Court won’t revive suit over suicide

JACKSON, Miss. — A federal appeals court says it will not revive a lawsuit by the family of a Mississippi lawyer who took his own life after he was arrested and accused of providing information to people who snuck into a nursing home and photographed the ailing wife of a U.S. senator during a contentious election.

Images of Rose Cochran appeared briefly online during the 2014 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, in a video that accused now-deceased Sen. Thad Cochran of having an affair while his wife was bedridden with dementia — an accusation that Thad Cochran denied.

The primary exacerbated rifts between establishment Republicans who supported Cochran and tea party activists, including lawyer Mark Mayfield, who backed Cochran’s GOP primary challenger, state lawmaker Chris McDaniel.

In 2017, Mayfield’s survivors sued Madison Mayor Hawkins-Butler and others, saying the defendants were part of a network of Cochran supporters who pushed Mayfield to suicide in June 2014.

Mayfield died by gunfire and police said he left a suicide note, days after Cochran defeated McDaniel in a primary runoff and before the felony charge against Mayfield could be prosecuted.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves dismissed the lawsuit in 2021. He wrote that Mayfield’s relatives did not prove the city of Madison improperly retaliated against Mayfield for constitutionally protected speech or political activity.

A panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Reeves’ ruling July 27. In a split decision Wednesday, the full appeals court said it would not reconsider the Mayfield family’s appeal.

One of the appellate judges, James Ho, wrote that the family’s lawsuit should have gone to trial, and this ruling and others by the 5th Circuit could have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.

“There’s not much left to freedom of speech if you have to worry about being jailed for disagreeing with public officials,” Ho wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.