Arkansas: church elder and Sunday-school superintendent's civil liability for abusing a 13-year-old parishioner affirmed on appeal
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Material that narrows or disputes the record
Appellate history
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Arkansas Court of Appeals affirmed the liability judgment on January 28, 2026; only the unrelated attorney-fee cross-appeal issue was reversed and remanded.
Record class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
church elder and Sunday-school superintendent
Organization
No organization assigned
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Smith was MC1's church elder and the Sunday-school superintendent; the appellate opinion expressly frames the relationship as 'he was a church elder, and she was a parishioner' in finding sexual contact by a person in a position of trust to be actionable. MC1's father brought suit on her behalf as next friend but is not the perpetrator.
- Pastoral or clerical authority
Evidence structure
Proceedings
2020-02-27 · criminal guilty plea
Carroll County Circuit Court, Arkansas. Lester Smith, a 74-year-old church elder and Sunday-school superintendent, pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of MC1, a 13-year-old parishioner at his church.
2026-01-28 · civil appeal, No. CV-24-131
Arkansas Court of Appeals. Affirmed on direct appeal. The court held Smith's undisputed admission that he had sexual contact with MC1 when she was 13, and his status as her church elder with her as a parishioner, supported summary judgment on liability; the jury had awarded MC1 $100,000 in compensatory and $1 million in punitive damages. Reversed and remanded only on the separate cross-appeal issue of attorney fees.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- position as church elder and Sunday-school superintendent over a 13-year-old parishioner
Cited record
Sources
- official court judgment civil appellate judgment Smith v. Eastwood, 2026 Ark. App. 48 (Jan. 28, 2026).
Arkansas Court of Appeals opinion affirming liability judgment against church elder Lester Smith for sexual abuse of parishioner MC1, based on his guilty plea to second-degree sexual assault and his position of trust as church elder and Sunday-school superintendent.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2026/01/28/lester_buckley_smith_v._vince_eastwood_as_parent_and_next_friend_of_two_1.pdf Corpus classification: official-court-judgment; evidentiary role: civil-appellate-judgment. SHA-256 7f57e2fe1c8e41f63545352ce4eb34ee40f85d2c838a75da41ff9c8ac9b0b190
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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