Maurice Clemmons isn’t the first killer Mike Huckabee released as governor thanks to his religious sense of mercy. Huckabee granted more commutations and pardons than any governor in the 40 years before him. Some, no doubt, were warranted by Arkansas’ draconian drug laws, but many more came courtesy of pastor recommendations, writes Joe Conason on Salon. “No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again.”
The most infamous case was Wayne Dumond, accused of raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. After Huckabee freed him, on an ultra-conservative Baptist preacher’s advice, Dumond raped and killed another young woman. Another time, a preacher convinced Huckabee to release Glen Green, a man who’d confessed to beating a teenage girl with nunchucks, raping her, and then running her over with a car. Public outcry put the kibosh on that one, but Huck kept dishing out his dubious mercy. If he ever runs for office again, that kind of “arrogance and stupidity… should get no free pass.” (More Mike Huckabee stories.)
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