The Trail: A Daily Diary of Campaign 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119845454582347775.html

Judging Huckabee's Clemencies
Prison Commutations Under Scrutiny;
What Role Did Faith Play?
By MARY JACOBY
December 24, 2007; Page A4

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- In 2004, Mike Huckabee granted clemency to John Henry Claiborne III, a man facing the prospect of life in prison for a violent crime spree committed 11 years earlier.

The grant came following the plea of a prominent African-American evangelical supporter of Mr. Huckabee, then the Republican Arkansas governor -- and over the objections of Mr. Claiborne's victims, and the prosecutor in the case.

As Mr. Huckabee has surged to the top of the Republican presidential race, scrutiny of his record here in Little Rock has grown. One element in particular is the high number of prison-sentence commutations and pardons that Mr. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, granted during his decade in office -- more than a thousand, or twice those of the previous three governors combined.

One of Mr. Huckabee's opponents, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, has zeroed in on the clemencies to paint Mr. Huckabee as soft on crime. Mr. Huckabee has responded that his governing philosophy included a willingness to give people "a second chance."

The clemency decisions go to the heart of Mr. Huckabee's message: part Christian moral conservatism, part liberal-leaning social conscience. Little Rock lobbyist J. J. Vigneault, a former political aide to Mr. Huckabee, says of his former boss's faith: "I do think it has the potential to influence everything he does."

The minister who would eventually become Mr. Claiborne's champion began his political relationship with Mr. Huckabee around 1993.

The Rev. Charles E. Williams, of the Covenant of Zion Cathedral Church in Little Rock, grew up in Cleveland, Miss., the son of sharecroppers. His family of 10 lived in a shack with no plumbing beside their cotton field, and his tale of childhood hardship echoes the one Mr. Huckabee often tells of his own upbringing. "But we were never on welfare. And my parents taught us to value America and its values, despite deep racism," Mr. Williams says in an interview at his church in a blighted area near downtown Little Rock.

After Mr. Williams moved from Mississippi to Arkansas, he met Mr. Huckabee, then the lieutenant governor, at an event at the state capitol. Mr. Huckabee greeted Mr. Williams with a big hug, Mr. Williams recalls. "We bonded. The guy is as comfortable around blacks as he is any other people," he says.

Messrs. Huckabee and Williams -- now both 52 years old -- shared a belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible and a strong opposition to abortion and homosexuality.

Mr. Huckabee took office as governor in 1996. In 2001 he appointed Mr. Williams to a post on the state Claims Commission reviewing tort litigation, a position that paid around $20,000 a year. Mr. Williams served on the panel until 2006.

Mr. Williams was part of Mr. Huckabee's network in the religious African-American community. Mr. Huckabee regularly won around 20% of the black vote in his gubernatorial races in Arkansas, substantially more than any other Republican candidate for statewide office. Much of that support came from his close connections with black evangelical ministers in the state, allowing him to tap their networks for votes, said former aide Mr. Vigneault.

Over the years, Mr. Williams brought what he thought were worthy clemency applications to Mr. Huckabee's attention. "I would pray over them, weigh how heinous was the crime," he says.

In an interview, Mr. Huckabee said of Mr. Williams, "I've known him for many, many years." He said he couldn't remember whether Mr. Williams had influenced any specific clemency cases. "I'm sure he wrote letters for somebody," he said, but added: "One letter is never going to be the thing."

One application Mr. Williams promoted was from Mr. Claiborne.

Mr. Claiborne, who will turn 40 on Friday, grew up in Little Rock. In 1991, while he was living in Washington state, Mr. Claiborne was convicted of robbery and possessing stolen property and went to prison briefly. When he got out, he returned to Little Rock.

On the morning of April 1, 1993, according to a prosecutor's notes, Mr. Claiborne broke into the home of 72-year-old Cloy Evans, in a working-class neighborhood of Little Rock. Mr. Claiborne tied Mr. Evans to a chair and ripped his phone from the wall. He ransacked his house. He took a shotgun and rifles and headed next door.

