Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, December 01, 2009 5:42:08 PM
Kudos to Huck, I guess, for stopping short of calling his critics
racist too. In fairness, the clemency in Clemmons’s case wasn’t
indefensible at the time. He was a kid, he’d already served 10 years,
he had a judge on his side, and at the end of the day, the reduced
sentence imposed by Huckabee was still a stiff 47 years. It was the
parole board who sprung him, not Huck. Toss in the point about
disparate justice based on class and race and the fact that the
prosecutor who’s objecting so much now mysteriously had nothing to say
at the time and there’s at least an argument to be made that a reduced
sentence was in order. It’s his dumb luck that out of the hundreds and
hundreds of pardons and commutations he granted that gave him his rep
for being soft on crime, the cop-killer in the bunch turns out to be
someone who made a semi-compelling appeal. But it is what it is. Like Geraghty
says