USA — “Our families, our loved ones; the justice system that protects them depends on the county’s highest court,” begins the advertisement, the words read by a female voice superimposed on images of children frolicking on a playground.With a swell of appropriately ominous music, the message shifts into full “disparagement mode.”

“Now Patrick Dinkelacker wants to be on the Court of Appeals,” the voice says with a mix of skepticism and simmering resentment.

Alternating between images of Judge Patrick T. Dinkelacker and an Ohio storefront for Hustler, the ad delivers its pitch: “But as a lower court judge, his error allowed Larry Flynt to go free and continue selling pornography in Hamilton County.”

Having directly made one wildly misleading statement about Dinkelacker’s record, the ad then goes for broke: “Dinkelacker made headlines by putting a rape victim in jail and he prosecuted the only death penalty case ever commuted by Governor Taft.”

Cutting back to the children on the playground, the ad concludes by asserting that “On the Court of Appeals, the stakes are too high for Patrick Dinkelacker’s mistakes.”

In truth, Dinkelacker was the presiding judge when Larry and Jimmy Flynt struck a deal with Hamilton County, under which the Flynt’s Hustler store was allowed to remain open in exchange for Hustler News and Gifts paying a $10,000 fine and agreeing not to sell sexually explicit videos from its store in Hamilton County.

However, based on court documents and publicly available information, Dinkelacker’s serving as the judge in that case appears to be the end any “truth” contained in the attack ad, which was sponsored by Dinkelacker’s opponent, a volunteer law professor named Jim O’Reilly.

To characterize what happened in the case as an “error” that “allowed Larry Flynt to go free and continue selling pornography in Hamilton County” is not only factually inaccurate, it suggests a degree of certitude about Flynt’s guilt that only a full trial could establish.

As noted in commentary on the ad published by The Cincinnati Enquirer, “the claim that Dinkelacker’s handling of the case allowed Flynt to continue to sell pornography is dubious.”

The Enquirer correctly asserts that there’s “no guarantee Flynt would have been convicted in 1999,” and “it was the prosecutor who initially agreed to the deal.”

Further, there is nothing in the court’s decision that would prevent a separate indictment of Flynt and Hustler News and Gifts, should local officials produce evidence that the store has violated Ohio’s obscenity laws.

When the Hustler store sold sexually explicit videos to undercover officers in 2003, the County reinstated the 1999 charges against Flynt, which is the source of the actual error identified by the Court of Appeals in the case.

The Court ruled that the County’s reinstatement of the 1999 charges was unconstitutional, writing that “Criminal cases cannot be ‘conditionally’ dismissed,” and representing the agreement with the County as “a kind of ‘super-secret probation.’”

While it’s true that Dinkelacker signed off on the agreement between the county and the Flynts, the “error” the appellate court acknowledged was in a lower court allowing the county to reinstate the charges, and the agreement itself was struck by the prosecutor and the defense, not crafted by the judge.

As is the Hustler case claim, the other claims in the ad do not square with reality. For example, the alleged rape victim jailed by Dinkelacker was jailed for failing to appear in court, not for anything in direct connection to the alleged rape itself.

Also, as noted by the Enquirer, the woman in question “later admitted she lied about parts of her story,” testified that she “agreed to have sex with the defendant for $20,” and the accused in the case was ultimately acquitted.

In response to the ad, Dinkelacker focused on his opponent’s lack of experience and said the ad campaign was nothing more than political sleight of hand.

“It is a sad day for Hamilton County and the entire justice system when a candidate who has never made a judicial decision or even tried a case in Hamilton County pulls $226,000 from his wealth to run attack ads full of false, deceptive, and misleading representations against a judge with a proven record,” Dinkelacker told the Enquirer. “Such political conduct denigrates the entire justice system and takes the politicalization (sic) of the judicial branch to a new low.”

“In my opinion,” added Dinkelacker “it’s the experience and the proven record that matters, not false political attack ads.”

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, the race for Lieutenant Governor has included some spurious porn-related claims, as well.

In a press release issued by campaign officials for State Senator Jim Holt, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Arkansas, the campaign asserts that Holt had been “giving Democratic opponent Bill Halter the benefit of a doubt concerning his position on the board of a company that made money by distributing pornography and online gambling,” according to the Arkansas Times.

However, Holt spokesman Dan Noble said in the release that “(N)ow that Mr. Halter has defended his company’s activities in his own words, it is time to speak out.”

The company in question is Akamai, among the world’s largest and best-known online businesses. Don’t try telling Holt that, though. In his mind, Akamai is every bit as responsible for porn and gambling as the websites that offer such directly.

“I always assumed that he disapproved of his company signing contracts with pornographers and online gambling interests that Congress has since clamped down on,” Holt said according to the Times. “My point [at the debate] Thursday was that he can’t ride his business experience to office when something like this was going on right under his nose without his knowledge. It now appears that whether he knew about Akamai’s specific activities or not, he has no problem with making money distributing pornography.”

What Holt and his campaign do not mention, naturally, is that Akamai is essentially an ISP, and as such, does business with a wide variety of legal online businesses. Although, after receiving negative attention for its dealing with the porn industry in 2002, Akamai moved to “phase out” its contracts with adult clients, as Holt’s campaign does note in the release.

In defending Akamai, Halter reportedly responded at the debate by saying that Akamai “delivers content over the Internet in the same way that phone companies deliver content over phone lines,” adding that is “hard to imagine somebody saying that the manufacturers of video tapes or phone companies are pornographers because of what somebody else does with their product..”

Holt took exception to this, saying that Halter’s “analogy is flawed.”

“If someone goes to the store and buys a blank tape and puts teen porn on it, the tape company is not responsible because they can’t know what is going to be on the tape,” Holt argued. “But if a company signs a contract with someone making teen porn to distribute the tapes, then they are responsible. They know what is on the tapes. Akamai knew what the content was. So does Bill Halter, but he is using flawed analogies to defend his company’s role as cultural polluters.”

Apparently, there are plenty of people in the federal government that are less concerned about Akamai’s “role as cultural polluters” than Holt, as Akamai’s other clients include the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, and Treasury.

Among Akamai’s corporate clients are Audi, NBC and Fujitsu, according to the Akamai website.

So what does the Halter campaign make of Holt’s crowing about porn and gambling?

“You can’t trust Jim Holt,” said campaign manager Michael Cook in a press release responding to the Holt campaign’s statements. “Holt is a professional politician, running a desperate campaign, who will lie, and say or do anything to get elected.”

Cook added that “what makes his (Holt’s) behavior even more reprehensible is the fact that he knows the truth because it has already been widely reported during the primary run-off election. The same person, Dan Noble, who ran the Democratic campaign that made these false charges back in June is now running Jim Holt’s campaign.”

This article is not, and should not be construed as, an endorsement of any political candidate.