Why did Mike Huckabee pardon a rapist?

[boston bean]

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/frontend.php/question?qid=20071028094908AA7u5Gz


Dumond - now dead - was paroled from an Arkansas prison, with then- governor Huckabee’s endorsement, only to sexually assault and kill a woman in Missouri.

Dumond’s case is notorious in Arkansas. In 1984, he raped a 17-year-old girl. While awaiting trial at his home, he was castrated by, he said, masked intruders. Later, after Dumond went to prison for life, some people in Arkansas saw the sentence as excessive, especially given his mutilation.

Huckabee was one, and, after becoming governor in 1996, he announced his desire to commute Dumond’s sentence. Dumond’s rape victim, Ashley Stevens, saw it differently.

Stevens, now 40 and living in the western United States, said she tried to persuade Huckabee not to shorten the sentence for Dumond.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071018/NEWS08/310180085

But it's the case of Wayne DuMond that continues to follow Huckabee.

Upon first taking office in 1996, Huckabee said he backed clemency for DuMond, convicted of the 1984 rape of a Forrest City, Ark., cheerleader who was a distant relative of former President Bill Clinton.

But Huckabee denied clemency the same day a state board granted DuMond parole. DuMond moved to Kansas City and was convicted of suffocating a 39-year-old woman.

"The only clemency I could have given him, because he was parole-eligible, was to commute his sentence to time served with no supervision,'' Huckabee recalled. "I did not have a good feeling about that, did not feel confident that he could just walk out the door without supervision.''

Huckabee denies the claims of some on that parole board who said he tried to get them to grant DuMond parole.

http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=154e1aad-fd18-4efd-8d80-b5dab8559419

The occasion prompts us to republish Murray Waas' prize-winning article for the Arkansas Times in 2002 about the extraordinary steps Gov. Mike Huckabee took to help win Dumond's freedom. He has since blamed others for Dumond's release to kill again, but his actions over many years demonstrated his support for Dumond and, ultimately, the instrumental role he played in the parole board's decision to free him.

New sources, including an advisor to Gov. Mike Huckabee, have told the Arkansas Times that Huckabee and a senior member of his staff exerted behind-the-scenes influence to bring about the parole of rapist Wayne Dumond, who Missouri authorities say raped and killed a woman there shortly after his parole.

Huckabee has denied a role in Dumond’s release, which has become an issue in his race for re-election against Democrat Jimmie Lou Fisher. Fisher says Huckabee’s advocacy of Dumond’s freedom, plus other acts of executive clemency, exhibit poor judgment. In response, Huckabee has shifted responsibility for Dumond’s release to others, claiming former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker made Dumond eligible for parole and saying the Post Prison Transfer Board made the decision on its own to free Dumond.

But the Times’ new reporting shows the extent to which Huckabee and a key aide were involved in the process to win Dumond’s release. It was a process marked by deviation from accepted parole practice and direct personal lobbying by the governor, in an apparently illegal and unrecorded closed-door meeting with the parole board (the informal name by which the Post Prison Transfer Board is known).

After Huckabee told the board, in executive session, that he believed Dumond got a “raw deal,” according to a board member who was there, and supported his release, board chairman Leroy Brownlee personally paved the way for Dumond’s release, according to board records and former members. During that time — from December 1996 to January 1997 — Brownlee regularly consulted with Butch Reeves, the governor’s prison liaison, on the status of his efforts, two state officials have told the Times

[NNN0LHI]

1. Wayne DuMond must have been a very white good old boy n/t

[scarface2004]

2. must of been to smart to ever run for public office!!!

hucklescumbag is a freak!!

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Dumond's story is an important one

in that it shows rape for what it is--an act of violence. He was castrated, but when given the opportunity, was violent towards women again. Apparently Huckabee thought that lack of male members would make him a non-threat to society, and obviously he was wrong.

[boobooday]

4. I think you're right

I think it was an attempt to prove that violent, vengeful punishments work on criminals.

[TwilightGardener]

5. Hucky's lied several times over about his role in releasing this guy--

He even tried to blame Clinton. He once tried to blame the parole board, and said he had nothing to do with it. He engineerd the parole so that he wouldn't have to commute the guy's sentence, thus trying to avoid political fallout. This guy is a sick liar, and very weak-minded: even the members of Free Republic acknowledge that he caved to pressure to release Dumond.

[lolly]

6. Right-wing cause celebre

Didn't Dumond become a favorite of the wingnut brigade? Because the victim was a distant cousin of Clinton's, they convinced themselves that the trial and conviction HAD to have been engineered by the all-powerful Bill Clinton.

He did it to appease the wingnuts, pure and simple.