Les Jones

Politics > Soft on Crime Huckabee Won't Be Republican Nominee

The Huffington Post - Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release:

While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public. Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.

"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's release. "None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out."

But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

In a letter that has never before been made public, one of Dumond's victims warned: "I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to testify against him the next time." Before Dumond was granted parole at Huckabee's urging, records show that Huckabee's office received a copy of this letter from Arkansas' parole board.

Wayne Dumond is Huckabee's Willie Horton, only worse. As Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis implemented a weekend furlough program for convicts. Willie Horton, a convicted murderer sentenced to life in prison, was released one weekend under that program and committed armed robbery and rape. In the 1988 presidential race Al Gore tried to discredit Michael Dukakis, his primary opponent, using the weekend furlough issue. After Dukakis won the primary George H.W. Bush used Horton to discredit Dukakis's law and order credentials.

In Dukakis's case, Horton was an incidental side effect of Dukakis's weekend furlough program. In Huckabee's case he specifically lobbied for a reduced sentence for Dumond by name. Essentially, Huckabee vouched for convicted rapist Dumond as an individual, arguing that despite receiving a life sentence from a jury he should be subject to a lesser sentence because Huckabee couldn't imagine him being a further threat. After being released from prison Demond went on to rape and murder another woman, 23 year old Sara Andrasek.

Huckabee has elsewhere stated that he felt Dumond wasn't a threat. It's also been suggested Dumond wasn't really guilty, but that isn't what Dumon's previous rape victim told Huckabee prior to the clemency, according to the L.A. Times:

The rape victim, Ashley Stevens, became enraged. She and prosecutor Fletcher Long met with Huckabee at the Capitol. They warned him that DuMond would strike again.

At one point in the meeting, Stevens recalled, she stood up, put her face next to Huckabee's and told the governor: "This is how close I was to DuMond. I'll never forget his face, and you'll never forget mine."

The meeting ended, and Long, a Republican, could tell the governor was unmoved: "Most of what I think about him would be unprintable. His actions were just about as arrogant as you can get."

The prosecutor added that Huckabee and Arkansas evangelicals were conned by DuMond's contention that he had been "saved" -- a common ruse by prisoners. "If you're religiously converted," Long said, "how do you go out and kill two women in Missouri?"

And from the Arkansas Leader:

Other governors use their clemency power only rarely, while Huckabee has made it routine. As we've told you before, he has issued more than 700 pardons and commutations during his eight years in office – more than 137 this year alone – and more than his three predecessors combined.

Here are the figures for neighboring states since 1996, when Huckabee took office (and keep in mind the population of these states is nearly 20 times ours):

>> Louisiana – 213.
>> Mississippi – 24.
>> Missouri – 79.
>> Oklahoma – 178.
>> Tennessee – 32.
>> Texas – 98 (includes 36 inmates released because they were convicted on drug charges with planted evidence).

Total: 624 vs. Huckabee's 703.

And in a telling statistic, Huckabee offered clemency to 10 times as many inmates as previous Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Huckabee's Republican opponents will rightfully discredit him on this issue.