Vivian Allbritton had just come inside from hanging the laundry when Mr. Claiborne broke down her back door. He ordered her and her husband, Homer, a World War II veteran, to lie on the kitchen floor, and pointed the shotgun at their heads. He ripped the wedding rings from Mrs. Allbritton's fingers, according to her son, Greg.

Mr. Allbritton, then 69 years old, started to have chest pains. Still, he tried to flee for help. But he slipped and fell, and Mr. Claiborne dragged him back inside the house and ransacked their home, according to Greg Allbritton and the prosecutor.

Mr. Claiborne left in the couple's 1983 Mercury. A few weeks later, Homer Allbritton suffered a heart attack, his son says. After he had committed seven more felony crimes for which he was convicted, Mr. Claiborne was apprehended.

Mr. Claiborne went to prison on a 375-year sentence, which was later reduced to 100 years by Mr. Huckabee's predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker. Mr. Claiborne repeatedly applied for early release, Greg Allbritton says.

Mr. Williams said he pushed for Mr. Claiborne's early release because his family asked for his help. "And I want to help people," he says, declining to elaborate. Mr. Williams says in general he would lobby the governor in person when he saw him at political or official events.

In 2004, the Allbrittons got word that Gov. Huckabee was going to back Mr. Claiborne's commutation request. "It was like anyone who said they'd found Jesus could get Gov. Huckabee to commute their sentence," says Greg Allbritton, whose father, Homer, had died in 2001. Greg called the Pulaski County prosecutor, Larry Jegley, to complain about Mr. Huckabee's decision.

"When I heard his story, I got angry," says Mr. Jegley, a Democrat. Mr. Jegley held a press conference to press Mr. Huckabee for a moratorium on clemencies. Of Mr. Claiborne and his list of felony convictions, he says: "This guy was trouble."

Mr. Huckabee plays down the idea that arguments for redemption influenced his clemency decisions. "Everybody in jail will always claim to have a conversion," he says. "You look at institutional records, disciplinaries, recommendations from prosecutors, police, friends, family, whether they have a job." The Huckabee campaign declined to comment on Mr. Claiborne's case.

After Mr. Claiborne was granted parole in 2004, he married the sister of Mr. Williams, the minister.

In September of this year, a police officer found Mr. Claiborne slumped over the wheel of his car in the middle of a Little Rock intersection, passed out. The officer found marijuana, small bags and a scale in the car with Mr. Claiborne. He was charged with possessing a controlled substance with the intent to distribute. Mr. Claiborne is now out of jail on $15,000 bond, court records show.

Mr. Claiborne couldn't be reached for comment, and Mr. Williams declined to arrange an interview with him. But, Mr. Williams said in an interview last week: "He's doing real well."

--Laura Meckler contributed to this article.

Write to Mary Jacoby at mary.jacoby@wsj.com

Now looks who's waving his arms in the air and telling the voters we'll clobber 'em in New Hampshire. Senator McCain was so excited that Governor Romney lost to Governor Huckabee in Iowa, that the Senator failed to see that he himself was beaten three votes to one by Huckabee in Iowa.

Don't you just love Republican Rovian politics? Willie Horton, Swiftboaters, Wayne Dumond.

Huckabee's right, there is a movement all right - a smelly neocon Christian extremist one.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTcyMTM5YzRiMzVjMjA3MGEwMjUwM2Y3NGJiMzM1YWY=

December 05, 2007, 4:00 a.m.

The Story Mike Huckabee Dreads
With his new success comes new attention to an old Arkansas crime.

By Byron York

In August, I interviewed former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee about the case of Wayne Dumond, the convicted rapist who was freed under Huckabee's administration, only to rape and kill a woman in neighboring Missouri. The crime attracted enormous attention in Arkansas, but at the time of our interview, it had not made its way into much coverage of Huckabee's presidential bid. "If [Huckabee] continues to rise in the polls," I wrote, "it's likely he'll be talking about it a lot more."

