Debate renewed on U.S. Capitol statues

Legislature’s Hester works on bill for picking 2 new figures to represent state

Senate Republican leader Bart Hester of Cave Springs said Wednesday that he is drafting legislation to replace the two statues the state donated to the U.S. Capitol with figures of more prominent Arkansans.

The statues now there are of the late attorney Uriah M. Rose and the late U.S. Sen. and Gov. James P. Clarke. They were placed there about 100 years ago.

Hester said he filed a shell bill — meaning it lacked details — during the 2017 regular session to replace the two statues. He said he had toured the U.S. Capitol and didn’t know anything about the people depicted by Arkansas’ statues. Hester saw other states with statues of people such as Will Rogers, representing Oklahoma, and Thomas Edison, representing Ohio.

But he said he opted against pushing the bill because he realized there needed to be “a much bigger conversation” about whose statues should represent Arkansas in the U.S. Capitol.

In 1864, Congress passed a law inviting each state to submit up to two bronze or marble statues to be placed in what is now known as Statuary Hall. As the number of states grew, the statues spread to other areas in the U.S. Capitol.

In 1917, the Arkansas Legislature approved a marble statue of Rose, who helped found the Rose Law Firm and the American Bar Association. In 1921, the Arkansas Legislature approved a marble statue of Clarke, who was Arkansas’ governor from 1895-97 and a U.S. senator from 1903-16. Clarke is the great-great-grandfather of state Rep. Clarke Tucker, a Democrat from Little Rock who is challenging Republican U.S. Rep. French Hill of Little Rock in the Nov. 6 general election.

“After 100 years, we have recognized somebody long enough,” Hester said in an interview.

“There are many good options out there,” such as Walmart founder Sam Walton and musician Johnny Cash, he said.

He said he is drafting legislation that would authorize a statue of one of the Little Rock Nine that he hasn’t determined and a statue of Adam Brown, a U.S. Navy SEAL who died in combat in Afghanistan in 2010.

“But this isn’t something you do without the consultation of all the Legislature,” Hester said. “It’s a big deal. The last people were there for a hundred years. I don’t know if these guys will be there 10 or 12 years or 20 years, but it is certainly time for us to pick some new people.”

Hester said his plan for legislation during the 2019 regular session isn’t a parti-

group of inmates that their case has been split into 23 different cases, with each of the named inmates acting as separate plaintiffs. He provided a list of rules every proposed plaintiff must follow in order to proceed, noting that not only must each inmate pursue his own case, but each suit must be accompanied by either a $400 filing fee or a motion to proceed as a pauper.

Similarly, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joe Volpe entered an order Aug. 30 giving each of the 35 inmates who signed on to the second lawsuit a chance to refile the suit correctly or see it dismissed.

Volpe said each plaintiff must submit the filing fee, as required by law, or “a properly completed Application to Proceed Without Prepayment of Fees and Affidavit, with the required calculation sheet signed by an authorized official of the detention center at which he or she is confined, within 30 days.”

Volpe’s order notes that even prisoners allowed to proceed as paupers must pay a $350 filing fee, sometimes in the form of installments that are collected from the prisoner’s inmate trust account.

“If the prisoner’s case is subsequently dismissed for any reason, including a determination that it is frivolous, malicious, fails to state a claim, or seeks monetary relief against a defendant who is immune from such relief, the full amount of the $350 filing fee will be collected, and no portion of this filing fee will be refunded to the prisoner,” the order states, with those words emphasized in bold.

A sheriff’s office spokesman didn’t respond to a reporter’s request for comment about the lawsuits shortly after they were filed.

Nearly a year ago, however, the sheriff’s office acknowledged one of the issues raised in the lawsuits — that many areas outside the inmates’ housing blocks aren’t covered by cameras. The Quorum Court approved the sheriff’s office’s request for $400,000 from a reserve fund to replace nonworking cameras and add others.

The inmates complained that when only one jailer is available to oversee up to 150 inmates at a time, especially when the lack of cameras creates “blind spots” in the facility, there is an increased risk of jailers not noticing violent or sexual acts, which endangers the inmates.