Persuasive Huckabee changed a state, his way

A dangerous gullibility?
Some Arkansas prosecutors argue that Mr. Huckabee’s clemency record reveals a dangerous gullibility about human nature, particularly when it comes to claims of religious conversion. It raises, they say, the basic question of judgment, the precise question one of Mr. Huckabee’s rivals for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, has raised anew in his Iowa campaign.

Exhibit A in this critique is the case of Wayne Dumond, a rapist who had been implicated in other violent crimes, including a murder and another rape, when Mr. Huckabee took office in 1996. Mr. Dumond said he found God in prison, and his case was championed by evangelicals and conservative opponents of Bill Clinton, who was a distant relative of one of the rape victims and who refused to grant clemency to Mr. Dumond.

Months after being sworn in, Mr. Huckabee announced his intention to cut Mr. Dumond’s prison sentence, prompting furious public protests from Mr. Dumond’s victim and from prosecutors around the state.

“We told the governor that Wayne Dumond had a history of rape and murder,” Henry Morgan, then president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association, recalled. “So the governor knew, or any reasonable person should have known, that releasing him was dangerous.”

Mr. Huckabee was not persuaded. “He thought the man should be released,” Mr. Nelson, his former communications director, recalled.

As it turned out, Mr. Huckabee did not grant clemency to Mr. Dumond; the state Parole Board released him instead, and several former members of the board have since told reporters that they acted under pressure from Mr. Huckabee, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

Even so, Mr. Nelson recalled the moment in 2001 when he and Mr. Huckabee first heard the news that the newly freed Mr. Dumond had been charged with raping and murdering a woman in Missouri. “Everybody realized at that point that that would be something used against him politically in the 2002 campaign,” he said — a prediction that turned out to be correct when the issue contributed to a tight re-election race.

There were several other cases of convicts who won clemency from Mr. Huckabee and then went on to commit more crimes, including Wade Stewart, whose life sentence for murder was commuted in 2004. Mr. Stewart was arrested this year, charged with carrying a concealed revolver. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found that nearly one in 10 who received clemency from Governor Huckabee were later sentenced to prison.

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Mr. Huckabee eventually did bend, if slightly, to criticism and scrutiny. He proved less willing to grant clemency in his second term, especially for violent offenses. He also agreed to give slightly more information about his reasoning. Yet some prosecutors say that victims’ families are now skeptical about life sentences.

“They say, ‘You can’t guarantee that he’ll stay in prison for the rest of his life because the governor can let him out,’” said Larry Jegley, Little Rock’s longtime prosecuting attorney. “People are aware the governor has this power and it has been exercised to let murderers, rapists and home invaders loose, and that’s a problem.”

Gifts and critics
Throughout his tenure, Mr. Huckabee reacted with outrage and scorn when questions arose over the stream of gifts that flowed his way. He pugnaciously fought back against state ethics commission investigations. The governor appeared to find no conflict between occupying the highest office in the state, and receiving tribute; critics, on the other hand, said the two were directly related, in a way that was unseemly at best.

Early in his first term, he was questioned, and eventually sued, for using a state fund meant to operate the governor’s mansion for personal family expenses like pantyhose and meals at Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The suit was eventually dropped, but spending out of the fund was curtailed.

Meanwhile, other methods emerged to supplement the governor’s salary, which was $68,448 in 1999. That year, he reported getting $112,366 in gifts, including thousands in clothing from Jennings Osborne, a wealthy businessman in Little Rock who befriended the family. Mr. Osborne also made regular gifts of pastries and flowers to the governor’s mansion. There were also gift certificates to department stores, ties and other items.

The gift-taking tailed off in subsequent years — there was $5,000 worth in 2003 — but Mr. Huckabee’s tangles with the state ethics commission fill a thick binder with documents spanning much of his time as governor. Mr. Nelson, the governor’s former aide, described these episodes as “penny ante,” and it is true that the commission did not uphold roughly two-thirds of the complaints against the governor. But it did find violations in five, including Mr. Huckabee’s acceptance of a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola and a $200 stadium blanket, though a court later threw out the finding on the canoe.

As the governor left office, new questions arose over wedding registries set up decades after his marriage began at department stores, including Target, so friends could help furnish the Huckabees’s new home in Little Rock. The governor attacked reporters for raising the issue — “I feel you’ve done a real disservice to the people of this state” — but others saw a pattern, in the gift-taking and the defensiveness. Both hark back to his past as a member of the clergy, critics said.

Throughout his tenure, allies and enemies alike were struck by a governor adept at giving the word, if not at receiving it. And in his writings, Mr. Huckabee attributes his moral compass to God, not to himself.

“If integrity and character are divorced from God, they don’t make sense,” he writes in his book, with John Perry, “Character Makes a Difference” (B&H Publishing Group, 2007). “Integrity, left to define itself, becomes evil because everyone ends up choosing his own standards.”

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