LITTLE ROCK -- A Pulaski County circuit judge is considering whether a fired Little Rock police officer has presented enough evidence for her discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against retired Police Chief Stuart Thomas to go to trial.
After a nearly two-hour hearing Friday, Judge Mike Reif said he'd let the parties know next week when he would decide whether Natasha Sims has presented enough proof for her accusations against Thomas, who retired last June, to be heard by a jury.
Little Rock has already been removed as a defendant for lack of evidence of wrongdoing, a finding her lawyers are in the process of appealing.
Regardless of Reif's findings, Sims' appeal of her 2013 firing by the city Civil Service Commission is scheduled to be heard by the judge over three days beginning April 22.
Sims, 49, was a 17-year police veteran when she was fired by Thomas in April 2013 over accusations of accumulating excessive overtime and misrepresenting the hours she worked on duty.
Sims disputes the allegations, stating she worked based on the policies and procedures established by her supervisors.
She has further denied any wrongdoing in her lawsuit, contending she was really fired because she'd filed a complaint against the chief alleging gender discrimination and hostile work environment in May 2013, arguing men who had committed infractions, including crimes, worse than what she was accused of weren't punished as harshly by firing as she was.
The Civil Service Commission upheld the firing decision in August 2013 after a three-day hearing, despite Sims' unsuccessful efforts to get a court order to the halt the proceedings, complaining she wasn't getting a fair hearing.
She complained the commission chairman wrongly excluded evidence that would clear her name, demonstrate her good character and show how poorly the Police Department treated her. But she couldn't convince a circuit judge to halt the hearing.
Much of Friday's hearing was an effort by Sims' attorney, Luther Sutter, to convince the judge to reconsider the ruling, made last year by his predecessor Collins Kilgore, dismissing the city from the lawsuit.
Sutter said Sims had been denied an effective "name-clearing" hearing she was legally entitled to because civil service chairman James Hudson is the brother of a witness in Sims' case and Hudson wrongly limited the evidence Sims could present to clear her name.
James Hudson is the brother of police Lt. David Hudson, whose Halloween 2011 arrest of a man at a Little Rock nightclub was video-recorded and resulted in an ongoing lawsuit alleging Hudson used excessive force. Sutter said David Hudson, one of Sims' supervisors, was disciplined less severely than Sims for transgressions comparable or worse.
City lawyers told the judge questions about what Hudson had done were irrelevant to the hearing about the accusations against Sims because wrongdoing by one officer didn't excuse, explain or mitigate wrongdoing by another.
NW News on 04/11/2015