Bad things happen when religion is allowed to cloud judicial decisions

COMPASSION is one thing; faith-based stupidity is quite another. And this week popular Republican Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas, is looking very stupid indeed.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is now host of the Fox News Channel talk show Huckabee

It has emerged that the former Baptist minister, who entered the 2008 presidential race promising “to take this nation back for Christ”, was a complete sucker for miscreants playing the “Hallalujah-I-Have-Found-Jesus” card.

Among the “born-again” bad guys he freed from prison was 37-year-old Maurice Clemmons, the man suspected of shooting four Washington police officers dead in a coffee bar in Washington on November 29. Clemmons died on December 1 when he was shot by a policeman in Seattle.

In 1999, after having served 10 years of a 108-year sentence for burglary, robbery and a multitude other crimes, Clemmons filed a clemency appeal with Huckabee. In his petition Clemmons wrote that he came from “a very good Christian family” and was “raised much better than my actions speak”.

He added:

I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.

After his release in 2000, Clemmons, promptly resumed a life of crime. Just days before allegedly shooting dead the four policemen in coffee bar, he  was arrested on a charge of raping a child, but released on bail.

Of course, anyone can make a bad call, but Huckabee, a right-wing fundie who opposes abortion, same-sex-marriage and civil unions – but supports the death penalty  and “intelligent design” – made at least two other decisions that produced devastating results. And his chances of running for the White House in the 2012 presidential election now looks very slim indeed.

Maurice Clemmons

Writing in Salon.com, Joe Conason highlights the cases of Wayne Dumond, a rapist and murderer now deceased, who was originally sent to prison in Arkansas for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton; and Glen Green, who raped and killed a teenage girl.

Conason says:

During Clinton’s presidency the Dumond case became an obsession among certain right-wing pundits and politicians, who insisted that Dumond had been framed and brutalized by the ‘Clinton machine’. When Huckabee became governor, he supported a parole for Dumond, winning applause from the Republican right – until the former prisoner raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. Dumond later died in prison, under suspicion that he had murdered at least one other woman after his Arkansas release – a tragic outcome for which Huckabee has repeatedly tried to blame others, including his two Democratic predecessors in the statehouse.

Conason adds:

Jay Cole, who also happened to be a friend of Huckabee. Cole would tell the governor about his visits with the supposedly innocent Dumond, when the minister and the prisoner would read the Bible and pray together.

Perhaps the worst instance of that same syndrome, chronicled in detail by Arkansas journalists, concerned an Air Force sergeant named Glen Green, who was sentenced to prison for life after confessing that he had raped and killed a teenage girl. After beating the woman with nunchucks, he violated her almost lifeless body, ran over her with his car and buried her in a swamp. But yet another preacher friend of Huckabee’s named Rev Johnny Jackson somehow persuaded the governor that this incredibly brutal killing had been an “accident” – and that Green had repented, come to Jesus and therefore should be freed.

And Conason points out:

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations.