Crush Liberalism

Huckabee’s Willie Horton

Those of you unfamiliar with the Willie Horton saga, used in the 1988 presidential campaign, get your refresher here.  It looks like Huck has one of his own Wille Horton incidents with which to deal.  Excerpts from CBS News (though I think they may be authentic anyway!):

… And then there’s the story of Wayne DuMond.

In 1985, DuMond was convicted of the rape of a 17-year-old girl with a connection to then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton: She was the governor’s distant cousin and the daughter of a major campaign contributor. (Funny, and not in the humorous way, that Bubba got away with rape but DuMond didn’t, huh? – Ed.)

As Clinton rose to national prominence, the case came to the attention of his critics. Journalists and talk show hosts questioned the victim’s story and suggested that DuMond had been railroaded by the former governor. Steve Dunleavy, a New York Post columnist, took up the case as a cause, calling DuMond’s conviction “a travesty of justice.”

The story also came with a tabloid-ready twist: DuMond said that while awaiting trial, masked men broke into his house and castrated him. Though there were doubts about the story (wouldn’t that be pretty easy to verify? – Ed.), it engendered sympathy for DuMond among Clinton foes.
…
When Huckabee became governor in 1996, he expressed doubts about DuMond’s guilt and said he was considering commuting his sentence to time served. After the victim and her supporters protested, Huckabee decided against commutation. But in 1997, according to the Kansas City Star, Huckabee wrote a letter to DuMond saying “my desire is that you be released from prison.” Less than a year later, DuMond was granted parole.

Huckabee’s office denied that the governor played a role in the parole board’s decision, but there was evidence (exhaustively detailed here) to contradict that claim.

Charles Chastain, a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who was on the parole board at the time, told CBSNews.com the governor met with the board to argue on DuMond’s behalf.

“He thought DuMond had gotten a raw deal,” said Chastain, who calls himself neutral towards Huckabee. “He said he’d been born on the wrong side of the tracks and hadn’t been treated all that fairly.”
…
After the meeting, Chastain said, a number of the board members “switched their vote” from the previous year, and DuMond was paroled.
…
DuMond’s release was delayed because a number of states did not want to take him in, but he left prison in 1999 and ended up in Missouri. Not long after he arrived, he was arrested again – this time for sexually assaulting and murdering a woman named Carol Sue Shields. DuMond was also the leading suspect in the rape and murder of another woman. He was convicted of murdering Shields and died in prison in 2005.

Pressure on the parole board, or bad judgment?  You tell me.  Either way, he hasn’t been entirely truthful on the matter (not very minister-like, is it?) and hasn’t accepted responsibility for exercising poor judgment in championing the rapist’s cause.

December 4, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | Huckabee