsel. Attorneys on both sides agreed that a trial could be concluded within three days.
The judge denied the motion hours later.
Waide said late Saturday afternoon that the final amount of the settlement had not been finalized but that he expected that action would happen within a couple of weeks.
“I think most people would regard it as a good settlement,” Waide said.
He said county leaders admitted that one of the reasons for firing Brown “was writing to your newspaper, a violation of his First Amendment rights. They would have fired him anyway.”
Attorneys representing the county could not be reached for comment.
•Contact Nick Rogers at 581-7235 or nrogers@gwcommonwealth.com.
