Politics ain’t beanbag, as Mike Huckabee likes to say. In South Carolina, it’s more like a wrecking ball.
In an ad currently running in the Palmetto State, Mike Huckabee is slammed for the Dumond case. If you are unfamiliar with the case, Wayne Dumond was put in prison for the 1984 rape of a 17-year old girl. When Huckabee became Governor of Arkansas, he bought into the conspiracy theory that Dumond had been railroaded because the alleged victim was a distant relatives of the Clintons. Huckabee announced that he thought Dumond should be released (writing a letter to Dumond saying as much), met with the parole board to make that case, and eventually oversaw Dumond’s release from prison in 1999.
A year later, Wayne Dumond sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old Kansas City woman named Carol Sue Shields.
Huckabee issued a lot of pardons and commutations as Governor, demonstrating a mercy and compassion that probably granted new life to an awful lot of people. He deserves credit: Huckabee did this despite the knowledge that he would someday be open to allegations of being soft on crime (see Romney, Mitt). In this instance, though, he screwed up big time.
And now, it’s being used against him. And the group who created the ad, Victims Voice, isn’t pulling any punches. Starring in the ad: the mother of Carol Sue Shields.
