A former Faulkner County sheriff ’s deputy admitted Friday that he created a phony birth certificate last spring to make it appear that a rival candidate for sheriff had fathered an illegitimate, mixed-race child in Texas, then mailed copies of the fake document from Texas to a few voters.
“I did something stupid,” Harold L. Smith, 47, of Greenbrier told U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., while pleading guilty in Marshall’s Little Rock courtroom to a felony charge of mailing a false official document.
“It was a mud-slinging campaign,” Smith explained. “There were faults on both sides, but I took it a step higher.”
The veteran law enforcement officer - one of four vying for the Republican nomination for sheriff in 2012 - said the ruse was suggested by Stephan Hawks, the Faulkner County civil attorney. He said Hawks mentioned during a meeting about the election that it would be “funny” if such a document surfaced to tarnish the reputation of candidate Andy Shock, who was then a major with the sheriff’s office.
Shock, who is white and married to a white woman, was listed on the forged birth certificate as the father of a boy born in July 2009 in Texarkana, Texas, to an unmarried black woman. After a handful of Faulkner County residents received typed letters with copies of the falsified document that had been mailed from Hooks, Texas, Shock turned the letter over to U.S. Postal Service officials. He said at the time that he didn’t suspect any of his rivals were behind the hoax and called it a distraction.
Smith, a former training officer in the sheriff’s office, admitted Friday in court that, although he initially didn’t act on the suggestion he attributed to Hawks, he later became angry about something else that occurred during the race, and, after talking to Ron Bartels, created the false Texas birth certificates. In 2012, Bartels was listed at the end of a column on the Arkansas Business website as chairman of the Arkansas Conservative Party and an adviser to Americans for Limited Government.
Smith acknowledged that on March 28, 2012, he drove to Hooks, just across the state line from Texarkana, and mailed the letters with a Texas postmark to people he believed would vote in the Republican primary. A woman who rode along in the vehicle, Carol Fletcher, had no idea what he was up to, he said.
Shock ultimately won the four-man primary contest as well as the general election and is currently the sheriff.
He said Friday, after hearing about Smith’s guilty plea, that it was “very vindicating for me, for everybody to know and understand … what I’ve known forever, for it to finally come out.”
During Smith’s plea hearing, he acknowledged that he, Hawks and Jeff Johnston, the county administrator, had several meetings during February and March of 2012 to discuss the election and how to prevent Shock from winning the primary. Shock was endorsed by then-Sheriff Karl Byrd and Prosecuting Attorney Cody Hiland of Conway.
“I’ve been a victim,” as have family and friends, said Shock, a “distant relative” of Johnston, on Friday. “To this day … ever so often I’ll hear scuttlebutt about” someone having repeated the allegations in the faked birth certificate.
“On top of the whole political motive, these people threw a racial thing in there,” Shock said. “Throwing that racial overtone is disgusting.”
Hawks resigned as Faulkner County’s civil attorney in June 2012 amid contention over a two-month paid leave he had taken.
Hawks did not attend the hearing and could not be reached for comment Friday. Bartels also didn’t return a phone message.
Johnston, who is awaiting trial in an unrelated felony theft of property case, declined comment Friday and referred questions to his attorney in that case, Joe Don Winningham. Winningham said the two haven’t discussed the birth-certificate case and said he didn’t know if federal agents had interviewed or sought to interview Johnston about it.
County Judge Allen Dodson, who took office after his predecessor resigned Feb. 1, said he will be “monitoring” the birth-certificate case as it pertains to Johnston, who is still the county administrator.
Dodson said that what he had read online about this case “shows that clearly he [Johnston] wasn’t a supporter of Andy Shock.”
“I hate that, just being friends with both of them,” Dodson said. “But in terms of taking action, in terms of terminating him, from what I read, Harold Smith … acted on his own. The comments I saw reported really showed nothing more than really he [Johnston] didn’t support Andy.”
After court Friday, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Harris, who is handling the case against Smith, refused to answer questions about whether an investigation was still ongoing or other people were expected to be charged.
The investigation that led Smith to plead guilty after waiving his right to have the case reviewed by a federal grand jury was undertaken by U.S. Postal Inspector David Barrett, who sat in the courtroom Friday next to Harris.
Harris told the judge that Smith admitted to mailing 12 letters, each with a copy of the false birth certificate, to people he believed would vote in the Republican primary.
Smith told the judge, “I am guilty, your honor.”
His attorney, John Collins of Little Rock, told the judge that Smith had never been in trouble before, and Marshall agreed to allow Smith to remain free on his own recognizance until sentencing, which will be scheduled at a later date, after a pre-sentence investigation is completed by U.S. probation officers.
Smith agreed to surrender his passport while his sentencing is pending, and Marshall agreed to let him travel out of state to take the remains of a recently deceased uncle to West Virginia for burial.
Smith said he’s not working anywhere right now, but is a full-time student at the University of Arkansas at Morrilton.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/22/2013