PARIS, TX - A year and a half after being charged with murder, two Paris men are seeking restitution for time spent in jail.

Brandon McClelland had been drinking with two men from Paris the evening leading up to his death, but that's about the only detail everyone involved in this case can agree on.

Brandon McClelland's mother, Jaqueline, said, "They have not, from day one, done things the way they're supposed to be done, and everything I said from the start, that it was going to be swept under the rug, that's exactly what's done happened."

Jaqueline McClelland has her own ideas of what happened to her son that night and says before anyone else deserves justice, his murder case should be solved.

"They want to sue Lamar County for a million dollars, and the county has not even solved the murder against my son," she says.

"That's hurting."

The two men once charged for the death of McClelland say they were defamed and branded as racists.

The murder case against Ryan Crostley and Shannon Finley caused the men to spend nine months behind bars, but with new evidence the two men were released. Now the pair are headed back to court, but this time not as defendants.

Lamar County District Attorney investigator Chris Brooks, DPS Trooper Stacy McNeal, and the special prosecutor in the murder case Toby Shook are named in a lawsuit which also lists Lamar County as a defendant, accusing them of defamation, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. The suit also claims the two men were denied due process.

Attorney Michael Mosher represents Crostley and Finley. He says if basic forensic principles were followed, McClelland's death would have been ruled an accident and his clients would never have been put through such an ordeal.

"The investigators in this case made no effort to interview the witnesses to the accidents that actually occurred. They ignored all the on the scene officers who said it was clearly a traffic accident," Mosher says.

"They ignored everything."

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. Federal Court in Texarkana, seeks $4 million total in damages.