Now Huckabee is rising in the polls, and sure enough, the Dumond case is attracting more attention. This morning, ABC News ran a report featuring the mother of the woman Dumond murdered, who blames Huckabee for her daughter's death and vows to do everything she can to stop his campaign. "I can't imagine anybody wanting somebody like that running the country," the woman told ABC.

For many people, the report is the first they've heard of the Dumond case. Once they learn about it, however, they are unlikely to forget its bizarre details and the strange turn of events that led to Dumond's final crime. The case is the wild card in Mike Huckabee's record, the single most controversial event during his time in the Arkansas governor's office. And it is a potential threat to his now-soaring candidacy.

It began in September 1984, when Dumond, a 35-year-old handyman, kidnapped and raped a 17-year-old high-school cheerleader in the small eastern-Arkansas town of Forrest City. Dumond was allowed to remain free on bond while awaiting trial, and in March 1985 two masked men entered his house, tied him up with fishing line, and castrated him. People were stunned; the case, already notorious, became much more so. And that was before the local sheriff, a rather colorful man named Coolidge Conlee, displayed Dumond's severed testicles in a jar of formaldehyde on his desk in the St. Francis County building. Amid tons of publicity, Dumond was found guilty and sentenced to life plus 20 years.

The case took on a political coloring when it became known that the victim was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. After conviction, Dumond, who claimed he was innocent, asked Clinton for clemency. Clinton declined.

Dumond also argued that even if he were guilty his sentence was excessive, and his position won him some sympathy, not least on the grounds that he had suffered terribly at the hands of those unknown assailants. In April 1992, when Dumond had served just seven years, Lt. Gov. Tucker, acting as governor while Clinton was out of state campaigning for president, commuted Dumond's sentence to a level where he would be eligible for parole. That didn't mean Dumond would go free, only that the state parole board would consider the question. The board declined to free Dumond.

That's where things stood when Huckabee took office on July 15, 1996. Last August, Huckabee told me he had his doubts about Dumond's guilt, and also felt sorry for him over the castration attack. On September 20, just weeks after taking office, Huckabee announced that he intended to set Dumond free, saying that there were "serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt." On October 31, Huckabee met with the parole board. Not long after, the board voted to free Dumond, but on the condition he move to another state. Huckabee was pleased, in part because -- given that the board had voted to free Dumond -- there was no need for Huckabee to commute the sentence or pardon him. So Huckabee denied Dumond's now-irrelevant pardon application while at the same time congratulating him on his soon-to-come freedom. "Dear Wayne," Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. "My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place."

But no state would take Dumond. He remained behind bars for two and a half more years, until the board voted to free him in Arkansas. He was released in October 1999 and returned home. The next year, Dumond left the state, moving to a small town near Kansas City, Mo. Within weeks of arriving, he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman at an apartment complex near his home. The day that happened, everyone knew that freeing Wayne Dumond had been a very, very bad idea.

A political storm erupted. Huckabee sought cover by saying that all he had done was to deny Dumond's pardon application. But some Democrats claimed that Huckabee had pressured the parole board to free Dumond. What actually happened between Huckabee and the board remains unclear to this day, but there is no doubt that Huckabee wanted Wayne Dumond set free. And today, he knows he was terribly wrong, but he still defends his actions. "My only official action was to deny his clemency," Huckabee told me in Iowa. As we talked, Huckabee spread the blame around, not only to Tucker, who originally commuted Dumond's sentence, but to Bill Clinton as well. "Tucker could not have done that without Clinton's full knowledge and approval," Huckabee said.

I asked about the "Dear Wayne" letter. Didn't Huckabee want Dumond to go free? "I thought he would, you know, be clean," Huckabee told me. "And he had a job, he had sponsors lined up, so at the time, I did not have this apprehension that something horrible like that would happen. I did want him to report in [to parole authorities], because I just didn't know -- you never know about a guy like that."

As he talked, Huckabee looked down. "I hate it like crazy," he said. "It's one of the most horrible things ever that he went off and did what he did. It's just terrible. There's nothing you can say, but my gosh, it's the thing you pray never happens. And it did."

