NEW ORLEANS (Legal Newsline) - The widow and sons of a Mississippi Tea Party operative who committed suicide after being arrested for ordering a photo taken of a political rival’s incapacitated wife in her nursing home room have no case against the city that investigated him, a federal appeals court ruled.
Addressing the case for the second time, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the family of Mark Mayfield failed to bring viable claims against the City of Madison, Miss., and its mayor over Mayfield’s arrest and suicide. A trial judge properly dismissed the sole remaining claim that Mayfield had been targeted for arrest because of his political views, the Fifth Circuit ruled in a July 27 decision.
The decision could put an end to a legal and political saga that began in 2014 when Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel challenged Sen. Thad Cochran in the Republican primary. McDaniel supporters thought they could get an edge by publicizing what they believed was an affair between Cochran and his assistant, Kay Webber.
McDaniel supporters hatched a plan to sneak into the room of Cochran’s wife Rose, who suffered from dementia, and snap a picture of her to juxtapose with a picture of Webber. Mayfield frequently visited the nursing home because his mother lived there but he refused to take the picture himself. Instead, he directed Clayton Kelly to do so. Kelly put the photo in a YouTube video but quickly took it down “due to negative reactions, including from McDaniel supporters,” the Fifth Circuit said.
Sen. Cochran staffers saw the video, however, and reported it to his law firm which in turn notified Madison police. Kelly was arrested for exploitation of a vulnerable person and a search of his social media accounts turned up the connection to Mayfield, a lawyer who faced criminal charges he gave advice on how to enter the nursing home. Cochran won his runoff race on June 24, 2014, and three days later Mayfield committed suicide.
Mayfield’s family sued under a variety of theories including violation of his First Amendment rights. But after most of them were dismissed all that was left was a so-called Lozman claim based upon a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held people might have a viable claim for retaliatory arrest even if officers had probable cause. That was the second trip to the Supreme Court for a man who owned a houseboat – he insisted upon calling it a “floating house” – that officials in the City of Riviera Beach seized amid a waterfront improvement scheme.
Lozman was later arrested for disrupting a city meeting, which the Supreme Court ruled might be grist for a lawsuit. But not in Mayfield’s case, the Fifth Circuit said.
“Plaintiffs’ best evidence merely establishes that the City of Madison was aggressively pursuing those who committed a potential invasion of the privacy of an incapacitated adult,” the court ruled. “The evidence doesn’t show that the City carried out the investigation, arrest, search, or prosecution because of Mayfield’s political views, which the Plaintiffs needed to show to succeed.”