Two out-of-state billionaires, one a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican, have taken sides in the race to decide the next elected Little Rock prosecutor who will replace the retiring Larry Jegley.
Also taking an interest in the outcome of the race is Arkansas chicken magnate Ron Cameron, a millionaire Republican supporter, said to be one of Arkansas' biggest political donors.
Voters will choose a successor between Will Jones and Alicia Walton to be the next prosecuting attorney for the 6th Judicial District of Perry and Pulaski counties. Early voting continues today and Monday, with the general election Tuesday.
The candidates themselves are not partisan. The law requires they run as independents without party affiliation.
Billionaire Democrat activist George Soros is backing Walton, a public defender, through the Arkansas Justice & Public Safety PAC, based in Washington, D.C., and established in Arkansas in April with $321,000 from Soros. The group's sole officer is Whitney Tymas of Washington, D.C., director of Black Women Forward Action Fund, according to secretary of state records.
According to its most recent expenditure report, the Arkansas Justice PAC paid $162,512 between April 20 and May 12 to the BerlinRose advertising agency in New York to fund radio ads, direct mail and digital advertising supporting Walton, raising the group's total expenditures to $268,760.
Last week, Fair Courts America, headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Ill., registered with state regulators as an independent expenditure committee and sent out a mailer endorsing Jones.
According to its only expenditure report, Fair Courts has spent $66,594 with Gilmore Davis Strategy Group of Little Rock on mailers supporting Jones and opposing Walton.
Records from the secretary of state show that Fair Courts was established with a $100,000 contribution from Cameron, chairman of Mountaire Corp., one of the country's largest poultry producers.
The company is headquartered in Delaware but was founded in Arkansas by his grandfather. Mountaire Corp., and its operating affiliates Mountaire Farms Inc. and Mountaire Farms of Delaware Inc., also have facilities in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.
On Friday, the Fair Courts America web site, faircourtsamerica.org, displayed only a video supporting Maria Lazar, a Wisconsin judge who successfully ran for a seat on that state's Court of Appeals. According to an April 6 article in the Wisconsin Examiner, Fair Courts spent $250,000 on TV ads on Lazar's behalf.
One of the Arkansas Fair Courts officers is Sherry Gaskill, according to documents from the secretary of state. The Federal Election Commission shows Gaskill to be Fair Courts treasurer. She is the wife of Republican activist billionaire Richard Uihlein and the treasurer for Uihlein's Restoration PAC. Further both groups share the same office address. Restoration is almost entirely funded by Uihlein, federal campaign finance records show. The Lazar video on the Fair Courts site is also hosted on Restoration's YouTube page.
Fair Courts organizers did not return an email sent Friday seeking comment.
Claims made in some of the out-of-town ad campaigns have drawn ire from the candidates and campaign watchers.
Released this week, a Fair Courts mailer endorses Jones. But the flier also disparages Walton's career as a defense attorney "representing violent criminals" while describing her as "soft on crime." To emphasize this point, the mailer cites six Arkansas Democrat-Gazette news articles, illustrating them with made-up headlines that never appeared in the newspaper.
Jones denounced the mailer on Facebook, stating that "I have great respect for defense attorneys and consider many of them personal friends. We need vigorous prosecution and defense for the scales of justice to balance."
Speaking further about the involvement of the Fair Courts and Arkansas Justice PAC, Jones said he had no interest in either.
"We have no involvement with any of these [groups] and have already gone on record condemning some of the unfair attacks against my opponent by these outside groups," he said Friday. "We're running our own race and are excited about the support we have received throughout the district. With four days until Election Day, we're focusing on my message of wanting to unify our community, get justice for crime victims, and how I'll use my 20 years of experience to protect our families."
In a response on Facebook, Walton condemned the advertisement's suggestion that there was anything wrong with being a public defender, representing the poor and marginalized, drawing a comparison to some of the attacks on the career of Incoming Supreme Court Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson who worked as a federal public defender for two years.
In an "open letter" statement released Friday, a dozen Black lawyers endorsed Walton while complaining the Fair Courts mailer uses "dog whistle" tactics to falsely suggest that Walton is soft on crime while also tarnishing her as anti-police. The accusations are "flat-out lies" that misrepresent her position on bail reform, in particular, the group states.
"The very dog whistles that are used to justify the different treatment of African Americans form the basis of the recent attacks against Ms. Walton," the two-page statement reads. "Ms. Walton has aggressively advocated for those that should not be incarcerated and should be released on bail. This is a basic right secured by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ms. Walton understands that a person is presumed innocent until they are proven guilty."
Signees include former circuit judge Willard Proctor Jr., civil rights attorney Austin Porter Jr., retired Court of Appeals Judge Olly Neal, the state's first black elected prosecuting attorney, and Dominique King, past president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society.
That "attack ad" shows how good Walton is at her job, the letter states.
"The mailer lists six newspaper ads where Ms. Walton either got an acquittal for a wrongfully accused client, worked out a great deal for a guilty client or defended someone that no one else had the courage to defend," it reads.
One Soros-group mailer, claiming to be a "voter's guide," has injected race into the contest by invoking the shooting of a Black car-theft suspect by police. Noting that Jones began his career working for Jegley, who declined to prosecute the police officer who killed the man, the flier questions whether Jones will recognize one standard for all residents.
The mailer further disputes Jones' commitment to being an advocate for crime victims. The flier along with a radio ad from the Arkansas Justice PAC includes an out-of-context quote from a rapist who Jones prosecuted in 2008. The man had posed as a police officer to lure two women away from a downtown Little Rock nightclub where they had been celebrating then molested one of them, raping the other in his car.
The defendant, Chase Prater of Maumelle, had used a palm-size golden security-guard badge to fool the women, telling them he was saving them from an imminent raid by law officers cracking down on drug abuse and intoxication.
In Jones' closing arguments, he described the women as "naive and gullible" to fall for Prater's claims, warning jurors that Prater was similarly counting on them to be naive and gullible too as he tried to talk his way out of a conviction.