Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee – Too Naive a Guy to be Prez?

In the aftermath of this week’s shootings of four police officers in a coffee shop outside Tacoma, Wash., commentators and citizens are outraged at the long-ago decision of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to commute the sentence of the killer, Maurice Clemmons.

Huckabee explained to Bill O’Reilly yesterday evening on The O’Reilly Factor that in 2000, he granted clemency, not freedom or a pardon, to Clemmons, who was in prison as a result of a seven-month crime spree of armed robbery, firearms possession, and burglary when he was 16. Clemency meant that Clemmons’ sentence was reduced and he became eligible for parole.

The parole board then let him out and, according to Huckabee, Clemmons violated his parole, but because prosecutors did not promptly file paperwork, they had to drop charges against him.

Huckabee is not the only one to blame here and, indeed, the actions of Washington State judges John McCarthy and Thomas J. Felnagle, who much more recently released Clemmons on $15,000 bail after he was charged with child rape, seem far more egregious. Also, Huckabee granted the clemency for crimes Clemmons committed when he was a minor, and he had not yet committed especially heinous violent crimes.

But Huckabee’s record of granting clemencies and pardons does raise serious questions about him as a potential nominee for the 2012 Republican nomination. According to The Arkansas Leader, Governor Huckabee single-handedly granted more pardons and commutations than all the other governors of Arkansas combined from 1967 till 1996.

Arkansas Leader crime reporter Garrick Feldman wrote a persuasive column in the late 1990’s chronicling the Governor’s decision to make eligible for parole a particularly heinous criminal.(Again it should be noted that, ironically, Clemens is not the best example of Huckabee’s tendency to be dangerously liberal, because although Clemens went on to commit horrible crimes, he had not committed such extreme acts of violence at the time Huckabee granted him clemency. Also, as the New York Daily News reported today, in recent years Clemens seems to have become intermittently delusional, which he does not appear to have been at the time Huckabee granted the clemency. Like so many cases in which the mentally ill/criminally insane take innocent lives, this one may reflect our society’s absymal neglect of the mentally ill and inadequacy at confronting/treating mental illness).

Examination of a letter Clemmons sent Huckabee in the early 1990’s, excerpts of which the Seattle Times printed in today’s paper, suggest one possibility as to Huckabee’s motivation in granting  so many pardons and clemencies: “Clemmons wrote that he came from ‘a very good Christian family’ and ‘was raised much better than my actions speak’ (I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought to my family name.)'”

I am normally cautious to blame Christian religious fundamentalism for people’s lapses, because doing so all-too-often reflects knee-jerk left-wing prejudice against believers, who are often characterized as “scary” for no good reason. But in this case, I wonder if the former Governor is so infatuated with his religious ideals that he lets them dictate his behavior to a dangerous extent.

Overall, I get the impression Governor Huckabee is a nice, and rather naive, guy — too nice to be in charge of criminal sentencing, and too naive to be commander-in-chief in a lawless world.

This entry was written by and posted on December 1, 2009 at 5:29 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>