The Dumond case followed Huckabee around for the rest of his time in the governor's office. In his 2002 reelection bid, his Democratic opponent based virtually her entire campaign on the issue. And beyond the narrow issue of Dumond, Huckabee's actions raise larger questions about his views on crime and punishment. Critics, and some friends, too, have said Huckabee's position was deeply influenced by his Christian faith. "When I first met him, I was going through his positions on issues and I said, 'You're a conservative, so I'm sure you oppose granting parole for violent felons,'" Dick Morris, the campaign consultant who ran Huckabee's first run for lieutenant governor, told me. "And he said, 'Oh no, I would never take that position, because the concept of Christian duty requires that there is a possibility of forgiveness. The concept of Christian forgiveness requires that we keep open the process of parole -- use it sparingly, but keep it open.'"

When I asked Huckabee about that, he reminded me that he was tough on a lot of criminals, too. "Heck, I executed more people than any governor in the history of the state," Huckabee told me. "It's not something I'm bragging about, I'm just saying that if it had been simply a matter of my Christian conscience saying I don't believe in capital punishment, then I was pretty lousy in my conscience."

Huckabee doesn't duck talking about Dumond or the larger clemency issue. But he doesn't enjoy it, either, given that it was unquestionably the worst thing that happened while he was governor. Now, with the press spotlight shining on him, he has no choice but to explain himself.

--

Byron York, NR's White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President -- and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time .

http://www.patriots247.com/forums/index.php?s=f8556f6dd7d5c4749e7471397ba29f7d&showtopic=1628&st=0&p=12750&#entry12750

Huckabee faces scrutiny for involvement in rapist parole

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Following the release of several new polls suggesting Mike Huckabee has risen into the first tier of the Republican presidential candidates, the former Arkansas governor is facing a fresh round of scrutiny over supporting the parole of a convicted rapist in 1999.

Huckabee, then in his first term as governor, expressed support for the parole of Wayne DuMond, who was serving a life sentence for raping a 17-year-old girl. Less than a year after his release, DuMond was accused of murdering and raping a woman in Kansas City, Missouri, a crime he was eventually convicted of in 2003. He died in prison in 2005.

Huckabee has repeatedly said he wished he had more information about DuMond before advocating the release, and recently told CNN there was no indication DuMond remained a threat.

"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said. "None of us could've predicted what he could've done when he got out." Huckabee also said that the process leading to DuMond's release began under former President Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas.

But new documents posted on the liberal Web site The Huffington Post indicate Huckabee had received letters from several victims of Wayne Dumond's before his release. The letters detailed his past actions and pleaded that he remain incarcerated.

"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," one victim wrote. She described how DuMond had raped her at knifepoint.

In another letter, a woman documented how her mother was raped by DuMond, and said he had told her mother that he would rape her daughter if she did not cooperate.

The Huffington Post says it received the never-before-published letters from a "deeply troubled" former aide to Huckabee who believes the now-presidential candidate has "deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of DuMond's other sexual assaults."

Huckabee spokesman Alice Stewart denied to the Huffington Post that Huckabee ever received any of the letters, but now tells CNN he got at least one from a victim named "Onita" who lived in DeWitt, Arkansas.

It's not clear if this is one of the letters posted on the Huffington Post, because the site has redacted the names.

The Huffington Post has published three victims' letters, and says it will post additional files later Wednesday.

- CNN's Dana Bash and Alexander Mooney

It's still very early for results and conjecture. Although it's fun; let's see what the situation looks like around 9:30PM, EST.

Sorry Huckleberry, But it is Mitt Romney, who can honestly say, HE does not need to place first!

See, if Huckleberry takes Iowa, and McCain somehow takes New Hampshire, and Giuliani somehow Takes Floriduh, Etc., Etc., while Mitt Consistently takes the second spot, Mitt Wins! Then the Nation starts to realize there is a reason HE is the most Consistent Candidate, and the others seem to have Pockets of support!

He is the one most Qualified!

"We don't have to finish first to feel we've been successful," he said.

But it wouldn't hurt either ; )

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