The Huffington Post has a detailed expose on Mike Huckabee's involvement with the release of Wayne Dumond, the convicted rapist who went on to rape and murder another woman after being released from prison.
I would caution any reader of the Huffington Post to take anything there with a minimum of one grain of salt; the Huffington Post is on most days a den of liberal spin.
Having issued that caution, however, and taken that grain of salt (or even a few shakes of the salt shaker, for me), I can say that I've researched this issue fairly well for someone not close to the sources, and I don't see anything here inconsistent with other things I've found. Also, Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator blog says "the writer is a solid journalist and he backs up every single word he writes."
According to the author of the piece, Murray Waas, here are a couple of the salient points of the issue:
- Huckabee supported the release of Dumond on the campaign trail because "he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public"
- Because Huckabee lobbied the state parole board, "Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended"
Huckabee says no one could have known that Dumond would be a threat to the public after being released. However, it seems a number of people tried to warn him that Dumond really was guilty, and deserved to be in prison a long, long time.
The Huffington Post also has copies of letters sent to Huckabee's office from another of Dumond's rape victim and her daughter here. These letters are from a woman who says Dumond raped her in 1976 while her 3 year old daughter was in bed with her, but never filed charges because she was too afraid. The HuffPost piece says Dumond told the victim he'd come back and rape and kill her 3 year old daughter if she told anyone.
Of particular note in one of those letters from the victim, she said, after saying that Dumond had a number of previous brushes with the law that he "conned" his way out of, "My greatest fear is that since he was finally caught and sentenced for his crime, the next time he will be more careful not to leave a witness to testify against him." Since Dumond did in fact murder his next rape victim, this victim's fears were realized.
She also points out that before Huckabee came on the scene, the parole board had reviewed Dumond's records three times and denied release each time. She also mentioned that Dumond had made threatening statements that after he was released, things would be different when the "rabbit had the gun."
The HuffPost piece also says information was sent to Huckabee's office including "a police report in which Dumond confessed to the rape." (This would be the 1976 rape for which he was never charged). The piece says Dumond later refused to sign his confession (not that uncommon, speaking as a cop who's seen people realize they've buried themselves after initially making a confession), and since the victim was too afraid to file charges, the case went no further.
Years later Dumond was arrested and found guilty of raping at gunpoint Ashley Stevens, a 17 year old cheerleader in 1984. This is the crime for which he was serving prison time when Huckabee began lobbying for his release. Dumond had been sentenced to life+20 years. In 1992, Governor Jim Guy Tucker reduced Dumond's sentence to sentence to 39.5 years, which made him eligible for parole.
When Huckabee became governor and was talking about releasing Dumond, according to the HuffPost piece
Stevens, her father, and Fletcher Long, the Arkansas state prosecuting attorney who sent Dumond to prison, met with Huckabee to protest.
The piece also says
Twenty women members of the state House of Representatives protested the commutation proposal. The editorial pages of some Arkansas newspapers questioned Huckabee's judgment and suggested he reconsider.
According to the HuffPost piece, despite having received these letters mentioned above from state government records, Huckabee's office has dodged admitting these letters were sent to the governor's office:
"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday when contacted by the Huffington Post.
Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.
Murray Waas, the writer of the HuffPost piece, says these letters and other records were given to him in 2002 by a Republican staffer who worked for then-Governor Huckabee. Waas says he didn't go public with the records at the time out of consideration for the rape victims, but now that Huckabee is running for president, he consulted with the victims and decided to make them public.
Waas says that in the information given to Huckabee about Dumond was a letter from a woman who says she was almost raped by Dumond. The letter says Dumond entered her bedroom at night and was about to rape her, but when he saw the woman's boyfriend in the bed, he quickly ran from the house. She said she was talked out of filing charges by the police, who said it would be hard to prove.
These incidents weren't Dumond's only experiences with crime. The HuffPost piece says he was arrested in 1972 for his involvement in a beating death, but he was granted immunity for his testimony against two others involved. Dumond admitted to beating the man, but said he didn't strike the fatal blows.
Dumond was arrested in 1973 for assaulting a teenage girl. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 5 years probation.
