LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (ABP) — The Dec. 1 police shooting of suspected cop killer Maurice Clemmons has renewed allegations that, as governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee paid more attention to preachers and professed jailhouse conversions than prosecutors and parole boards in deciding to commute the sentences of prisoners.
As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee pardoned or shortened sentences of more than 1,000 prisoners, including Maurice Clemmons, a suspect in the murder of four police officers in Washington state.
Mike Huckabee spoke at the 2009 Southern Baptist Pastors' Conference in Louisville, Ky. (BP photo by Kent Harville)
|
Clemmons, suspected of gunning down four police officers at a coffee shop in a Lakewood, Wash., strip mall Nov. 29, was one of 1,033 people who were pardoned or had sentences reduced during Huckabee’s 10 1/2 years as governor. That was twice as many clemencies as were granted by his three immediate predecessors combined.
While many of Huckabee’s pardons were recommended by parole boards, in some he overrode objections of prosecutors, judges and victims’ families and followed recommendations of Baptist preacher friends who vouched for petitioning inmates by claiming they had been born again.
The previously best-known allegation of misplaced mercy became an issue in Huckabee’s presidential candidacy in 2008. Shortly after taking office as governor, Huckabee supported parole for Wayne Dumond, a man sent to prison for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton.
A pastor, radio commentator and conservative political activist in Fayetteville, Ark., named Jay Cole organized other evangelicals in the state to lobby Huckabee for Dumond’s release. Cole was a friend of the governor’s.
Huckabee’s behind-the-scenes efforts to pressure the Clinton-appointed parole board to set Dumond free won praise from right-wing politicians and pundits, who claimed the convicted rapist had been framed by the Clintons’ political machine.
After his release, Dumond raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. He died in prison in 2005. Police believed he was also responsible for another murder after Arkansas set him free.
In another case, Huckabee announced commutation for Glen Green, an Air Force sergeant sentenced to life in prison for raping and killing a teenage girl. Another preacher friend of Huckabee’s, longtime and well-known Baptist pastor Johnny Jackson, reportedly described Green as a “humble Christian man” and insisted the killing was an accident. Prosecutors who put Green behind bars in 1974 argued that he was capable of killing again. Only protests by the victim’s family and media attention forced Huckabee to rescind commutation of Green’s sentence.
Questions about whether the former Baptist preacher’s beliefs about the possibility of spiritual redemption might cloud his judgment as commander in chief have resurfaced as Huckabee tops polls for potential GOP presidential candidates in 2012.
Comparisons have already begun between Clemmons and Willie Horton, a convicted killer and rapist released in a Massachusetts prison-furlough program supported by then-governor Michael Dukakis. Allies of former President George H.W. Bush ran ads during his successful 1988 campaign against Dukakis using Horton to convince voters that the Democratic nominee was soft on crime.
In his 2000 clemency petition, Clemmons appealed to Huckabee, a former pastor and past president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, for mercy.
A former Southern Baptist pastor, Huckabee was a featured preacher at the 2009 SBC pastor's conference in Louisville, Ky.
Clemmons claimed the crimes for which he was then imprisoned were committed when he was 16, during a seven-month spree after he moved from Seattle to a crime-infested neighborhood in Arkansas and fell in with the wrong crowd.
“I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” Clemmons claimed. He said his mother’s death changed his heart, because he now had to live with the knowledge that after all he had put her through he had missed an opportunity to make her proud of him before she passed away.
“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 new start,” Clemmons petitioned. “Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”
The Arkansas Leader, a Little Rock-area newspaper that began writing about Huckabee’s commutations in 2004, said the governor appeared to have a penchant for releasing inmates he happened to meet or who had connections to his family as well as for those vouched for by a fellow minister claiming the prisoner had accepted Christ. As Huckabee’s reputation for granting clemency spread, the number of convicts applying increased.
“We never quarreled with his compassion but with his judgment,” the newspaper opined in a Dec. 1 editorial. “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.”
Huckabee, now host of a TV talk show on Fox News, issued a press release Nov. 29 blaming the “senseless and savage execution of police officers” on a “series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.”
“If I could have known nine years ago this guy was capable of something of this magnitude, obviously, I would never have granted a commutation,” Huckabee said Nov. 30 on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Even before news broke that he had commuted the sentence of Clemmons, Huckabee told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” Nov. 29 it is “less likely than more likely” that he will run for president.
“The reason I wouldn’t is that this Fox gig I’ve got right now, Chris, is really, really wonderful,” Huckabee told Wallace. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh gee, don’t you just want to jump back in it?’ But jumping into the pool, you gotta make sure there is some water in it.”
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.