Correction: James Hudson, chairman of the Little Rock Civil Service Commission, is unrelated to police Lt. David Hudson but is the brother of detective Tommy Hudson. James Hudson's family connections in the Little Rock Police Department were incorrectly described in this story about fired police officer Natasha Sims.
A Pulaski County circuit judge is considering whether a fired Little Rock police officer has presented enough evidence to go to trial with her discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against retired Police Chief Stuart Thomas.
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 evidence for her accusations against Thomas, who retired last June, to be heard by a jury.
The city of Little Rock has already been removed as a defendant for lack of evidence of wrongdoing, a finding Sims' lawyers are in the process of appealing.
Regardless of Reif's findings, Sims' appeal of her 2013 firing, which was upheld 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 that she worked based on the policies and procedures established by her supervisors.
She has further denied any wrongdoing in her lawsuit, contending that she was really fired because she'd filed a complaint against the chief alleging gender discrimination and hostile work environment in May 2013, arguing that men who had committed infractions, including crimes, worse than what she was accused of were not 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 was not getting a fair hearing.
She complained that the commission chairman had wrongly excluded evidence that would clear her name, demonstrate her good character and show how poorly the Police Department had treated her. But she could not persuade a circuit judge to halt the hearing.
Much of Friday's hearing was an effort by Sims' attorney, Luther Sutter, to persuade the judge to reconsider the ruling, made last year by his predecessor Collins Kilgore, that dismissed the city from the lawsuit.
Sutter said Sims had been denied an effective "name-clearing" hearing that she was legally entitled to because Civil Service Commission Chairman James Hudson is the brother of a witness in Sims' case and that 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 that were comparable or worse.
City lawyers told the judge that questions about what Hudson had done were irrelevant to the hearing about the accusations against Sims, because wrongdoing by one officer did not excuse, explain or mitigate wrongdoing by another.
Metro on 04/11/2015