Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Huckabee and Dumond   [Byron York]

    A few notes about developments today in the Wayne Dumond case.  The story has gotten a lot more attention than ever before because of the ABC News report that ran this morning. Huckabee will need to address more fully the accounts of Dumond's victims, or relatives of Dumond's victims, who say they warned the governor that Dumond might rape again, or even commit murder.  Did Huckabee take their views into account?

    But Huckabee will probably also point out that the ABC report, as aired this morning, left out a rather important part of the story.  Reporter Brian Ross played a soundbite from Dumond victim Ashley Stevens, who was relieved when Dumond was originally sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison:

Stevens: That way he wouldn't come back to me again, 'cause he told me if I ever told anyone, he would come back and kill me.

Ross: The fact that he was going to prison forever, was for you a sense of security?

Stevens: Uh huh.

Ross: Until then-Governor Mike Huckabee began to push for Dumond to be free – a controversial move that Huckabee is now trying to play down.

What Ross didn't say was that the first official action to reduce Dumond's sentence was taken not by Huckabee, but by his predecessor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker.  Tucker was actually lieutenant governor at the time he commuted Dumond's sentence, not to set Dumond free, but to make him eligible for parole.  Tucker did so while he was acting governor because the sitting governor, Bill Clinton, was out of the state campaigning for president.  (When Tucker was forced from office as a result of a felony conviction in the Whitewater investigation, the Dumond case fell into Huckabee's hands.)

Huckabee says he believes Tucker acted because he, Tucker, thought Dumond's sentence was excessive.  Was that the case?  I haven't been able to reach Tucker today, but this is from a story about Tucker's action in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on April 16, 1992:

Acting Gov. Jim Guy Tucker Wednesday commuted the sentence of Wayne Dumond, a castrated Forrest City man imprisoned for the 1984 kidnapping rape of a 17- year-old distant cousin of Gov. Bill Clinton.

The decision will make Dumond eligible for parole in 1995, after serving 10 years, but his attorney said with good time he could be eligible for release by August.

Tucker reduced Dumond's life-plus-20-years sentence to 39 1/2 years in a decree issued hours after Clinton resumed a presidential campaign interrupted for six days by laryngitis. Clinton's office issued a statement saying Clinton agreed with Tucker's decision.

In a letter to Dumond's attorney, John Wesley Hall, Tucker said he found no error in the jury's guilty verdict. But he said the castration of Dumond before the start of trial should mitigate his sentence.

In March 1985, four months after Dumond's arrest, two men castrated him. He was convicted of rape and kidnapping in August 1985. The castration has not been solved.

''Regardless of who was responsible, this was a reprehensible action which no society can condone,'' Tucker said in the letter to Hall. ''It seems clear that it was intended as an extrajudicial, vigilante punishment of Mr. Dumond for the crime with which he had been charged.''

Tucker said he and Clinton discussed the decision in the past few days, but Tucker refused to give details of the conversations.

The paper reported that because Ashley Stevens was distantly related to Clinton, "Clinton asked Tucker to review the application 'to remove any doubt about the governor's objectivity,' a governor's office statement said."

The bottom line is that Huckabee was dreadfully wrong about Dumond.  Some of Huckabee's accusers are suggesting that he alone was dreadfully wrong about Dumond, when others, including some in positions of responsibility, might have held similar views.

12/05 06:47 PMShare