Why is Huckabee now trying to seem tough rather than compassionate?
This piece from the Quad-City Times reveals that Mike Huckabee in trying to talk tough now that Mitt Romney has attacked him for his clemency record:
During an appearance Friday in Davenport, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee confronted criticisms he was soft on criminals while governor of Arkansas, pointing out he’s the only one in the race who’s put people to death.
“If somebody tries to tell you that I’m soft on crime, that would be real news to the 16 people whose executions I carried out,” Huckabee told a packed room during a campaign swing through eastern Iowa. “They didn’t think I was being very soft.”
I find this response extremely disappointing given that, as this new New York Times piece highlights, Baptist minister Huckabee has risen “to the first tier of Republican presidential candidates on the strength of his Christian bona fides.” Wouldn’t it be more fitting, given his campaign themes, for Huckabee to say that he genuinely believes in the human potential for redemption and that he used his clemency power to help those who seemed to achieve genuine rehabilitation after criminal transgressions?
As the faith-based prison and re-entry movement highlights, religion and progressive criminal justice policies can fit together quite well. Moreover, I believe a truly compassionate conservative would not only grant a lot of clemencies, but also look for ways to reduce spending on “big government” criminal punishments that may produce more human suffering than societal benefits.
Significantly, as this new Houston Chronicle article details, religious beliefs and concerns about fairness apparently were central to Huckabee’s clemency record as Governor:
Driven by a religious belief in redemption and questions about the state’s legal system, Huckabee paid close attention to clemency petitions, former aides said. He insisted on reviewing every single application, though they came in by the hundreds most months. “He would take these files home with him to the governor’s mansion,” recalled Rex Nelson, Huckabee’s communications director for nine years. “He would read them, study them. He took it very seriously, the political consequences be damned.”
Most of Huckabee’s clemency decisions were unremarkable; in the vast majority of cases he simply followed the recommendation of the Arkansas Parole Board. But in a small though significant number of cases, he commuted prison sentences for murderers and other violent criminals over the pleas of victims’ families, prosecutors and judges. As his reputation for granting clemency spread, applications surged. “We had tons of them,” said Cory Cox, who worked for several years as Huckabee’s aide in charge of clemency matters. “People, they’d call and say, ‘Please, let the governor look at this. We don’t know who the next governor is going to be.'”
By every account, Huckabee’s approach to clemency was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. As John Wesley Hall, a Little Rock defense lawyer who filed numerous clemency petitions with the Huckabee administration, put it: “He’s a Baptist preacher who believes in redemption and second chances.”
But it also reflected Huckabee’s broader concerns about the criminal justice system in Arkansas, one of the few states where juries rather than judges impose sentences, which defense lawyers say can produce arbitrary results. Dana Reece, another defense lawyer, told of one client who received a life sentence for selling six grams of crack cocaine. “He’d still be in prison today if it weren’t for Governor Huckabee,” Reece said. “How many politicians, she asked, would stick their necks out for a crack dealer?”
“This was a political hot potato, and he knew it,” Cox said of his former boss. “But he had a conviction that people could better themselves, and he was open-minded to the idea that a poor black man from east Arkansas convicted by an all-white jury just may have been a victim of injustice.”
It is sad and ironic that Huckabee was willing to “walk the walk” as a compassionate conservative when Governor of Arkansas, but now he seems to be afraid to “talk the talk.” Not only is this a shame for the broader political conversation, it might backfire on Huckabee. Remember how well it worked in 1988when Mike Dukakis tried to look tough by driving a tank.
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