When a man kills four police officers sitting in a coffee shop and the killer is later shot dead by police, it’s only natural to look for someone to blame. Accomplices have been arrested for assisting Maurice Clemmons in his execution-style murders near Tacoma last weekend, and judges and parole officers in Washington state and Arkansas should be asked some tough questions about why he roamed free. But the person who has received the most scrutiny in the case is also the least responsible: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
In 1989, at age 16, Clemmons was sentenced to 108 years in prison for burglary and robbery without the use of a weapon in the state of Arkansas. Eleven years later, Huckabee, the governor and an ordained Baptist minister, commuted the sentence to 47 years so Clemmons would be eligible for parole. Huckabee has said he commuted the sentence because Clemmons, a black man, had already served more time than an upper-class white 16-year-old would have been sentenced and he deserved a second chance.
Clemmons later fled to Washington state and went on to commit more felonies, including raping a 12-year-old female family member. Though his later arrests violated his parole, Arkansas authorities made no effort to extradite him. A judge released Clemmons on bond just days before his shooting spree.
In the wake of Clemmons’ horrifying crimes, right-wing pundits and operatives for other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates have used the case as evidence that Huckabee is soft on crime. Conservative bloggers have suggested Huckabee is culpable for the murders of police officers.
The story has recklessly been labeled Huckabee’s “Willie Horton,” after the man who raped and murdered while on a weekend furlough from prison authorized by former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Republicans used Horton gratuitously during the 1988 presidential campaign in perhaps the dirtiest and most racially-charged political ad ever.
It is a danger to democracy and the criminal justice system to perpetuate the idea that public officials should be held responsible for the future crimes of those they offer minimal empathy. Politicians will be discouraged from offering second chances when the news media give credence to constant political campaigning that looks for hooks in current events to rehash old smears. The originators of such attacks are looking to end a career — or simply want to end empathy.
Perhaps a Republican governor willing to publicly question the racial biases of the criminal justice system is too much of a heretic to fit in the party. Huckabee has always been a little too populist, a little too legitimately religious for a party that excels at pandering to believers and falters at delivering a more just world.
But Huckabee’s career should also serve as a warning to those voters who seek a religious man in office. Too often — especially when commuting prison sentences — Huckabee governed as a minister. He signed off on thousands of commutations in his 10 and a half years in office; more than twice the number his three predecessors commuted combined, more than the governors of five neighboring states combined.
With numbers like that, one commutation was bound to turn out like Clemmons. Huckabee’s penchant for redemption is a warning of the dangers of theocracy. But the attacks coming from his right are illegitimate. Huckabee did not murder anybody last weekend; Maurice Clemmons did.
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Clemmons, not Huckabee, guilty
Daily Emerald
December 3, 2009
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