Board Called for Clemency for Dumond While Clinton Was Governor

I do not support Mike Huckabee for President. I support the truth. If the truth is that media hasn’t been entirely honest in the Wayne Dumond case, I’ll say it. There are several things that are true in the media’s coverage of the Wayne Dumond story:

1) Wayne Dumond was paroled and Mike Huckabee preferred the parole option.

2) That victim sent a letter to Huckabee, as did several other alleged victims of Dumond.

3) Some Democratic members of the parole board insisted Huckabee pressured them to parole.

However, a couple of myths have gone around:

1) The only people pushing Wayne Dumond’s release were a bunch of conservative of anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists.

2) This was a rash decision made by Governor Mike Huckabee.

The far left Village Voice wrote a piece on the Wayne Dumond case in 2001 framing the story as a miscarriage of justice and that Bill Clinton should have issued the pardon long ago, as he did for his rich friends in 2001.

And here’s the kicker. The Voice claimed that a recommendation of commutation was issued by the State Parole and Pardon Board in 1990. Doing a search of the newspaper database I have access to through Boise Public library, I found this snippet from the Seattle Times of September 21, 1996:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A convicted rapist who was castrated by masked men while awaiting trial should be freed from prison because his guilt is questionable and his mutilation punishment enough, Gov. Mike Huckabee said yesterday.

After a review of Wayne Dumond’s case, which included DNA evidence not available at trial, Huckabee said he could not justify Dumond’s imprisonment.

His castration “more than has given whatever punishment is necessary, particularly for a crime that is very questionable he committed,” the governor said.

The state Parole Board in 1990 recommended that then-Gov. Bill Clinton grant Dumond clemency, in part because a DNA expert concluded that semen on the girl’s pants pointed to Dumond’s innocence. But Clinton indicated he felt Dumond had not served enough time.

The State Parole Board before Mike Huckabee ever ran for office recommended the parole of Wayne Dumond. As an aside, It’d be interesting to see if any of the same characters who are now claiming Huckabee lobbied them were on the State Parole commission in 1990.

Huckabee also can’t be blamed for what Dumond did in Missouri. The Parole Board refused to release Dumond into Arkansas and it fell to several states to decide if they would take him. Texas and Florida said no, as did Missouri until he married a Missouri woman and then they decided to allow him into Missouri.

Nor is it fair to compare this to the Willie Horton case. The Willie Horton case represented a systematic policy failure of the Dukakis administration in Massachusetts that allowed a convicted murderer who could never be paroled to have a one week vacation from prison which allowed him to commit additional crimes. Huckabee’s support for a parole decision represents a bad call on one difficult case. If you can show me that Mike Huckabee was running a prison fun house while governor and was soft on criminals, be my guest. The Wayne Dumond case doesn’t illustrate that.

Huckabee also added some detail and casts some doubt on the parole board’s statements:

For people to say that I was responsible in getting him out makes a few presumptions – number one, it presumes, I had an influence on Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker in 1992. The second presumption, it assumes I had the amazing persuasive power to go into a board of seven people, all of them appointed by Democratic governors before me, and persuade them to do something they didn’t wish to do.

It also assumes that, not only did I have that power, but that only two of them changed [their] story about what happened and they didn’t do so until 6 years later when we were in the middle of an election year. And after, and subsequent to the fact[,] that I had not reappointed them to their $75,000 jobs on the parole board.

Now if you can follow that line and believe that I am solely responsible, then you’ll believe that. But you’ll believe a lot of other things as well. I am deeply sorry, and I mean, awfully, just horrified of what happened to (inaudible). And there is not a single person that will ever bring those women back to their families. But that’s the story, that’s what happened.

Indeed, the Arkansas Times pointed out that Huckabee reappointed two members that voted for the release. He also didn’t reappoint two who voted for the release. Also, remember in terms of timeline, Huckabee didn’t even become governor until August 1996. The story we’re told of Huckabee’s control over the board is not that of a Political neophyte who had been elected office for only 3 years (most of that as a Republican outsider in a Democratic Administration), but of a veteran political machine that played the board of parole like a finely tuned fiddle. And thus board members who voted “yes” are able to avoid responsibility and blame it on the bad ol’ Governor Huckabee.

That’s not to say Huckabee didn’t have some influence. Looking at the public statements he made a little more than a month after becoming Governor, it’s hard to imagine how such public pronuncements don’t influence the decision of a parole board, but it seems there’s plenty of blame to go around, plenty of folks who got it wrong. Only in a political campaign can you assign the totality of blame to a guy who no direct control over the outcome.