For Dumond and Huckabee, all of our coverage is here. Also check out four of the court opinions in his case, found below:
There's also this 2001 Village Voice article, The Castration of Wayne Dumond. And Murray Waas's 2002 article on Huckabee and Dumond (republished in 2005.)
The thing about Huckabee's pardons was not that they were bad, but that several made no sense. As we wrote here,
Huckabee granted a lot of deserved pardons while in office, particularly for drug offenders serving excessive sentences. A Governor's use of clemency and pardon power is a good thing. The problem with Huckabee's exercise of the power is that several of his decisions make no sense, he refused to explain his decisions, and he injected his religion into it.
And, on Huckabee's explanations:
Instead of saying, "Yes, I believed Dumond should have been paroled, his sentence was too long, there were doubts about his guilt and I made my thoughts known to the parole board," Huckabee is all over the map, saying he didn't know a lot about the case; he denied clemency and didn't pressure the parole board; it's former Lt. Governor Jim Tucker's fault for reducing Dumond's sentence to 39 1/2 years, making him eligible for parole; Bill Clinton must have known about it; and on and on.
Sometimes the truth will set you free. I think it's too late now for Huckabee. He's caught in a Willie Horton trap, and it's a web of his own making.
Which is really too bad, because while I don't want any Republican as President, someone like Huckabee who is willing to exercise clemency, even if wrong sometimes, is preferable to a candidate like Giuliani who is so intent on furthering his law and order image that he is only capable of showing compassion for former offenders who happen to be his cronies and business associates.
The last thing we need is more Governors hesitant to grant clemency and pardons. By turning the conversation to Wayne Dumond and attacking Huckabee, we're risking the prospects of many other deserving inmates. At a time when states are finally seeing their way to reducing prison time as a way out of their economic problems, when the U.S. continues to imprison more than 2 million people, we need for cooler heads to prevail. Yes, sometimes those granted clemency or parole reoffend. This shouldn't be an argument for restricting it.
We cannot insure that somebody will not re-offend. At the same time, we should not keep others locked up who probably won't just because we're afraid of the political consequences.
The Seattle case is a tragedy. The crime is horrific. But we should never enact policies or laws based on grief or passion arising from a singular event. Cooler heads are needed.
And maybe if Clemmons hadn't been sentenced at 17 to 60 years in prison for a garden-variety burglary, he wouldn't have gone wacko.
From my reading of his Arkansas case decisions last night (available on Lexis.com), the 60 year sentence was determined by a federal court in a habeas action to need reexamination on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel. It was the only one of five convictions being challenged that the court found fault with. The federal court said his attorney failed to seek the recusal of the judge, who before trial accused Clemons of threatening him.
The case got sent back to Arkansas which upheld the conviction and sentence, holding essentially, the lawyer decided to trust the judge to be fair and believed the judge would give concurrent sentences but it turned out he was wrong and so be it, people make mistakes, the 60 year sentence (30 years per each of two counts) stands. That might be enough to send any 17 year old over the edge.
