In the aftermath of this week’s shootings of four police officers in a coffee shop outside Tacoma, Wash., commentators and citizens are outraged at the long-ago decision of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to commute the sentence of the killer, Maurice Clemmons.
Huckabee explained to Bill O’Reilly yesterday evening on The O’Reilly Factor that in 2000, he granted clemency, not freedom or a pardon, to Clemmons, who was in prison as a result of a seven-month crime spree of armed robbery, firearms possession, and burglary when he was 16. Clemency meant that Clemmons’ sentence was reduced and he became eligible for parole.
The parole board then let him out and, according to Huckabee, Clemmons violated his parole, but because prosecutors did not promptly file paperwork, they had to drop charges against him.
Huckabee is not the only one to blame here and, indeed, the actions of Washington State judges John McCarthy and Thomas J. Felnagle, who much more recently released Clemmons on $15,000 bail after he was charged with child rape, seem far more egregious. Also, Huckabee granted the clemency for crimes Clemmons committed when he was a minor, and he had not yet committed especially heinous violent crimes.
But Huckabee’s record of granting clemencies and pardons does raise serious questions about him as a potential nominee for the 2012 Republican nomination. According to The Arkansas Leader, Governor Huckabee single-handedly granted more pardons and commutations than all the other governors of Arkansas combined from 1967 till 1996.
Arkansas Leader crime reporter Garrick Feldman wrote a persuasive column in the late 1990’s chronicling the Governor’s decision to make eligible for parole a particularly heinous criminal.(Again it should be noted that, ironically, Clemens is not the best example of Huckabee’s tendency to be dangerously liberal, because although Clemens went on to commit horrible crimes, he had not committed such extreme acts of violence at the time Huckabee granted him clemency. Also, as the New York Daily News reported today, in recent years Clemens seems to have become intermittently delusional, which he does not appear to have been at the time Huckabee granted the clemency. Like so many cases in which the mentally ill/criminally insane take innocent lives, this one may reflect our society’s absymal neglect of the mentally ill and inadequacy at confronting/treating mental illness).
Examination of a letter Clemmons sent Huckabee in the early 1990’s, excerpts of which the Seattle Times printed in today’s paper, suggest one possibility as to Huckabee’s motivation in granting so many pardons and clemencies: “Clemmons wrote that he came from ‘a very good Christian family’ and ‘was raised much better than my actions speak’ (I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought to my family name.)’”
I am normally cautious to blame Christian religious fundamentalism for people’s lapses, because doing so all-too-often reflects knee-jerk left-wing prejudice against believers, who are often characterized as “scary” for no good reason. But in this case, I wonder if the former Governor is so infatuated with his religious ideals that he lets them dictate his behavior to a dangerous extent.
Overall, I get the impression Governor Huckabee is a nice, and rather naive, guy — too nice to be in charge of criminal sentencing, and too naive to be commander-in-chief in a lawless world.
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Regardless of one’s political affiliation, most would agree that Huckabee’s decision to commute Clemmons’ sentence has eliminated any chance of Huckabee running for president in 2012, notwithstanding Huckabee’s attempt to explain away his actions on Fox.
So much to say on this issue. Yet, the editorial in an Arkansas paper which knows Huckabee better than most says it well:
Huckabee Self-Destructs
A few days ago, Republicans were more apt to view Mike Huckabee as a suitable candidate for president than any of the other prospects, including Sarah Palin, whose book tour was eclipsing his own. Today, that is mere history.
He will not be Arkansas’ second president or even his party’s nominee.
That is a crass way to think about the tragedy in Spanaway, Wash.,[sic] where an ex-convict from Pulaski County who had been freed from a life sentence by Huckabee executed four young police officers who were having coffee before beginning their patrols.
But there is an insatiable desire to assess accountability when these things happen, and our former governor cannot and did not escape his large share of it.
Huckabee survived Wayne Dumond’s murders and made himself the knight of the powerful religious wing of the Republican Party, but the blood of six innocent people cannot be charmed away.
(You remember Wayne Dumond, who murdered two women in Missouri after Huckabee made him eligible for immediate parole from Cummins Prison.)
Huckabee’s boss, Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, can explain to him how this works. Ailes, the media consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, came up with the Willie Horton ads, which doomed the presidential campaign of Gov. Mike Dukakis in 1988.
William Horton (Ailes changed his name to “Willie” so that people would know that he was a black man) committed rape and robbery while he was on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.
They tested that knowledge in focus groups and found that it turned voters against Dukakis, so they saturated the airwaves with ads of a black man walking through swinging cell doors.
Dukakis didn’t personally furlough Horton. Huckabee personally granted clemency to Dumond, Maurice Clemmons and others who resumed their criminal careers. There is a sympathetic and tragic side to Huckabee’s own fall. He never wanted or expected the men he liberated — 167 in his 10 years as governor — to resume their crime sprees.
He acted always out of Christian charity, he said. He said he knew that the politically safe thing to do was to rarely use his clemency power, as Bill Clinton, Jim Guy Tucker and Mike Beebe seldom did, but the Bible instructed him to be compassionate and to forgive.
We never quarreled with his compassion but with his judgment. If a convict could get the governor’s ear and convince him that he had found Jesus and turned his life around or he could get a preacher to intercede with the governor, he was apt to go free.
Clemmons, who killed the four officers in Tacoma, wrote Huckabee in 2000 that he had discovered Jesus and he prayed that God would move the governor to reduce his 108-year sentence to time served.
Huckabee never said whether he sought God’s guidance, as he often did, or whether he assumed that Clemmons had gotten through to God. Cell conversions have a magnificent history in Arkansas.
Many will remember James Dean Walker, Arkansas’ most celebrated criminal before Dumond. Walker, a Las Vegas thug, was in Pulaski County on some criminal errand in 1963 when he killed a cop after a chase down Hwy. 165 toward England.
He found Jesus in prison, developed a big ministerial following and while on a prison furlough to witness for Christ he escaped and started a new life of crime in California.
We would be more sympathetic if Huckabee had followed the biblical injunctions about bearing false witness and accepting blame as devoutly as he did those about charity and forgiveness.
Instead, as he did with Dumond, he blamed everyone else: the boards he appointed that recommended clemency for Clemmons and carried out the governor’s wishes, prosecutors, the Pulaski County judge who supported Clemmons’ plea over the objections of victims, the prosecutor and the parole administrator, and judges in the state of Washington who let him go free in the midst of a crime spree.
To tell his side, Huckabee on Monday arranged to go on the Bill O’Reilly show, where his friend questioned him ever so gingerly. He fudged the details, claiming that Clemmons had gotten those 108 years in prison for only two crimes (there were eight).
He explained that he had been moved by Clemmons’ account that he was only 16 when he did some of the stuff and that he had turned his life around. He said he grieved for the families of the dead officers, but O’Reilly would not let him accept responsibility, not a bit.
O’Reilly said it was the fault of prosecutors and the judges in Washington who let him go free on bond. He was furious with them. It was the failure of the criminal justice system in two states, Huckabee said.
That’s it! The system is to blame. So now Huckabee can wash his hands of it and continue his book tour.
http://www.arkansasleader.com/2009/12/editorial-huckabee-self-destructs.html
What a fair and balanced piece! It would be so easy to simply write him off as a religious fanatic, but most often, that knee-jerk reaction comes from people who don’t have the depth or intelligence to truly evaluate another person’s actions (religion aside). I’m with you…I don’t think Huckabee should sit in the Oval Office. He has a history of making weak and poor choices, and in this “lawless world” (as you so aptly put it). we need a man or woman who has a strong sense of justice. Excellent piece!
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