Is Dumond Huckabee’s Willie Horton?
Investigative reporter Murray Waas has dropped a bombshell into the campaign of Republican presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee.
Waas reveals that then-Arkansas Governor Huckabee aggressively pushed for the early release of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond despite being warned by numerous women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family members, and would likely strike again.
Dumond went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.
In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence. They claimed that Dumond’s travails were due to the fact that the high school cheerleader he had raped was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor.
Huckabee has denied knowing of the warnings, which Waas says he kept secret because they would be politically damaging.
And how!
More here on the Waas report and here for a more nuanced view of the Dumond case.
Footnote: Willie Horton was furloughed from a Massachusetts prison on weekends while serving a life sentence for murder without the possibility of parole. This provided him the opportunity to commit armed robbery and rape, and was the basis of a damaging George H. W. Bush campaign ad in 1988 against Democratic nominee and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who had supported the program.
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3 Responses to “Is Dumond Huckabee’s Willie Horton?”
To be fair, victims are not necessarily experts in the psychology of rapists. and the ‘damaging evidence’ Waas uncovered consists merely of the opinons of victims.
Trying to hide the warnings, however, was not an exercise in forthrightness. Politically, this could be damaging.
More damaging in my view is that Huckabee pudhed for the early release of the rapist. Did he not think that rape was a serious crime?
Had he studied how difficult it is to rehabilitate rapists?
Gotta say, given the circumstances as published at HuffPo today, this looks much, much worse, if that’s possible, than the “Willie Horton incident.”
I can’t imagine a candidate – especially one who hopes to capture the evangelical vote – winning the Republican primary, let alone the general, with this sort of thing as recent history. I can’t believe it but with this, Giulianni’s meltdown, Mitt’s tanking and Thompson’s complete absence, McCain, who I’ve always thought was the Republicans’ best hope of hanging on to the White House, may actually be able to pull off a win! That in spite of the hatred of the R base.
That’s not a bomb-shell, though. That’s not even recent news. I’m surprised people can say they’ve been following this, but don’t know that very basic point about Huckabee. Wikipedia had this on his page for months now, and it was predated in tons of articles. Huckabee has always denied that he played a major role, and the facts have always demonstrated otherwise. It’s actually all fairly heinous, mind, the idea that he met with the rapist, understood his predicament, saw it as Clinton’s vindictiveness as he had raped a relative of Clinton’s, and then pushed to have him released so that, guess what, it turns out, he could go a’ rapin’ again…