LITTLE ROCK — Mike Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, said Monday that he commuted the 108-year prison term of a young felon as a stroke for greater racial parity in the criminal justice system.
Maurice Clemmons, freed in 2000 with help from Huckabee, shot and killed four police officers in Washington state last month.
Speaking at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock to promote his seventh book, A Simple Christmas, Huckabee said Clemmons would have received “a probated sentence, a $1,000 fine and 20 hours of community service” had he been an “ upper-middle-classwhite kid” rather than a poor, black teenager arrested for his first felony when he was 16, in 1989. After a monthslong string of robberies and burglaries, as well as carrying a .25-caliber handgun on the Hall High School campus, Clemmons began serving his multiple sentences the next year.
A decade later, Huckabee, governor from 1998 to 2007, shortened Clemmons’ term in prison to 47 years, making possible his immediate parole. The Arkansas Parole Board agreed to release Clemmons not long afterward.
Making two of Clemmons longer sentences run consecutively instead of concurrently was an injustice, Huckabee said, one perpetrated systematically in Arkansas on the basis of a person’s skin color.
Deciding to shorten Clemmons’ prison term, he said, “was not so much based on forgiveness as justice.”
“I made my decision on the information that I had,” Huckabee told an audience of 200, “not on the information that was to come.”
On Nov. 29, Clemmons, 38, walked into a coffeehouse outside Seattle and killed four uniformed Lakewood, Wash., police officers as they prepared for their shift. One of them woundedClemmons, whom Seattle police shot and killed two days later.
Most of the questions Huckabee fielded from his book audience asked for his thoughts on health care legislation - “There is a difference between covering the uninsured and covering the uninsurable,” he said - or tried to gently seek an answer on whether he would run for president again in 2012 - “I don’t know.”
But he spoke the longest to a question about Clemmons.
Huckabee said he feared governors in the future would grant fewer clemencies because of publicity like that surrounding the Clemmons case.
“There is no political upside to even looking at those cases,” Huckabee said.
Being merciful and just on principle alone would not win a candidate a single vote,he said. Huckabee said he hoped “automatic responses to justice” would not become the default position of those with the power to grant clemency.
“If you do, it’s easy: You just say no to everybody,” Huckabee said.
In a question-and-answer session afterward, he cut off questioning on the Clemmons case after fielding six or seven. He never addressed the long-term impact of such decisions on rehabilitation and redemption, themes he discusses often. Nor did he offer his response to a Rasmussen Reports survey of 500 likely Arkansas voters published Dec. 3 that showed 70 percent of respondents oppose elected officials having the power to reduce sentences.
One of the perks of not being in elected office, he said, was being able to avoid topics he no longer wanted to discuss.
“It’s kind of nice to say, ‘No, I don’t want to deal with that,’” he said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/15/2009