Please, we implore you national media types who insist on rehashing and second-guessing the sad plight of the Duggar family--give your sensationalized repetitions a rest.
One aspect of the Duggar deluge that does deserve deeper scrutiny is to discover how the system so bizarrely mishandled it. Washington County Juvenile Court Judge Stacy Zimmerman on May 21 ordered that young Josh Duggar's police report from a 2006 investigation be destroyed. However, a day earlier, May 20, Springdale Police Chief Kathy O'Kelley had agreed to release redacted copies of the same report, as political reporter Doug Thompson writes.
As folks from Arkansas to Timbuktu must know by now, that report implicated the now 27-year-old Josh Duggar in admittedly fondling five female victims through their clothing in 2002 and 2003. Four of those were his sisters. Fear not, I'm not about to review the entire mess yet again.
Josh Duggar got a "very stern talk" at the time by former Arkansas State Police Cpl. Joseph T. Hutchens (now imprisoned on child pornography offenses) but wasn't charged with a crime. Last month he resigned as a lobbyist with the D.C.- based conservative Family Research Council. God knows, there's been plenty of personal and professional hemorrhaging from this debacle and subsequent "official" decisions surrounding it.
Former Springdale alderman Ray Dotson, a colorful, outspoken fella who filed a complaint against O'Kelley with the Civil Service Commission on June 3, provides one example.
Dotson claims O'Kelley shouldn't have released her department's Duggar investigative report because it involved juveniles, and he asked the commissioners to determine whether her actions broke the law.
But Springdale attorney Thomas Kieklak advised commissioners it wasn't their responsibility to wrestle with Freedom of Information matters. Filling in for City Attorney Ernest Cate (who'd recused), Kieklak said such decisions officially lie with the prosecutor, the state's attorney general or the courts.
Besides that, Judge Zimmerman's order meant the original police report was destroyed the day after the chief already had released it. By the time Zimmerman issued her order, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and In Touch magazine had already acquired copies, Thompson also reported.
Kieklak, who has a history of litigious wrangling with Dotson, also said that because the released police copies aren't the destroyed original, that record couldn't be used as evidence in administrative proceedings.
All this curiously timed releasing on the eve of officially destroying records has led at least one Duggar daughter to say she was easily identified through language contained in the related documents through the process of elimination.
Since two sisters say that as children they never realized their brother had touched them through their clothing as they slept, the released information and resulting intense publicity has caused them infinitely more pain as outed victims than anything their brother did and apologized for, and that they'd forgiven him years ago.
It gets stranger. Zimmerman explained she issued her destruction order because the by-then-released police report contained information she believed could directly or indirectly identify a minor victim.
However, Tom Larimer, the executive director of the Arkansas Press Association, openly wondered whether Zimmerman had the legal authority to order police records destroyed rather than sealed, Thompson reports. "What good can come from destroying a public record so that it can never be used by anyone, ever?" Larimer asked.
Brandon Cate, a Springdale lawyer who deals in public record law, supports Larimer's view, saying police records are not court records, so Zimmerman didn't have authority to order their destruction. He also told Thompson he believes Zimmerman's court appeared responsible for revealing the identity of a Duggar sister when the order revealed one of the victims remains a minor.
But wait. There's more. the other day Thompson reported on this newspaper's efforts to lay hands on the recording of a 911 call made on May 27 by someone identifying himself as a DHS case worker. He'd called to complain he was at the Duggar home to investigate a matter involving a child and the family was being uncooperative.
Is this the same Jim Bob Duggar who's claimed to have been cooperative with authorities in every way?
As of Wednesday, a news account said the police were denying that request for the 911 call information (although they'd previously released it to In Touch), supposedly basing their denial to the paper on language in a Zimmerman court order they apparently never actually received.
You and I still don't know how events truly unfolded in the matter of how and why the 2006 Duggar police record was released. Yet it's evident to me that many of the highly relevant whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows remain unanswered.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 06/14/2015