The city of Clarksdale on Monday filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss its lawsuit against the Clarksdale Press Register and a judge’s order that required the newspaper to remove an editorial from its website, a court action that stunned free press advocates. 

The motion asks the court to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, which means the city cannot refile the same lawsuit against the city in the future. Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin would have to agree to the motion. 

The city leaders and the newspaper are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday morning. But if the judge agrees to the dismissal motion before then, the court will likely cancel the hearing. 

“They shouldn’t have filed the lawsuit in the first place,” said Wyatt Emmerich, the newspaper’s owner. “But I’m glad they’re dismissing it.” 

Clarksdale Mayor Chuck Espy and the Board of Commissioners filed the petition last week in Hinds County Chancery Court, alleging that an editorial the local newspaper published criticizing them was “libelous” and saying the editorial would bring “immediate and irreparable injury” to the city.

The editorial criticized the city for conducting a special-called meeting without informing the news outlet beforehand. The purpose of the meeting was to ask the Legislature for permission to enact an additional local tax.  

“Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kickback from the community?” the editorial reads. “Until Tuesday, we had not heard of any. Maybe they just wanted a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea — at public expense.” 

READ MORE: Editorial: Someone needs to read the First Amendment to Judge Crystal Wise Martin

The state’s Open Meetings Act requires public bodies to email a notice of the meeting to media outlets and citizens who have asked to be placed on the city’s email distribution list. 

The Clarksdale city clerk, Laketha Covington, filed an affidavit with the city’s petition stating that she forgot to send an email notice about the special meeting to the outlet. Still, she said it was a simple mistake and not intentional.

Angered, the city leaders filed the petition over the editorial in Jackson, around 155 miles from Clarksdale, where the judge issued the temporary restraining order that ordered the newspaper to remove the website from its website. 

A temporary restraining order is typically issued by a judge instructing someone to stop a specific action. It is issued when the judge believes immediate and irreparable loss or damage will occur before the court can conduct a full hearing. 

But Charlie Mitchell, a lawyer and former newspaper editor who has taught media law at the University of Mississippi for years, doubted if the editorial met the irreparable loss burden and said the judge’s order went a step further than a typical restraining order and ordered a “remedy” by demanding the news outlet to take corrective action.

“The opinion expressed in the editorial — government secrecy breeds mistrust — has been voiced countless times throughout American history and is the very root of the First Amendment,” Mitchell said. 

The Mississippi Press Association and other press advocates were alarmed by the ruling, calling it “unconstitutional” and worried that it would set a dangerous precedent for nearly a century of case law that clearly outlawed prior restraint orders.

National news outlets, including the Associated Press and the New York Times, quickly picked up on the story, and legal advocates supported the Clarksdale Press Register. Now, six days after the judge entered her order, the city is dismissing its petition. 

Emmerich believes other government bodies would be hesitant to pursue similar actions against local news outlets in the future because of the swift response from free press advocates nationwide. 

“I’m really inspired by all the support throughout the country and that First Amendment advocates quickly responded to this,” Emmerich said. 

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