If clemency for Maurice Clemmons were the only fatal error committed by Mike Huckabee as governor of Arkansas, he might be able to shift blame to the state's law enforcement system and even run for president again in 2012. Yet the Clemmons commutation that he granted nine years ago is only one among several cases that raise serious questions about Huckabee's judgment.
Clemmons, the fugitive suspect in the shooting deaths of four police officers, was hit in the torso by return fire from one of the cops who later died, he escaped.
Having accumulated five felony convictions in Arkansas and at least eight felony charges in Washington, according to the Seattle Times, Clemmons was undoubtedly a danger to the community who ought to have been returned to prison long ago by law enforcement authorities. Only days before the police shooting, he was released on $150,000 bail from a jail in Pierce County, Wash., where he was incarcerated on charges of raping a child.
As Huckabee suggested in a statement released on Monday, courts and law enforcement agencies in Washington should probably share the blame for Sunday's carnage. "Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, " the statement said, referring to Clemmons, "it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State."
In short, Huckabee was arguing, the killings attributed to Clemmons were not Huckabee's fault. Certainly they were not his fault alone. But this incident has revived memories of other decisions he made that later led to terrible consequences. The damage to his political future will hinge on how deeply news organizations now delve into those cases -- and the bizarre faith-based rationale behind his use of the clemency and pardon powers of the governor.
Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state's draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.
No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee's tendency to believe such pious testimonials. "I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak," he explained in his clemency application in 2000. "I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family's name ... I have never done anything good for God, but I've prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start."
Surely the most notorious instance of misplaced mercy involved Wayne Dumond, a rapist and murderer now deceased, who was originally sent to prison in Arkansas for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. During Clinton's presidency the Dumond case became an obsession among certain right-wing pundits and politicians, who insisted that Dumond had been framed and brutalized by the "Clinton machine." When Huckabee became governor, he supported a parole for Dumond, winning applause from the Republican right -- until the former prisoner raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. Dumond later died in prison, under suspicion that he had murdered at least one other woman after his Arkansas release -- a tragic outcome for which Huckabee has repeatedly tried to blame others, including his two Democratic predecessors in the statehouse.
The real engine behind Dumond's release, however, was a Baptist minister and ultra-conservative ideologue named Jay Cole, who also happened to be a friend of Huckabee. Cole would tell the governor about his visits with the supposedly innocent Dumond, when the minister and the prisoner would read the Bible and pray together.
Perhaps the worst instance of that same syndrome, chronicled in detail by Arkansas journalists, concerned an Air Force sergeant named Glen Green, who was sentenced to prison for life after confessing that he had raped and killed a teenage girl. After beating the woman with nunchucks, he violated her almost lifeless body, ran over her with his car and buried her in a swamp. But yet another preacher friend of Huckabee's named Rev. Johnny Jackson somehow persuaded the governor that this incredibly brutal killing had been an "accident" -- and that Green had repented, come to Jesus and therefore should be freed.
Two years ago, I noted that Huckabee knew almost nothing about the Green case beyond what his preacher pal had told him. He consulted neither the prosecutor nor the victim's family, and overruled the dissent of his own parole board. After he announced that Green would be released, the furious public reaction forced him to reverse the decision. Yet he continued to release murderers and other violent criminals despite angry dissent from local prosecutors.
Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader. Among the thugs who benefited from his mercy was a robber who beat an old man to death with a lead pipe.
During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee's arrogance and stupidity mostly escaped the full scrutiny of the national press corps, in part because his stint as a contender was so brief. But next time, if there is a next time, he should get no such free pass -- and his claims to divine guidance ought to be thoroughly debunked.
Note: This story was updated after publication with news of Clemmons' reported death.
"I can confirm, Laura, that I do have a soul."
That's former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, talking to radio host Laura Ingraham about the new book "Game Change," in which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is quoted as saying, "I don't think Romney has a soul."
This isn't a religious argument, though Romney also made a joke about that; it's about the sense many observers have -- and apparently, many of his opponents as well -- that Romney's principles are very flexible and depend upon electoral politics.
(Hat-tip to Hotline On Call.)
Another week, another grotesque mass shooting: In Washington state this time, leaving four police officers dead, four families destroyed and nine children's lives shattered. As it's politically unfashionable to wonder whether Americans shouldn't do more to keep semi-automatic handguns away from crazy people, attention soon focused on why mass murderer Maurice Clemmons wasn't locked away, where he belonged.
Once again, former Arkansas Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee struggled to explain his catastrophically poor judgment. Once again, a violent felon turned loose on his say-so had run amok. Once again, according to Huckabee, currently a Fox News Channel talk show host, the disaster was everybody's fault but his own. He issued a buck-passing statement blaming "a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington."
Assisted by an absurdly deferential Bill O'Reilly on Fox, Huckabee attempted to shift blame to Washington judges who'd freed Clemmons on $150,000 bail pending trial for child rape. Why, had he known Clemmons would go berserk, he vowed, he'd never have commuted his sentence in 2000. (One can only imagine O'Reilly's reaction to this self-serving blather had Huckabee been a Democrat.)
The Washington tragedy almost surely marks the end of Huckabee's political career. Ironically, however, for once his alibi is more right than wrong. For his own protection and everybody else's, Clemmons ought to have been inside a locked-down psychiatric unit. The system failed from top to bottom.
But let's start at the top, shall we? Although he posed as a conservative hard-liner, when it came to crime and punishment, the glib, self-deprecating Huckabee proved as softheaded and gullible as the woolliest sociology professor in the faculty lounge.
During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.
Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."
Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.
