Drawing the sting

LITTLE ROCK — There’s a term well-known to those in the legal profession: “drawing the sting.”

In essence, it means you disclose damaging information in a case against yourself before the other side has a chance to bring it out with its own spin and headlines.

The adage leapt to mind the other day when I read that our state’s top elected legal official-who announced (seems like 10 years ago now) that he’s a Democratic candidate for governor in 2014-stepped forward to allow that he’d had an “inappropriate” relationship in 2011 with female attorney Andrea Davis of Hot Springs.

Way to go, Mr. Attorney General! That’s drawing the sting so early that by the time the election rolls around, everyone hopefully will have either forgotten your transgression, or won’t give a flip.

Had I been advising McDaniel, I’d have told him to do the same thing, especially after the relationship had been alleged weeks beforehand by the Hot Springs lawyer’s estranged husband in documents filed in late October during the former couple’s ongoing custody dispute.

News of that court filing, incidentally, was initially reported by the publication known as Talk Business.

While mercifully disclosing nary a single detail of his admitted dalliance (thus leaving those to individual vivid imaginations), McDaniel instead issued a vague confession admitting he’d regretfully engaged in “limited interaction” he called “inappropriate” with the attorney he’d met in 2010 during his campaign for attorney general.

We really didn’t need to know all the technical smarm anyway, did we?

McDaniel publicly apologized to the state of Arkansas (and of course his wife and maybe even the family pet), two years before the gubernatorial election.

Then it was promptly announced that, why-of course-he’s still a candidate to lead our state onward to prosperity and achievement in 2014.

Gosh knows that here in 2012 America, he’s far from being alone when it comes to dallying in the vast arena of the overly predictable politician’s dalliance. I’d say for an attorney, especially our state’s leading legal eagle, McDaniel drew the sting away from this injury quite effectively and with the best sense of political timing possible in distasteful circumstances.

The sooner the better, I always say, when it comes to such unsettling matters in the honorable world of elected public-servant jurisprudence.

I also couldn’t help but notice that Ms. Davis’ estranged husband, Dr. Fred Day, in his pleadings to the court for admissions, also sought a response about a cast of other men allegedly linked in what I’ll call inappropriately affectionate ways to his ex-wife, including Mena’s own Tim Williamson, prosecuting attorney for the 18th Judicial District West.

You may recall the honorable Mr. Williamson as the lawyer appointed in 2004 as the special prosecutor in a four-year state-sponsored circus, aka the purported investigation into the1989 death of Marshall’s Janie Ward.

Those who followed Williamson’s seemingly never-ending trail of irrelevant busywork and stacks of meaningless paper that created only a big circle right back into the black hole of “undetermined” from whence it emerged, will recall how he uncovered jack-diddly-squat.

He also strangely stopped communicating with me just weeks into that investigation. Guess I’d become too much a nosy pest about how Janie truly died at a teenage beer bust Sept. 9, 1989.

And so now I read in a genuine court document that her ex specifically asked Ms. Davis, as part of their custody dispute, to admit to an affair with Williamson, as well as the circumstances of her termination as a public defender.

Oh my, please say it ain’t so. Is there no sense of fair play and justice remaining in this deeply troubled world?

Tell you what-I’ll agree to allocate half of my space here for Prosecuting Attorney Williamson (and Ms. Davis) to individually or together explain, deny, whatever he and/or she feels is the honorable and true manner to respond to such an allegation, and even placed on the public record, for gosh sakes!

Just email away and I promise to investigate and take it from there.

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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.