Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot more about a guy named Wayne Dumond:
It began in September 1984, when Dumond, a 35-year-old handyman, kidnapped and raped a 17-year-old high-school cheerleader in the small eastern-Arkansas town of Forrest City. Dumond was allowed to remain free on bond while awaiting trial, and in March 1985 two masked men entered his house, tied him up with fishing line, and castrated him. People were stunned; the case, already notorious, became much more so. And that was before the local sheriff, a rather colorful man named Coolidge Conlee, displayed Dumond’s severed testicles in a jar of formaldehyde on his desk in the St. Francis County building. Amid tons of publicity, Dumond was found guilty and sentenced to life plus 20 years.
Prior to Huckabee taking office, the Arkansas Parole Board declined Dumond’s request for parole, then Huckabee stepped in:
On September 20, just weeks after taking office, Huckabee announced that he intended to set Dumond free, saying that there were “serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt.” On October 31, Huckabee met with the parole board. Not long after, the board voted to free Dumond, but on the condition he move to another state. Huckabee was pleased, in part because — given that the board had voted to free Dumond — there was no need for Huckabee to commute the sentence or pardon him. So Huckabee denied Dumond’s now-irrelevant pardon application while at the same time congratulating him on his soon-to-come freedom. “Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”
But no state would take Dumond. He remained behind bars for two and a half more years, until the board voted to free him in Arkansas. He was released in October 1999 and returned home. The next year, Dumond left the state, moving to a small town near Kansas City, Mo. Within weeks of arriving, he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman at an apartment complex near his home. The day that happened, everyone knew that freeing Wayne Dumond had been a very, very bad idea.
This story has been around for some time, and was an issue in Huckabee’s re-election bid in Arkansas, but it’s only now starting to percolate through the 2008 campaign. It won’t be long, I imagine before someone (i.e., Romney or Giuliani) goes negative on Huckabee in a big way, and this is the perfect issue to do it with.
December 5th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
[...] Why Mike Huckabee must be stopped. I know I’m supposed to start with a grand, long post opening this blog, but instead, I think it would be more efficient to just point here, here, here, here, and here. [...]
December 6th, 2007 at 10:07 am
We’ve gone ahead and cut a YouTube ad on this already.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLAF3dDMT4g