Huckabee's rape and murder problem

Yes, there is something odd about the way the mainstream press is covering Huckabee's DuMond problem.

HUCKABEE AND DUMOND....Today in the LA Times, Richard Serrano has a story about the Wayne DuMond affair that's headlined "Parole case may dog Huckabee." The question at hand is: why did Mike Huckabee, as governor of Arkansas, push for the parole of Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist who was then serving a 39-year sentence in the state Department of Correction's Tucker Unit? Let's listen in (all italics mine):

Three [parole] board members...said Huckabee raised the issue of DuMond's release, asking to discuss the matter with them in a closed session. They said his religious beliefs, and the influence of the evangelical community from which he came, drove him.

....[Jay] Cole, the minister who befriended DuMond, said: "The governor felt compassion for Wayne. He was sorry for him. So, I asked the governor to help. I asked him if anything could be done. And Mike had a lot of people on his neck trying to get him to get Wayne released."

....Cole, meanwhile, was working to help DuMond. Cole said he talked to "probably a hundred people" about his hope of winning DuMond's release, turning foremost to the evangelical community...."All of them thought Wayne was innocent," said Cole.

Interesting! Out of all the Arkansas prisoners who claimed to have discovered God, the Arkansas evangelical community chose DuMond as its poster boy. I wonder how that came about?

The answer, of course, was not merely that famous Southern evangelical compassion for convicted rapists serving out long sentences in state prison. It was because DuMond's victim was Bill Clinton's second cousin once removed, and the Clinton-hating fever swamp had long since turned DuMond into yet another of its spittle-flecked conspiracy theories about the endless treachery and hellish vengeance of William Jefferson Clinton upon his enemies. But you'll find not a single mention of this in Serrano's story.

I noticed a similar omission in the NY Times' coverage this morning. In fact, the Times' approach was to include his involvement in the DuMond case and his 1992 assertions that AIDs patients should be quarantined. In other words, higher profile, higher scrutiny. Not a word said about an obscure talk show nut and a New York Post attack dog obsessed with the Clenis.

Huckabee was then new to his job — he’d been in office only a couple of months — and was fearful of his first stumble, the official said.

In an effort to stem the political fallout, Huckabee and his staff agreed to meet for the first time with Dumond’s victim, Ashley Stevens, her family, and Fletcher Long, the prosecuting attorney who sent Dumond to prison. In interviews, both Walter “Stevie” Stevens, Ashley’s father, and Long both said they came away frustrated that Huckabee knew so few specifics about the case.

“He [Huckabee] kept insisting that there was DNA evidence that has since exonerated Dumond, when that very much wasn’t the case,” recalled Long. “No matter that that wasn’t true … we couldn’t seem to say or do anything to disabuse him of that notion.”

In fact, there had never been any DNA testing in the Ashley Stevens case.

The state official who advised Huckabee on the Dumond case confirmed that the governor knew very little about Ashley Stevens’ case:

“I don’t believe that he had access to, or read, the law enforcement records or parole commission’s files — even by then,” the official said. “He already seemed to have made up his mind, and his knowledge of the case appeared to be limited to a large degree as to what people had told him, what Jay Cole had told him, and what he had read in the New York Post.”

Jay Cole, like Huckabee, is a Baptist minister, pastor for the Mission Fellowship Bible Church in Fayetteville and a close friend of the governor and his wife. On the ultra-conservative radio program he hosts, Cole has championed the cause of Wayne Dumond for more than a decade.

Cole has repeatedly claimed that Dumond’s various travails are the result of Ashley Stevens’ distant relationship to Bill Clinton.

The governor was also apparently relying on information he got from Steve Dunleavy, first as a correspondent for the tabloid television show “A Current Affair” and later as a columnist for the New York Post.

Much of what Dunleavy has written about the Dumond saga has been either unverified or is demonstrably untrue. Dunleavy has all but accused Ashley Stevens of having fabricated her rape, derisively referring to her in one column as a “so-called victim,” and brusquely asserting in another, “That rape never happened.”

The columnist wrote that Dumond was a “Vietnam veteran with no record” when in fact he did have a criminal record. He claimed there existed DNA evidence by “one of the most respected DNA experts in the country” to exonerate Dumond, even though there was no such evidence. He wrote that Bill Clinton had personally intervened to keep Dumond in prison, even though Clinton had recused himself in 1990 from any involvement in the case because of his distant relationship with Stevens.

“The problem with the governor is that he listens to Jay Cole and reads Steve Dunleavy and believes them ... [sic.] without doing other substantative work,” the state official said.

Had Huckabee examined in detail the parole board’s files regarding Dumond, he would have known Dumond had compiled a lengthy criminal resume.

Funny, the Post didn't mention this either.