While the candidate filing deadline for municipal races in Jonesboro is not until early August, Jeremy Terrell has already announced his intention to run for mayor. He even has a campaign website up and running.
Unfortunately for Terrell, due to a hot check conviction in 2011, he is currently ineligible to hold elected office in Arkansas, making him the latest example of a would-be politician derailed by the state’s draconian election-eligibility laws.
According to Craighead County court records, Terrell wrote a $1,029 check in December 2009 that was subsequently returned for insufficient funds. A little over three months later, prosecutors filed felony charges against Terrell for a hot check violation greater than $500 but less than $2,500, which is a class C felony in Arkansas. This charge carried a potential sentence of three to 10 years in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines.
On Sept. 26, 2010, Terrell was stopped for driving on expired license plates, at which point he was arrested on the outstanding felony warrant. Just over a year later, on Nov. 14, 2011, the state agreed to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor hot check charge, and Terrell pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to one year in jail.
The jail time was suspended as long as Terrell paid his $256 in fines and court costs, which he could do at $50 per month, and met other conditions for one year. Terrell completed the one-year suspended sentence in November 2012, and the case was closed.
Under the Arkansas Constitution, a person is disqualified from holding public office if he or she has been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, a misdemeanor in which the court “was required to find, or the defendant to admit, an act of deceit, fraud, or false statement.” Despite the harshness of permanent ineligibility for office based on misdemeanors that are frequently decades old by the time the person is a candidate, Arkansas’s courts have repeatedly held that a misdemeanor hot check conviction falls into that last category and disqualifies a person from public office.
Court and police records do not say who the victim was or give any details as to the circumstances surrounding Terrell’s passing of the hot check, other than the date and amount. But Terrell’s explanation about what happened is confusing at best.
“This was about a business I was a partner of,” Terrell said in an emailed response to questions. “We had a client write us a large check that bounced, causing the company to have a few checks that then bounced. The company resolved them quickly, but a small one got missed.”
So if this was only about a company’s business debt, how did Terrell wind up charged?
“I happened to be the partner that went to resolve this check,” he said. “They told me that the issue would be resolved in a year. I personally did not write any of the checks, but was the owner that resolved it.”
One problem with that explanation is that Terrell was charged personally, not in his official capacity as partner of a business, under Ark. Code Ann. § 5-37-302. There are three ways a person can be guilty of passing a hot check under that statute; in all three situations, however, the actions are only criminal if the person passing the hot check had “the intent to defraud” the person receiving the check. Terrell’s version of what happened — it was all just a big mistake because someone else’s check bounced first, causing Terrell’s check to a third party to bounce — falls well short of an intent to defraud anyone.
Terrell’s story raises two obvious questions. First, what was the name of the company for which Terrell was a partner/owner in 2009? Second, what was the company that received a bad check from Terrell’s company, which led to the criminal charge against Terrell?
“With respect to the privacy of those partners we cannot give out that information,” Terrell said.
It is somewhat surprising that this did not come up last year, when Terrell was running for Jonesboro School Board. (He lost that race by only 17 votes to Ashleigh Givens.) According to Givens, “My campaign was not aware of any personal or legal information about Mr. Terrell beyond what he chose to make public during his own campaign.”
Regardless, the issue has come up now, and the outcome seems clear: Terrell pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor hot check charge in 2011, which means he is barred from holding elected office in this state unless he receives a pardon for that conviction.
