In her failed effort to become the next chief justice, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson ended up lending her campaign a total of $660,700, including nearly $20,000 in the month after she lost the March 1 election.
Judicial candidates filed their final campaign-finance reports Monday, detailing final expenditures and, for some, their efforts to retire campaign debts.
State ethics rules allow candidates to raise money in the 45 days after an election and to put that money toward retiring any campaign debt.
Goodson, who lost the race for the chief justice position to Circuit Judge Dan Kemp of Mountain View, was able to pay herself back $1,178.01 after raising $16,200 in the month after the election.
She did not respond to a request seeking comment. A message was left with her office staff Tuesday afternoon.
Goodson, who has been a justice since 2011, first lent her campaign $100,000 early last fall, about the time she announced that she was running for chief justice. She continued to add to the personal loans to her campaign, including a $2,700 loan more than a week after the March 1 election and another $17,000 on April 20.
According to Monday's campaign-finance filing, Goodson spent $51,344 after the campaign, including $28,100 on a bill from a Maryland-based consulting company.
Beyond the $660,700 she lent her campaign, Goodson reported raising $367,604 in contributions from others and spending $1.03 million in her bid to defeat Kemp. She had no carry-over funds at the end of the reporting period, which ended April 30.
The current chief justice is Howard Brill, who was appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson after Brill's predecessor, the late Jim Hannah, resigned from office for health reasons. Brill cannot succeed himself because he was appointed to the office.
Kemp, who will join Goodson on the bench in January, reported having $13,154 in carryover campaign funds at the end of April.
The decades-long circuit judge reported that he had recouped the $20,000 that he lent his campaign early on, and went on to spend $120,143 between late February and the end of April.
Kemp ended up spending a total of $391,579 during the campaign and raised $384,734 in contributions.
Despite being outspent in the race, Kemp benefited from a deluge of negative ads aimed at Goodson that were paid for by an out-of-state group.
The Washington, D.C.-based Judicial Crisis Network -- which has traditionally supported conservative judicial candidates -- paid at least $622,435 for ads run across the state criticizing Goodson for, among other things, the fact that her husband John Goodson is a well-known class-action attorney.
The use of "dark money" -- so-called because the source of the funds isn't required to be revealed -- against Goodson, as well as ads that the Republican State Leadership Committee paid to run against a candidate in another Supreme Court race, has reignited debate over how best to regulate campaign finances and whether the state's top judges should be elected.
Circuit Judge Shawn Womack of Mountain Home reported Monday that he had paid himself back the $14,488 he lent his campaign against Little Rock attorney Clark Mason.
Womack will join the state's highest bench in January and replace Justice Paul Danielson.
Womack, who was a Republican legislator before reaching the bench, ended up raising $136,550 in contributions and spending a total of $148,177.
Mason reported that he had a personal campaign debt of $67,626. Mason, a last-minute entry into the race, reported raising $107,811 in contributions and spending $154,586 total.
The Republican State Leadership Committee, based in Washington, D.C., reported buying about $400,000 in advertising and other materials that sought to depict Mason as a money-loving attorney.
A Section on 05/04/2016