A Montgomery County Circuit judge dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday filed by a Cullman attorney against Gov. Robert Bentley over his executive order removing the Confederate flag from capitol grounds in June.

Melvin Hasting filed suit against Bentley, the Alabama Historical Commission and its acting director Lisa Jones in July, arguing the governor and historic commission had no authority to remove four flags from the Confederate Memorial on the capitol grounds in Montgomery.

“This was a knee-jerk reaction by the governor, and I don’t think he or the Alabama Historical Commission has the authority to remove the flag,” Hasting said in July. “The historical commission has the duty to protect and preserve our state’s history, and the Confederate flag and Confederacy is part of that history.”

Judge Truman Hobbs Jr. issued an order Tuesday dismissing the lawsuit, stating Hasting had no standing to file it since he could not show how he was injured by the flags’ removal.

“I don’t see how a state official abusing his authority is not injury enough, but I’ll go back and look at the law,” Hasting said Tuesday evening.

In addition to the lawsuit, Hasting also filed an injunction to block Bentley and the historical commission from removing, relocating, destroying or otherwise altering any monuments, sites, graves, bodies and landmarks concerning the state’s history and heritage.

Bentley’s removal of the flag came just days after Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, gunned down nine African-Americans in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Fallout from the massacre sparked protests against the flag— which to many blacks represented a glorification of the nation’s history of racial violence and discrimination — and prompted discussion over whether displaying the flag on public grounds was appropriate.  

Proponents of the Confederate flag argued it represented the South’s history and heritage and had nothing to do with racial hatred. Rallies were held across the state, including an event on the Cullman County Courthouse steps.

In July, the South Carolina Legislature voted to remove the Confederate Battle flag from its state capitol in Columbia.

During a visit to Cullman in July, Bentley defended his decision to remove the Confederate flag from the monument by executive order.

“To many people in the state of Alabama, it is a symbol of Southern heritage, and that’s OK,” Bentley said. “I’m very much on their side. I understand that. We can honor it in ways other than it flying over the capitol grounds. To some people in the state, it’s a symbol of bigotry and hatred because it’s been co-opted by organizations that feel that way. So as governor of the state of Alabama and governor of all the people, I’m going to do what’s best for this state to improve the image of the state of Alabama so that when people across the nation look at Alabama, they see Alabama in a different light. We’re not the government, we’re not the state that George Wallace governed over in 1963. We’re the state where Gov. Robert Bentley is the governor.”