The differences between Mike Huckabee and Bill Ritter are nearly comprehensive, and let’s hope they stay that wayespecially in the matter of early prisoner release.
Maurice Clemmons, the lifelong thug who executed four police officers near Tacoma, waited barely six months after his early release from an Arkansas prison in 2000 before he took to crime again, committing two armed robberies.
Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Fox TV host, insisted in a column in Human Events last week that “the Maurice Clemmons presented in a commutation request in the year 2000 was much different than the one” who murdered police. “The Clemmons of 2000 did not exhibit traits of psychosis,” Huckabee maintained, while his sentence of “108 years for burglary and robbery” at age 16 was “exponentially longer than similar cases” — and particularly, Huckabee suggested, when defendants were white.
Huckabee is almost certainly wrong in suggesting officials had no reason to wonder about Clemmons’ mental stability after 11 years in prison. At one of his original trials, for example, his behavior had been so frightening and disruptive that the judge reportedly had him shackled in leg irons.
Yet Huckabee is surely right about a broader point: Many of his critics are indifferent to the details of the case or to appeals to fairness in sentencing. They’d be heaping abuse on the former governor even if Clemmons had behaved like a choirboy during his early court appearances and the years he was locked up.
And therein lies the danger for Colorado’s governor. If one of the prisoners freed under his early release program goes berserk, Ritter will pay a political price no matter how carefully the parole board screened him.
To be sure, Ritter’s program is radically different from Huckabee’s slipshod habit of commuting sentences.
Huckabee granted clemency even to criminals with extremely violent histories — rapists and murderers included — with many years left to serve. Ritter excluded prisoners convicted for the worst felonies, as well as the chronically violent, and included only those in the final six months of their terms.
Huckabee seems to have been motivated in part by a Christian belief in the potential for personal redemption, and he often refused to explain his decisions. Ritter has offered extensive rationale for his early release program, which was prompted by the state budget crisis.
Yet no matter the safeguards, the fact remains that some — and maybe many — of the men released in Colorado have little statistical likelihood of reforming their ways. As The Denver Post’s Kirk Mitchell reported in October, “the first 10 inmates released in the program have previously been arrested an average of 19.5 times,” and a majority had previous convictions for violent crimes. Reformers who claim our prisons are teeming with non-violent offenders tripped up by an out-of-character mistake have been refuted once again.
For all we know, a few of those released may have already broken the law, although of course not in the spectacular fashion of Clemmons. And while the likelihood of a headline-grabbing incident occurring before November’s election is remote, the terrible mayhem in Washington reminds us of the stakes involved when prisoners go free.
When Ritter first outlined his plans for early release, it sounded as if he intended for virtually all inmates with violent incidents in their past to be excluded. Why not impose that principle now?
They’ll be getting out soon enough anyway, with decades still to disappoint us.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
