Mississippi’s capital settles free speech lawsuit, agrees to reform comment rules

“I can’t let you sit here and disparage a city employee.” 

Those were the words of Jackson, Mississippi, city council member Grian Grizzell to Zach Servis during a public comment period, after Servis criticized the municipal clerk’s performance and urged the city council to replace her.

At another meeting, Grizzell said the council would not allow “comments of a personal nature regarding individual members of the City Council or staff.”

The city’s public comment policy prohibited, among other things, “personal, impertinent, or slanderous remarks” and “derogatory remarks concerning councilmembers or anyone present in the council chambers.”

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Servis challenged those restrictions. At one meeting, he cited several court cases to explain why the ordinance was unconstitutional. But the council was unmoved. One councilman acknowledged the cases might be relevant, but insisted that until a successful challenge to the ordinance, speakers “must follow the law.” Except it was the council that was failing to follow the law, namely the First Amendment, which takes precedence over any city ordinance that conflicts with it.

In October 2025, FIRE warned the council that its restrictions violated the First Amendment and exposed the city to costly litigation. The city should have heeded the warning. We urged officials to stop censoring Servis and offered to help them rewrite the rules, free of charge, to develop policies that respect constitutional limits while maintaining orderly meetings. 

The council never responded.

So FIRE sent a second letter in December. Crickets. So FIRE connected Servis with Joel Dillard, an attorney in FIRE’s Legal Network, who filed a federal lawsuit in August challenging the city’s public comment restrictions and its treatment of Servis.

Last month, the city settled that lawsuit, agreeing to stop restricting Servis’s speech in violation of the First Amendment, to pay $10,000 in legal costs, and to suspend three challenged provisions of its public comment ordinance, while also agreeing to “collaborate in good faith” with FIRE to develop new rules “that comply with the United States Constitution.”

When government bodies open public comment periods, the First Amendment allows them to impose only reasonable, viewpoint-neutral restrictions. For example, the Jackson City Council could enforce a reasonable time limit for each speaker or ban true threats, which are not protected speech. But they cannot restrict comments just because they’re critical. And doing so while permitting comments that praise city officials — which the council allowed Servis to do in one meeting without interruption — is classic viewpoint discrimination. 

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Moreover, terms like “personal” and “impertinent” are vague, subjective standards, leaving officials to arbitrarily decide in the heat of the moment what crosses the line. While defamation, including slander, is a narrow category of unprotected false speech, whether a statement is defamatory is a complex legal question that council members aren’t equipped to decide. In any case, "personal" and "impertinent" are far broader terms — encompassing large amounts of protected speech — than actionable falsehoods.   

We congratulate Servis and Dillard on the settlement. This is a big win for the free speech rights of all Jackson residents. It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to get government officials to respect citizens’ constitutional rights but, of course, sometimes it does. As FIRE told the council in our first letter, we stand ready to assist. Now we look forward to doing exactly that.

For Servis, however, the fight was never about his “feelings being hurt, getting money, or a personal attempt at revenge.” After filing his lawsuit, he explained what motivated him:  “This is about standing up for the rights of every resident who couldn’t risk being arrested to stand on their rights.”