Huckabee and the Clemmons Issue...

First, the horror – a homicidal thug ambushed four Washington State Police officers, after being paroled on charges of raping a thirteen year-old!

Yes, another example of the Criminal Justice system letting down the people who pay for it.

And stranger still yet ANOTHER example of Mike Huckabee’s alleged “Christian values” coming back to haunt all of us.

Apparently the former Presidential candidate and former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, still believes that pablum about “inside every bad person is a good one trying to get out,” when Bill Bratton’s “Inside every turnstile jumper is a child-rapist trying to get out,” is far more likely and backed by the bulk of the existing empirical evidence.

Maurice Clemmons’s saga begins back in May of 1989, when Clemmons, then only 17, was caught with a gun at a Little Rock school. That appears to have been his first run in with the law.

Almost immediately after his expulsion from school over the aforementioned gun incident, Clemmons took part in a series of burglaries that landed him in prison. In one late-night incident, a middle-aged woman was hit in the face and Clemmons and another teen snatched her purse. He made the news again when he hid a 10-inch metal bar in his sock before a pretrial hearing, and once again when a padlock he threw at a bailiff hit Clemmons' own mother.

In 1989, for these and other crimes, the young Clemmons received a combined sentence adding up to 108 years, by the Arkansas Times' count. Some argued that that was excessive given his age and apparently the fact that no one was actually killed in those incidents.

By the time then-governor Huckabee was mulling a plea for clemency in 2000, Clemmons had spent roughly a decade (11 years) behind bars, and Maurice Clemmons pledged that he’d turned his life around. As governor, Huckabee granted pardons and commutations much more than most. According to ABC, many believed it was a religious issue for Huckabee, a Baptist minister.

Thus it made strategic sense that Clemmons stressed his faith in a letter to Governor Huckabee, obtained by the Seattle Times:

Clemmons said 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.)," he wrote.  (OR more aptly, some slick lawyer wrote FOR HIM:)

"Where once stood a young (16) year old misguided fool, who's (sic) own life he was unable to rule. Now stands a 27 year old man, who has learned through 'the school of hard knocks' to appreciate and respect the rights of others. And who has in the midst of the harsh reality of prison life developed the necessary skills to stand along (sic) and not follow a multitude of do evil, as I did as a 16 year old child."

In May 2000, citing Clemmons' youth at the time of his crimes, Huckabee commuted the sentence to 47 years, making Clemmons eligible for parole. The board granted parole in July and Clemmons was released in August, but a year later he was back in prison for another Arkansas robbery. He got a 10-year sentence but in 2004 Clemmons was paroled again. He soon moved to Washington State.

For several years after the move, he apparently avoided run-ins with the police. He next landed in jail earlier this year on a second-degree child rape charge - sex with a minor – a 13 year-old.

Just a week before the alleged shooting Sunday, Clemmons got out on $150,000 bail, by posting just 10% or $15,000 secured through a bail bondsman.

It costs the average American charged with  DUI some $20,000 to defend against the charges and get back on the road again...this guy walks out from a kiddie-raper beef on a measly FIFTEEN Grand?!

And as many others have pointed out, this isn't the first time we've seen Huckabee blame the parole board when a parolee reoffends.

When the case of Wayne DuMond became an issue during Huckabee's run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, the former Governor offered a different set of facts, but almost the same response.

Wayne Dumond was convicted of rape in the 1980s and was paroled in 1997 after Huckabee, who’d declined to commute the sentence, lobbied the parole board to free DuMond. Huckabee has persistently denied a role in the board's decision, despite a ton of evidence to the contrary.

After he was paroled, DuMond went on to kill at least one woman in Missouri.

I didn’t support Mike Huckabee in the GOP Primaries and this was NOT the reason...among other things, I just didn’t like his “we are our brother’s keeper” outlook on things...but then, I never cared much for that kind of sappy stuff.

The other day, Mike Huckabee released a statement that said in part;

“He was recommended for and received a commutation of his original sentence from 1990, this commutation made him parole eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.

“He was arrested later for parole violation and taken back to prison to serve his full term, but prosecutors dropped the charges that would have held him.

“It appears that he has continued to have a string of criminal and psychotic behavior but was not kept incarcerated by either state.”  (Mike Huckabee)
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He also apologized personally to the families of the slain police officers. I commend him on that, BUT I have a HUGE problem with a lot of the above statement.

First, it seems to seek to whitewash his own role in the commutation of Clemmons' sentence, when at the time, he’d said that Clemmons sentence (108 years) for a five state violent crime spree, was too severe for a teenager.

Nonsense, they stone violent teens to death in some of the countries America’s Left openly admire. In my view, that’s ONE of the very few things such hell-holes do fairly well.

Huckabee’s last sentence, consciously or not, seems to vindicate this savage by alleging some psychiatric illness on his part...again, NONSENSE; (1) mental illness does NOT result in a ruling of “mentally incompetent” in over 90% of the cases (nor SHOULD IT) in U.S. courts and (2) there’s no evidence whatsoever that this goon was at all mentally ill.

That last sentence seems to indicate that Huckabee hasn't learned ANYTHING even from this failure of our overly lenient criminal justice system.

Maurice Clemmons deserved to have gone down in a hail of gun fire a few decades earlier. It's only too bad that he didn't.

I think more and more Americans are getting the right idea – “Let’s just vote the bastards OUT, no matter what Party, no matter what they claim, professional politicians are about as trustworthy as used cars salesman...on their best days.