HOUSTON—Three former Texas Southern University students credited with helping expose a spending scandal that led to indictments of top administrators have won a retaliation lawsuit against school officials.

A federal jury decided Friday that William Hudson, Justin Jordan and Oliver Brown were kicked out of the university and arrested as payback for criticizing then-TSU President Priscilla Slade and other school leaders.

Known as the “TSU Three,” the students played a role in bringing to light a scandal that tarnished TSU and led to charges against Slade. In a plea bargain, Slade agreed to repay nearly $130,000 of the half-million she misspent in school funds on clothes, home furnishings and landscaping.

Jurors awarded actual damages totaling nearly $200,000 for all three students, and the jury is set to return next week to decide punitive damages.

“At least someone stood up for us, and the jury stood up for us,” Brown said in Saturday’s editions of the Houston Chronicle.

Peter Plotts, a lawyer with the Texas Attorney General’s Office who represented TSU, declined to comment.

The students filed a civil lawsuit against TSU officials in 2005 for allegedly thwarting their First Amendment rights by disciplining them for their anti-corruption speech. The lawsuit alleges they were retaliated against for exposing corruption at the university.

In early testimony of the two-week trial, Brown testified that he was paid $5,000 by the FBI to tape university officials in the midst of a corruption investigation.

Plotts had argued that the focus of the case was not on protected speech, but that the former students were disciplined for separate threatening or abusive speech. He said some of the students shouted at officials, called them names and made threats.

Slade and others were dismissed from the lawsuit, leaving the regents and four present and former campus employees and administrators as defendants.

The allegations against Slade coincided with the discovery of a pattern of financial mismanagement at TSU. Gov. Rick Perry demanded the resignations of the entire nine-member board of regents and the state put $13 million in funding on hold.

Since the indictments were first announced in 2006, TSU has a new president and board of regents.

The school also received approval of a reorganization plan, which meant it could begin to spend some $13 million of state money that was put on hold after TSU’s financial problems became public.