Mike Huckabee’s Faith-Based Justice
Now that Mike Huckabee has surged in the polls, reporters are spending more time delving into his past and the facts should frighten anyone who has any respect for human life or justice.
Salon.com gives the sordid details of Huckabee’s history of faith-based clemency while he was governor of Arkansas:
Dec. 14, 2007 | Responding to accusations that he caused a rapist and killer named Wayne DuMond to be set loose from the Arkansas prison system — leading ultimately to the murder of at least one and probably two women in Missouri — Mike Huckabee has long denied any personal responsibility for that profoundly stupid decision. In the past he has tried to blame DuMond’s parole on both Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker, who preceded him as governor.
[…]
For several years after 1996, when he first considered parole for DuMond (he was released in 1999), the Arkansas governor freed as many as 1,000 prisoners. Some were undoubtedly deserving of release, but others were dangerous and violent felons like DuMond who should have been kept behind bars. Huckabee’s questionable methods and motivations never changed until prosecutors, the media, his fellow Republicans and virtually the entire state of Arkansas rose up in protest against his idiocy.
The case that sparked the citizen revolt against Huckabee came to public attention in 2004, when he announced his intention to release a murderer and rapist named Glen Green. What seems to have impressed him was the endorsement of Green provided by one Rev. Johnny Jackson, a Baptist minister in the town of Jacksonville and friend of the governor’s. Observers doubted that Huckabee had bothered to glance at the case file before he decided to release Green, because he could not have helped being chilled by the harrowing confession it contained.
In 1974, Green was serving as a sergeant at Little Rock Air Force Base, located in a suburban county outside the state capital. On a certain evening, he seized Helen Lynnette Spencer, 18, and brought her to a quiet spot on the base where he assaulted and tried to rape her. She briefly escaped from Green, who then caught her and beat her brutally with nunchaku sticks. He stuffed her into the trunk of his car and drove her off the base to another county, where he pulled her into the front seat and violated her. Since she wasn’t dead, he ran over her several times with his car, and finally dumped her corpse in a bayou. When Spencer’s body was found, her hand was reaching up from the swampy waters.
Public outrage ultimately kept Green in jail when Huckabee’s religious delusions would have set him free. You can read the Salon.com article for more details.
In the end they pose the same question that I’ve asked before: Haven’t we learned our lesson from George W. Bush?
…Behind his pattern of error and misconduct is a troubling arrogance that is not unfamiliar in a certain kind of evangelical politician. He would not be the first elected official who did something stupid and destructive because he had convinced himself that he was fulfilling the will of God. The question is why the rest of us should want to risk our safety and security by entertaining such delusions again.
Also see my articles Is Obama Like Bush? and George Bush’s Mental Illness.
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