The most notorious was Wayne DuMond, Arkansas' celebrity inmate of the '90s. Convicted in 1985 of raping a Forrest City cheerleader at knifepoint, DuMond was a glib psychopath who persuaded ideologically deranged crackpots who circulated Clinton administration "death lists" that he'd been framed. DuMond's victim, see, was a distant cousin of the then-president's. Articles appeared in places like the New York Post portraying him as a victim of the Satanic Clinton machine.
Becoming governor after Kenneth Starr deposed his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, Huckabee came into office publicly doubting DuMond's guilt and talking about a pardon. After the prosecutor and the victim herself courageously objected, Huckabee pulled some hugger-mugger with the parole board that ended up freeing Dumond -- the proud recipient of a "Dear Wayne" letter from the governor celebrating his release.
In 2001, DuMond was arrested and subsequently convicted of the rape and murder of a Missouri woman. Huckabee's 2007 campaign bio titled, get this, "Character Makes a Difference," falsely claimed that DuMond died in prison awaiting trial. The man's worse than a hypocrite; he's a fool. Even so, establishment pundits pretty much gave Huckabee a pass. After all, he's so charming on television. Anyway, where, exactly, is Kansas City?
Maurice Clemmons, too, played the holy card to Huckabee, who got him turned loose back in 2000. But the governor had no seeming role in Arkansas' failure to revoke Clemmons' parole after he was convicted of two more armed robberies in 2001, bringing his total to seven felonies. He was released in 2004.
Nor was Huckabee involved in Washington's decision to free Clemmons on bail with seven pending felony charges -- one involving forcing 11- and 12-year-old relatives to strip naked and fondle him while he pronounced that he was Jesus. President Obama, Clemmons proclaimed, would soon declare him the Messiah. These are unmistakable symptoms of criminal psychosis.
How and why Washington authorities failed to act is frankly beyond comprehension.
A sheriff's spokesman in Washington state says Seattle police have fatally shot the man suspected of gunning down four police officers.
Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer says Maurice Clemmons was shot and killed early Tuesday in a Seattle neighborhood. Authorities suspected Clemmons of killing the four Lakewood officers at a coffee shop Sunday morning in Parkland, a Tacoma suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle.
Troyer says Seattle police found Clemmons after Pierce County authorities supplied addresses of possible hiding spots.
Police have said they aren't sure what prompted Clemmons to shoot the officers as they did paperwork on their laptops. Clemmons was described as increasingly erratic in the past few months.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has a problem, and that problem has a name -- Maurice Clemmons. Clemmons is currently a fugitive, suspected of shooting and killing four police officers. And Huckabee's the man who set him free.
In 1989, Clemmons -- then, at 17, still a minor -- was convicted of aggravated robbery and given a 95 year sentence. But in 2000, Huckabee commuted his sentence, making him eligible for parole; Clemmons reportedly violated that parole, and was sent back to prison, but was released for good in 2004. Now, Huckabee's presidential hopes may be tied to him.
In some sense, that's unfair. Governors often act on someone else's recommendation in a situation like this one -- Huckabee says that's what happened here -- and a certain percentage of recidivism is unavoidable. Huckabee may just be a victim, like Mike Dukakis was with Willie Horton, of circumstance.
However, this isn't the first time one of Huckabee's actions in this vein has come back to haunt him. And the first case can't really be written off to chance. When the then-governor commuted the sentence of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond, it was for political reasons -- opponents of former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton believed that DuMond had been railroaded because his victim was a distant relative of Clinton's. DuMond went on to sexually assault and murder a woman.
President Obama can rest a little easier tonight, as a new poll shows him leading potential Republican opponents in 2012.
Yes, of course, that election is three years away, and it's absurdly early to be talking about it, much less polling on it. But this survey -- conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm -- does have some interesting results beyond the topline.
First of all, it does appear that Obama's rebounding after a difficult summer, expanding his lead against the various potential challengers.
And then the performance of those challengers is interesting in and of itself. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee continues to be the strongest performer against Obama, with 41 percent of respondents saying they'd vote for him against 48 percent for Obama. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney does pretty well, too, with 39 percent of respondents opting for him over the same 48 percent for Obama.
But Sarah Palin, until recently the governor of Alaska, is slipping. The percentage of respondents who say they have a favorable opinion of her has fallen to a dismal 37 percent, versus 55 percent who view her unfavorably. And in a general election matchup against Obama, she does worse than a guy who has Bush for a last name. 37 percent of those polled said they'd vote for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush over Obama, who got 50 percent in that particular head-to-head. On the other hand, while 38 percent of respondents did choose Palin over Obama, it seems that her name on the ticket drove an additional three percent to the president.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Thursday that politicizing the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy "defies good taste." Apparently, he meant that to apply only to Democrats who are pushing for passage of healthcare reform, because he then went on to say this, as reported by Huffington Post's Sam Stein:
"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow-up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."
Of course, what Huckabee said about the Democratic plan -- and, for that matter, about what Obama had said -- was completely untrue. What Obama actually said was quite different:
I don’t want bureaucracies making those decisions. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they’re not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they’re being made by private insurers...
[W]hat we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know, and your mom know, that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help, maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.
Those are decisions that are being made by doctors and patients every day now, especially when it comes to terminal cancer. Unfortunately, in many cases there comes a point where the drawbacks to treatments like surgery and chemotherapy outweigh the potential benefits -- or where they're just not working well, and the decision's made to start focusing on making the patient comfortable in their final days. And, in fact, according to the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, Kennedy himself made a decision like that earlier this year. Leibovich writes, "By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority."
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