RawStory has ABC video of an interview on Good Morning America this morning with Lois Davidson, the mother of Carol Sue Shields, the woman Dumond raped and murdered after being released from prison. The ABC News blog also has further information and a video.
But it appears Carol Sue Shields wasn't Dumond's last victim. Again from the HuffPost piece:
But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for 23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri. Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest for raping and murdering Shields. Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was pregnant with their first child.
Dumond died of natural causes while in prison on September 1, 2005. At the time of his death, Missouri authorities were readying capital murder charges against Dumond for the rape and murder of Andrasek.
The HuffPost piece and others I've read have mentioned a "sympathy factor" that might have played a part in Huckabee's support of Dumond's release. After all, Dumond seems to have been castrated by unknown assailants while awaiting trial for raping Ashley Stevens. However...
Evidence has since come to light indicating that Dumond might not have been attacked but engaged in an act of self-mutilation. A physician who treated Dumond after his alleged attack told police, according to state police records, that Dumond's own wife asked him "if it was possible for Dumond to have inflicted the wound himself." The Forest City Times Herald, which published a series of articles about the Dumond controversy in 1996, quoted experts on sexual predators as saying it was not uncommon for them to engage in acts of self-mutilation to garner sympathy or because they feel guilt for what they have done.
Even if Dumond's story were true, that should still have zero bearing on how his guilt in Stevens' rape is viewed, and in whether Dumond's sentence should have been reduced.
As this story has received increasing attention in the press, Huckabee has tried to minimize his role in Dumond's release, and has said he didn't lobby the parole board for Dumond's release. However, here's what Waas says about that:
four board members -- three of who spoke on the record -- said that Huckabee lobbied and pressured board members on the matter. This included a 1996 executive meeting at which the board's recording secretary -- who ordinarily tapes the entire sessions -- was asked to leave the room. Several board members and members of the state legislator have said the secret session violated state law.
From the HuffPost piece, here's what the woman who was raped with her 3-year old daughter in the bed with her says:
When Huckabee pushed through Dumond's parole, she says, "It was like he believed we were lying and Dumond was telling the truth. I wish he would now say in front of the entire world whether we told the truth or lied. And if he believes we told the truth, explain why he did what he did."
Another very telling piece of information from the HuffPost piece:
Huckabee also wrote in his campaign book that his intervention on Dumond's behalf reflected his broad philosophy that the criminal justice system is too harsh...
My first reaction to this: is Huckabee delusional??? While any system administered by human beings will have its mistakes and flaws, if anything our system is FAR too soft. The Dumond case demonstrates this all the way through, from his 5-year probation for assaulting a teenager in 1973 to his early release for raping Ashley Stevens. And Dumond is only one example. The criminal justice system is FULL of criminals who, when compared to the severity of their crimes, have only received a mild slap on the wrist.
I know I probably sound like a broken record, but this insight into Huckabee's personal opinions and philosophies once again reinforces what I suspected back in July of this year when I heard that Huckabee said he was a "'grace' Christian, not a 'law' Christian."
Law is just as important as grace (it was law/righteousness that demanded Christ die on the cross in the first place, to extend grace to us), but in my experience, most folks who talk in these terms have an immature grasp of the relationship between grace and law, and don't understand that firmness (with a graceful attitude) is often required in dealing with sin, wrong, crime and evil. They don't seem to understand that sometimes the moral thing to do is to say "no," or even knock over some tables from time to time.
This unbalanced misunderstanding doesn't usually stay confined to hypothetical theology, but usually plays out in real life situations such as parenting, how we deal with others, the kind of things we advocate, and for elected officials, how they deal with right and wrong.
This information about Huckabee's statement in his campaign book only reaffirms my belief that he has not yet reached this understanding--which can be bad for any person, but is outright dangerous in an elected official.
There's a LOT of information in the HuffPost piece, and I may have been a little scattered in trying to summarize it here; if so, I apologize. If you're even remotely considering supporting Mike Huckabee, please go read this whole piece.
HT to the American Spectator blog.
0 comments:
Post a Comment