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"Haley Barbour's Bizarre Pardon Record"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this potent new piece by Radley Balko at Slate.  Here is how the piece begins: Mike Huckabee took a beating from his conservative brethren last month after Maurice Clemmons, a man whose sentence the former Arkansas governor commuted in 2000, shot and killed four police officers in Lakewood, Wash.  The scuttlebutt on the right suggested that Clemmons' release may doom Huckabee's chances of winning the Republican nomination for president in 2012.  I happen to think Huckabee's getting a raw deal on the Clemmons case; instead, we should be talking about the truly bizarre pardon record of one of Huckabee's possible competitors for the nomination, Haley Barbour.  The governor of Mississippi has simultaneously ignored increasing evidence that there may be a disturbingly high number of innocent people in prison in Mississippi and handed out pardons to the convicted murderers who just happen to do work on his house.continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on December 17, 2009 (boomark / email).